To learn even more, join our webinar Tuesday, December 5, where our experts will give you a tour of our expanded solutions — or download our eBook today.

As you’re trying to put customer data to work to drive growth for your brand, are any of these items on your wishlist?  

• “I wish I could identify the traffic sources that brought users that are more likely to stay active in my app or website.”

• “My customer data is always backward-looking: I wish I could somehow predict which campaigns and experiences would  drive engagement up and customer churn down.”

• “I wish I could get access to user-level data, but all I have are aggregate statistics and metrics, which aren’t actionable.”

• “It’s so difficult to know what I need to focus on. I wish I could see if there were certain activities in my app or website that increased the likelihood of more engagement in the future.” ”

• “I need to show the impact of mobile messaging on in-store footfall traffic. I wish there was an easy way to do that.”

If you’re like most digital marketers, at least one of these must sound familiar.

The fact is, in our experience working with hundreds of enterprise clients, marketers often struggle with analytics solutions that are siloed, not customizable, and disconnected to an action system.  

Giving Marketers the Keys to Their Customer Data

The focus of our data solutions has always been to give marketers the keys to their behavioral customer data to use in any part of their marketing stack. Because the martech stack is rapidly expanding (over 5,000 different solutions at last count), we built our platform to be open and accessible to easily enrich your data warehouse and other important business systems with a real-time data streaming API.

We also realized that every business is unique, and while there are common reports that everyone needs, every business needs to have control over how they want to view their data. So we created powerful drag and drop custom reporting on the data we collect.

Moreover, reports shouldn’t just be a bunch of statistics, they should provide insights into the behaviors, preferences and activities of your customers. So we made reports immediately actionable by allowing you to drill into the customers behind the data and create lists that can be used in your app, web and email engagement channels.

We also launched a landmark addition to our data solutions: Predictive Churn. Driven by machine learning, this solution gave marketers the ability to see and adjust their strategy, tactics and spend based on which users had a low, medium and high likelihood to churn.

All of these solutions — combined with our commitment to helping marketers connect with customers on any channel using any martech in their stack — led Forrester, in their recent Forrester Wave (TM): Mobile Engagement Automation, Q3 2017 to give our analytics capabilities a 5 out of 5 — the  highest among all vendors.

But of course we’re not stopping there.

Expanding Our Data Solutions to Help Power Growth

We’re continuing to grow our best-in-class customer intelligence solutions in ways that make life easier for marketers, and help brands achieve exponential growth.

Today, we’re excited to announce a major expansion of our data solutions, giving you four new ways to create insights that help you create deeper connections with customers and grow faster. Here’s what we’ve launched:

1) Look Forward, Not Backward With Machine Learning-Driven Predictive Analytics

Marketers can now add predictive churn state — whether a user has a low, medium or high potential for churn — as a metric to many lifecycle marketing reports to identify the campaigns, experiences and programs that are promoting or discouraging user engagement and retention. With this addition, you can get ahead of your historical trends and see the activities that will promote engagement. (Learn more about our Predictive Churn solution, which is based on a proprietary machine-learning model trained with more than 10 billion data points.)

2) Add User-Level Data from Any Channel In Your Marketing Stack

We’ve made it even easier to pull in user-level data — not only from mobile apps, but from other channels in your stack, like websites  email, SMS and Apple TV.

That means creating a more complete view of customers’ online brand interactions — and more opportunities to create personalized, 1:1 customer interactions on any channel.

3) Get Granular More Easily With 10 Levels of Campaign Data

Remember those wishlist questions at the beginning of this post? We’ve made it unbelievably easy to answer those questions and more, by allowing marketers to define up to 10 levels of campaign data for for detailed understanding of what’s driving performance.  This means you’ll be able to see specific results for data sets you care about most — like campaigns or campaign types, products, offers and much more.

The campaign drill down report gives you a telescopic view into campaign performance for more precise reporting. Most campaign reporting solutions provide one or two dimensions of detail: ours allows you to define up to 10, like campaign type, channel type, content type and more that are most critical to your business. Learn more in our eBook.

Getting to this level of specificity allows marketers to zero in on the audiences, campaigns and channels most likely to drive their next phase of growth.

4) Get Smarter Faster With Data Scientist-Designed Predictive Lifecycle Marketing Reports

We’ve now made it even easier for marketers to put their customer data to work with data-scientist designed reports that answer questions critical for driving growth in each customer lifecycle stage: acquisition, onboarding, activation, conversion, retention and re-engagement.

Our latest eBook, 11 Must-Have Predictive Lifecycle Marketing Reports dives into reports for each key lifecycle stage to show how they help digital marketers make smarter decisions more quickly, and better understand and connect with customers at each stage of the customer journey. Download your copy any time.

The reports include the items on most digital marketers wishlists, including:

• How to identify traffic sources that lead to new customers more likely to engage with your brand

• Techniques to find high-intent customers likely to take an action

• Reports that identify user cohorts that are likely to churn so you can take action before they leave forever

Take the Next Step

Now marketers can better understand and optimize cross-channel campaign performance and its long-term impact on customer value and growth, as well as have a flexible, data-driven way to power personalized 1:1 customer interactions across more of their business systems and marketing channels.

Get started today! You can:

• Schedule a demo, and let our experts walk you through a personalized tour of what’s possible with your brand’s data

• Hear our experts take a deeper dive into how marketers can use data to get closer to customers

• Download our eBook 11 Must-Have Predictive Lifecycle Marketing Reports to learn more about the reports our data scientists designed, and the key questions the reports answer

Download our eBook 11 Must-Have Predictive Lifecycle Marketing Reports today to:
– See which channels deeply engage users
– Find high-intent customers who are ready to buy
– Reveal the activation events that predict future engagement

Get your copy >>

The post Announcing New Predictive Lifecycle Marketing Analytics for Digital Marketers appeared first on Airship.

Most of us are on the receiving end of a steady trickle of push notifications just like these throughout each day. Some are relevant or even important, and others are just plain annoying.

Yet, despite the annoyance factor, the biggest social media apps send us notifications all the time — because it works. The simple truth is that push notifications keep us engaged. They remind us that the app is there, enticing us to return and engage more, and creating even more fodder for future notifications throughout our social graphs. And social media apps are continually experimenting to get better at engaging us.

Striking the Right Balance

But even some of the most prolific notification senders question the benefits of push as a blunt growth hack.

Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap Inc., indicated some distaste for the overuse of push notifications to spur user engagement growth when the company announced its first public quarterly earnings in May and its performance failed to meet expectations.

Regarding the relatively slow user growth of Snapchat versus its competitors, he said, “I think one of the reasons why it’s such a popular question is because there’s a lot of this thing in our industry called growth hacking, where you send a lot of push notifications to users or you try to get them to do things that might be unnatural, or something like that.”

App providers must strike a balance between providing value and getting value from push notifications. The best push notifications are a win/win for brands and their app users.

The most prominent social platforms have been perfecting their approach to push notifications for years, one experiment at a time. Here’s how Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram have done it:

Twitter’s Recommendation Tweaks

Twitter continually tweaks its push notifications, striving to deliver the most value and relevance while reducing the annoyance of too many unwelcome messages on users’ home screens.

Twitter was one of the first to adopt rich push notifications that include thumbnails and expandable images, which data findings show improves direct open rates by more than 50 percent on average.

Like the other big social platforms, Twitter developed algorithms to tease out suggestions for users, prompting notifications that recommended that people follow accounts that are also followed or retweeted by multiple people in their networks.

But a good push to one user can be a bad push to another. As often happens when new forms of notifications emerge, people balked. So Twitter adjusted the service to clearly emphasize how people could turn it off. Now, people who want to uncover new accounts appreciated by peers in their networks can maintain the default setting, and others can disable the recommendation notifications.

Snapchat Pushes User Anticipation

And then there was Snap, whose CEO reportedly favors creative product innovations as the keys to driving user engagement growth, as opposed to slamming users with push notifications, which can backfire. But that doesn’t mean Snapchat hasn’t been a “needy” app or innovative, depending on how you view it.

Snap builds user anticipation with lock-screen alerts notifying users that a friend “is typing.” Whether or not people like those notifications, they are clever because they elicit a very natural human response, says sports app expert Matt Restivo, general manager at BAMTech.

“It keeps you on that screen waiting for a response, which is how humans naturally converse,” he argued in a Quora post, adding, “Snapchat is indeed trying to make this feel like a real conversation, and on their end, increase engagement.”

Scarcity Sparks Interest for Instagram

Just like some product releases generate demand through limited supply, some social apps attempt to spark increased interest through scarcity.

Reportedly, Instagram and other apps have tested pooling likes or other interactions that normally would have prompted individual notifications into larger bulk pushes. The idea is to gauge whether some users respond with higher engagement levels when notifications come in lower volume but pack a bigger punch. Instagram also maintains extremely fine-tuned preferences in its push notification settings.

Arguably, social networks’ business models live or die by their growth in monthly active users, and research has found that greater notification frequency leads to greater mobile app retention rates among new users.

This doesn’t mean that some people won’t be upset or see too many notifications as intrusive or annoying, but it’s a far cry from days of yore “Tell your friends what’s on your mind. Post an update,” or reminders that it’s your or your ex’s birthday tomorrow, which were once commonplace.

Giving your customers control over what they get or don’t get as notifications, and truly listening to their signals through automation and machine learning, can help you avoid bad push notifications that risk deletion by those who are very likely your best customers.

Tips for Good Push Notifications

Customize notifications: User data showing preferences, behavior, location and preferred usage times is a treasure trove for fine-tuning notification content, targeting and automation. You can also ask them what they want to receive and provide fine-grained controls.

Consider in app marketing messages: Not every push deserves a shove. Some items don’t warrant a home screen notification that could annoy, and are better served by delivering an in app message.  

Make it worth their while: Users expect instant gratification when they click on a notification. Ensure that the messages linked to notifications provide real value and relevance. Strive to deliver value through the message itself versus always teasing users for app opens.

Adopt rich, interactive formats: From new notification priorities in Android O to including media and buttons within messages themselves, app marketing teams have more tools at their disposal to spark user intrigue and gain a better understanding of what users care about directly from the message itself.

For insight on which tools marketers are using or piloting to drive better engagement from their users, see highlights from Forrester Research’s April report, “The State of Mobile Marketer Tactics.”

This article originally appeared in Adweek

The post Push Notification Strategies Top Social Media Brands are Using: What Digital Marketers Can Learn appeared first on Airship.

Customer churn. It’s one of the most vexing issues app publishers face as they work to grow their app user base and revenue. The mobile product owners and mobile marketers we know are generally watching app user retention rates very, very closely.

So what can mobile product owners and marketers do — proactively — to impact app retention and customer churn rates for the better?

How about this: What if you could figure out just the right frequency for sending push notifications, so you engage and retain more (lots more) of your app users?  

Better yet, what if you could also predict which customers were most likely to churn, so you can take action to try to convince them to stay before they leave for good?

If one or both of those tactics sounds helpful to you, then today’s your lucky day! We’re announcing two new tools we think will help.

The first is data (knowledge is power!) on how push notification send volumes impact app retention rates.

The second is the coming availability of one of our most-requested mobile analytics solutions:  Predictive Churn Analytics.

Let’s start with the data.

New Benchmarks Help Answer the FAQ: “How Often Should I Send Push Notifications To Help Prevent Customer Churn?”

It’s one of the questions we hear most often. We even wrote a very popular blog post about finding the right push notification frequency.

As of today, we can add a data-based answer to the question, which might be a surprise to some of you. The answer is: If you’re looking to improve app retention rates, when it comes to push notifications, more is (almost always) better.  

Now, before you think we’re recommending that any push notification is a good push notification…we’re definitely not.

What we are saying is that many brands tend to be conservative about the number of push notifications they send, for fear of losing users.

Our data shows, however, that app users who have opted in (or have not opted out) welcome smart (useful, timely, personalized) push notifications — even at (and even especially at) high volumes.

Let’s take a look at the highlights.

Our data scientists pulled and analyzed anonymized data from 63 million app users’ first 90-days in an app. Here are their key findings:

Additional, industry-specific findings from this study — including retail, media, sports, utility & productivity, and more — are in our benchmark report. Download your copy of How Push Notifications Impact Mobile App Retention Rates anytime!

The not-so-great news: 95% of new, opt-in app users churn within the first 90 days if they don’t receive any push notifications.

• If they don’t receive messages, only 5% will continue to use the app 90 days after first app open, which means that 95 cents of every dollar spent acquiring them is wasted. (Yikes.)

• For Android apps (where users are opted in to receive push notifications as the default setting), 30% of users in our study received no push notifications at all.

• On iOS (where users must choose to opt in to receive push notifications), 15% of opt-in users never got a push notification.

The great news: There is a very strong correlation between notification frequency and greater mobile app retention rates.

• The more frequently users receive push notifications, the better their retention rates.

• App users who receive one or more push notifications in their first 90-days have 190% higher average retention rates than those who don’t receive any push notifications.

• While this general pattern of greater frequency equaling greater retention holds true across iOS and Android, there are some variances among different industry verticals, which we’ll share in more about in our upcoming webinar.

Daily or weekly push notifications result in even higher app retention rates.

• The most impressive impact on mobile app retention rates was for users who received “Daily +” push notifications.

• Apps that sent just over one push notification a day have 90-day app retention rates that are 3X higher on iOS, and 10X higher on Android than users who receive none.

• Apps that sent weekly push notifications have 90-day app retention rates that are 2X higher on iOS and 6X higher on Android than users who receive none.

Apps that send “Daily +” push notifications while retaining app users are those that have a strong understanding of their users, and are sending automated, programmatic, targeted push notifications. 

Bottom line:

• If you’re not sending any push notifications from your app, start building a plan. Today. (This blog post, “Building Your First Mobile Marketing Strategy,” is a great place to start.)

• If you’re sending a few push notifications, consider how you might start sending personalized, real-time push notifications your users will appreciate at scale. (We can help — schedule a consultation anytime.)

New Predictive Churn Analytics Help You Identify At-Risk Customers — and Take Action to Keep Them

We’ve talked about how you can increase mobile app retention rates by finding the sweet spot for push notification send volume.

Now let’s talk about the fact that the majority of your new app users are still likely to churn.

Even at a Daily + send-level, 54% of opt-in users will churn by month three — as will 85% of your opt-out users. What can you do about them?

In the past, mobile product owners and marketers could try reduce churn by:

• Analyzing cohorts to identify higher quality acquisition sources

• Retargeting users who had already deleted apps in other channels (although by then it’s a little late..)

• Defining an “inactivity” tag or attribute — which really only works if you know with high precision what your customer lifecycle looks like, and all customers behaved the same.

In short, it was rough ideas and best guesses.

As of today, that can change.

Based on a proprietary machine-learning model trained with more than 10 billion data points, our new Predictive Churn analytics solution analyzes user patterns for each app in order to assess a user’s likelihood to churn — before they leave.

It then classifies your app users into three risk profiles: low, medium and high churn risk. These risk profiles allow you to make real-time decisions about the actions you want to take to impact your app retention rate and reduce customer churn.

For example, a coffee retailer might send app users with a low churn risk a push notification with an offer for 10% off; a medium churn risk an offer for 30% off, and a high churn risk a free latte.

And because you can export your mobile analytics to any of your business systems, you can also message users with different risk levels differently on any channel in your stack.

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how you can leverage our Predictive Churn analytics. We’ll share more use cases and ideas here in the coming weeks and months. (Subscribe to the blog if you don’t want to miss those.)

Sound like something you could use in your mobile growth strategy? Predictive Churn is available now as an add-on for Insight, our mobile analytics solution, or for Connect, our mobile data streaming solution.

If you’re a current Insight or Connect customer, contact your account executive to learn more about next steps for getting started (or shoot us a note here, and we’ll get it to the right person).

If you’re not already using Insight or Connect, but you’re interested in using Predictive Churn, get in touch and let’s talk.

Get Industry-Specific App Retention Data & More in Our Benchmark Report

We hope that the data we’ve shared in this post and in our benchmark report, along with our new Predictive Churn analytics will go a long way to help mobile product owners and mobile marketers reduce customer churn — and make the most out of every dollar spent on app user acquisition.

Download our benchmark report How Push Notifications Impact Mobile App Retention Rates today to:
– Get industry-specific data on push notification send frequency
– Build a smarter push notification strategy
– Maximize your user acquisition spend & push notification ROI

Get your copy >>

The post Want to Predict & Prevent Customer Churn — and Increase App Retention? This Post is For You. appeared first on Airship.

Growing up on Long Island and being an avid tennis player, I always yearned to go to the US Open. But for various reasons, I could never make it happen. I would watch matches on tv or read about them online or in the paper, wishing I could have been there to experience all the action up close and in person.

So imagine my happiness when I had the opportunity to go for the first time this year. And not only that, I got to take along my Dad who, at 83, had wanted to go almost as badly as I did for years, but had never gone either.

And after so many years of anticipation, the event was everything I had dreamed it would be. It was magical. And a big part of what made it magical was, believe it or not, the US Open app.

A Mobile Experience That Felt Like Having a Personal Concierge at My Fingertips

How many event apps have you downloaded that don’t go beyond the basics? Many do little more than list out the day’s events – basically the same experience you could get from a paper program or a website.

As an on-site guest at the US Open, I had a completely different experience. The app covered the basics, but went way, way beyond. The Open team clearly spent time and effort considering what elements would surprise and delight guests, and executed against them flawlessly.

The result was an app that met and anticipated my needs while surprising me with extras and perks with a wow factor.

 Urban Airship is proud to work with the US Open to meet their goals and enhance the app user experience by creating amazing mobile moments. Learn more in our case study.

Here’s a highlight reel of how the US Open app helped make my experience magical:

Red-Carpet Welcome  

It started with a beacon-powered welcome message when I passed through the entrance gates. The message immediately got me oriented to the basics: the day’s schedule, events around the grounds and how to access free wi-fi to make my digital experience free, fast and friction-less.

In-App Message Center

Once in the app, I found a number of great features to help wrap the Open around me so I didn’t miss a thing!

The Inbox offered me a central place for me to see and manage all of my messages for the day. It would provide me with details on the grounds that day, services that I hadn’t yet taken advantage of like the fancam or on demand video replay — and of course, a reminder of featured matchplay.

Personalized Content

The app invited me to follow my favorite players so I could stay up to date on their latest scores. This was really handy when I had to pop out of my seat to grab a drink and a pretzel.

Real-Time Notifications on Match Play, Rain Delays & More

The app also gave me up-to-the-minute updates on match play so I didn’t miss a thing, even if there was a rain delay. And they wisely gave me control on whether I wanted to receive notifications on my favorite players.

Extra Mobile Perks

While not directly connected to messaging, two extra mobile-related perks were extremely memorable.

The first was the “Charge & Watch” device. This allowed me to get instant replays of the action AND charge my phone at the same time.  (Who wouldn’t want to replay that beautiful Wawrinka backhand over and over and over again?)

The second was the in-stadium fan cam that allowed guests to take a selfie from a number of cameras in the stadium. I wish I had taken advantage of it, but I was so wrapped up in match play that I forgot! Oh well, next time.

Integrating Mobile into Your Next Event: Going From Great to Epic

Bottom line, I had an incredible, memorable experience watching amazing athletes from around the world vie for their chance to win one of the biggest prizes in sports. What’s not to love.

But it was even better with a virtual concierge in my pocket keeping me up to speed and in the know on everything that was happening.   

That kind of experience is what takes mobile engagement from great to epic.

Want to brainstorm ideas for your next event? Our team is ready and willing to share what works for brands of all kinds and sizes. Get in touch anytime and let’s get started!

The post The US Open Mobile App: A Personalized Mobile Concierge appeared first on Airship.

Mobile is where your customers spend the majority of their digital lives. And the app is where your most engaged customers interact. That’s why we’re excited to announce our new integration with Customer.io for Urban Airship Connect.

Connecting Email and Mobile Data

Customer.io is an email marketing automation system used by many innovative companies and growth marketers. It excels at listening for important customer events in your digital infrastructure, building profiles and sending triggered messages, including through many leading ESPs.

If you are a Customer.io customer, you can now access the Customer.io connector in the Urban Airship Connect integration dashboard.

Once you turn it on, you can begin to send important customer events that happen in your mobile app to trigger a well-timed email that your customer can read at their leisure.

Using Real-Time Mobile Data to Drive Customer Engagement

One such event is the dreaded uninstall. Mobile apps tell us how engaged a user is, and whether they are likely to buy or churn. They also tell us when someone disengages completely. And unlike other mediums, this mobile signal is super clear and immediately actionable. By listening for app uninstalls, you can reach back out to these people through other channels.

With the Customer.io joint integration, you can listen for app uninstall events through the Urban Airship SDK and then set up an automation rule in Customer.io that sends a winback email, or possibly a customer survey to learn more about why they left for continuous improvement.

Creating a winback automation campaign in Customer.io based on an app uninstall event.

With the average cost per app install above $2.00, minimizing uninstalls is imperative. The secret sauce to maximizing growth is focusing on retention. Now you can put this to work across email and mobile with this simple, but powerful automation.

And that’s just the beginning. If app users exhibit a certain threshold of interest in a product or category, you can set up triggers and automation rules for precisely timed email offers. New account registrations can be welcomed with a loyalty reward, perhaps complete with an embedded button to download their new mobile wallet loyalty card and double-up your access to reach them on their lockscreen. All cylinders firing in perfect harmony!

Connecting You to Better Outcomes

These are just a few of the many exciting use cases our relationship with Customer.io allows. It’s exactly the type of integration we envision with Urban Airship Connect. We have a strong belief that your data should be free to move between systems so you can use the best solution for your business. Data is the center of every great messaging strategy. And now you can send mobile data from your app to Customer.io for better email engagement.

To learn more about how the integration works and how to put it to work for you, sign up for our upcoming webinar.

The post Mobile Data & Email: A Winning Combination appeared first on Airship.

If You’re Focusing on the Top of the Funnel, You’ve Got it All Wrong

Apps are not an acquisition strategy, they’re a retention strategy. More precisely, apps are currently the best way to deliver a virtual personal assistant for your business to your most loyal customers. There is no other property that can reside on the homescreen of your customer’s most preferred device; listen and learn about your customer’s interests and preferences in real-time; and send your customers a bespoke message about something they deeply care about, right now.

While you need to acquire users before you can retain them, you will fail if your focus is solely on optimizing your cost-per-install.

Apple and Google realize this, and have both recently announced very strong incentives to app developers. Last week, each separately announced that they are increasing the revenue share from 70% to 85% for app developers who sign a new user up to a subscription model. For the Apple App Store, this will begin on month 13 of the subscription. For the Google Play store, it will begin immediately!

This is a very strong signal from the platforms about what they believe will drive long-term success. Just like the Federal Reserve manages interest rates to control inflation, the platforms are using subscription revenue to encourage developers to focus on retention.

Addressing Mobile App Retention: A Refresher

Now that the market conditions have tipped in your favor, here are a few additional ideas to help you get your mobile app retention mojo going:

Solve a Problem Only Mobile Can Solve

It may seem obvious, but the first step in figuring out a winning app strategy is determining the specific problem your app can uniquely solve that you can’t solve in your other business channels. Hint: this isn’t replicating your website experience.

A good place to start is by focusing on what the immediacy, simplicity and convenience of mobile allow you to solve for your customers. For example, the Cleveland Cavaliers are using their app as their fans’ mobile companion pre-game, in-game and post-game to create higher fan engagement.

Get the Mobile App Onboarding Series Right

The statistics don’t lie. Ask any industry veteran and they’ll tell you that you’ll lose 80-90% of new install traffic to your app in the first week. You can cut that amount of churn in half with push and in-app notifications. There’s no better way to get started on the right foot than with a welcome series that clearly explains how to get started, why users should opt-in to push notifications and the benefits of sharing location to get personalized messaging. Do these three things well and you’re sure to increase retention rates for the long-term.

Banish the Funnel, Embrace the Loop

Lastly, re-orient your marketing approach away from the traditional linear funnel and towards a feedback loop-based model that is representative of the two-way relationship you have with customers. Because the app is always with your customers and is able to listen and learn about their preferences at each stage in the customer journey, you have the opportunity to tap into feedback loops of communication.

When your customers go through the onboarding process, you can pick up valuable signals about the type of information and offers they want to receive. They provide specific details of how and when they want to be reached. With these data signals at your disposal, you can personalize communication to them that will help your messaging break through, get noticed and deliver a measure of utility that only apps can provide.

Mobile App Retention is Work, Let us Help

Want to put the mobile engagement loop to work for you? Check out the comprehensive guide we’ve put together that breaks down each of the steps.

The post Apple & Google Got it Right — Apps are About Retention! appeared first on Airship.

I spent two and half days last week in sunny (err… cloudy) San Diego at the Gartner Digital Marketing Conference absorbing the latest digital marketing trends from many big thinkers in our industry. If you haven’t been before, it is a pretty amazing thing: marketing leaders and market analysts coming together to share their view and vision of the world ahead.

The role of marketing is going through another major shift as new technologies in data, automation, customer experience, personalization and marketing channels (to name just a few) afford new ways to reach and communicate with customers.

Today, where choice is a commodity, experience is the new battleground. And the person who Gartner believes should lead the charge is the CMO or, I should say, the CGO.

More than 20 hours of content can be hard to digest, but I’m going to give it a try by outlining five key trends that stood out at the show.

Goodbye CMO, Hello CGO (Chief Growth Officer)

The CMO has a new mandate: growth. To that end, Gartner sees the marketing function shifting from one of promotion to one of growing the business through all phases of the customer journey. If you work for a tech company, you know this trend is several years in the making as growth teams have emerged to hack and maximize digital channels for acquisition and retention. The “religion” is spreading as Gartner sees this as a requirement for marketers in all industries.

The precision and control that martech and adtech affords is allowing us to find and exploit existing advantages through specific marketing channels. This is driving new patterns in spending; Gartner found that martech spend is now up to 1/3rd of overall spend, on par with FTE cost and media spend!

Think Like a Sherpa, Not a Megaphone

The classic marketing funnel is dead. I think many of us have felt this for quite some time. The idea that you can promo blast your way to relevance and manage a sequential journey through a series of steps became outdated the moment digital started to take root. Customers are in control now. They decide when, where and how they are going to interact. They have unprecedented levels of information for decision-making. And now, with their mobile devices, they also have the power of access, anywhere and anytime.

So how should you respond? Flip the script. It’s no longer about trying to get the word out about what you have to sell. It’s quickly becoming about how you can help consumers. You can respond by looking for the typical moments that matter in your customer’s decision process. What do they need to evaluate alternatives and decide which option is right for them? How can you make replenishment easier? What can technology do to anticipate when they might need help? All of these things are possible today. Listening (i.e. data) is the axis upon which everything turns.

Focus on Little Insights, Not Big Data

What has digital given us? Data. Tons of it. Marketers report that they are drowning in data. As a result,talent to help make sense of the data and put it into actionable insights is in high demand. An analytics background was reported as the top requirement for new hires on marketing teams. Mobile experience is a close second.

This tells us marketers are turning the corner on the big data problem. Collecting data is no longer the issue. Tying it together into a master customer profile and identifying the data signals that help with core business goals like new user acquisition, purchase and retention (i.e. churn) is where attention needs to be. As such, when marketers create a dashboard or report, they should ask themselves a couple of questions: “What decision am I going to make?” and “How does this prove or disprove my hypothesis?”

Rise of the Loyads

What do Uber, Starbucks, Nest and Amazon have in common? Lots of loyads. Essentially, loyads are customers so loyal that they become brand advocates. And how do these brands attract them? They create customer experiences so remarkable that loyads want to talk about them — the ultimate in efficient marketing — rather than requiring promotion dollars to get the word out, you create an experience so unique in your category that customers want to share it because it makes them feel special.

Doing this is not easy. Thinking like a sherpa (see above) will set you on the right path. And finding little insights in your data (see above) will help you listen closely to what they want.

As you aim towards growth, think about how to add the advocate cycle into your customer experience. In other words, there are now three primary cycles in your customer experience to optimize:

• Buy cycle: prospect to customer

• Own cycle: new customer to loyal customer

• Advocate cycle: loyal customer to advocate

Customer Experience Trumps Promotion

The final — and possibly biggest — takeaway is that “the customer experience” is the new north star of marketing. Now that consumers have more control, they are blocking out the things they don’t want. Ad blocking increased 41% y/y and ad skipping increased 56% for consumers who watch at least five hours of TV every week.

The only way to cut through that power is to create personal, relevant experiences that serve the customer where they are at a specific point in time. Having an integrated view of the customer is imperative, as is creating the best experiences across channels. As Gartner said, no single vendor can deliver it all. Their recommendation is to use systems that are best-in-class, open and interoperate in real-time with your marketing stack to be best positioned for success.

As you can imagine, this was a welcome message from our standpoint, as we’ve released products that make it easier to bring mobile into the fold by openly communicating with your marketing stack , providing user-level insight and delivering great experiences through your app or mobile wallet.

The post Everything You Missed at the Gartner Digital Marketing Conference appeared first on Airship.

Mobile messaging is no different. In fact, it’s arguably even more important since our mobile devices are so personal. Irrelevant messages can be the difference between someone keeping or uninstalling your app; notifications must provide value to drive conversion. Our goal is to help you identify what content conveys that value best.

Urban Airship has offered the ability to test two different versions — a classic A/B test — of a notification for quite some time. But we've heard that you want more so, today, we're unveiling A/B/n testing.

A/B/n Testing: Expand Your Possibilities

The “n” in A/B/n allows testing of up to 26 variants at the same time. You may ask, “Do I need to test 26 variants at once?” If you’re new to A/B testing, maybe not immediately; but as time goes on you’ll certainly find yourself in situations where it is valuable to test more than two versions of something. Get a few creative people into a room to discuss messaging and you’ll very quickly come up with a number of likely solutions. Particularly when you consider all the elements you can test:

• Headline

• Message tone

• Calls to action

• Offer

• Interactivity —  e.g. one or two calls to action

• Button text

• Landing pages

• And emojis!

You can even test the impact of sending a message through just push notifications, in-app messaging or both. Plus, we make it easy to copy and tweak additional variants in our user interface. Want to see it in action? Here’s a video that demonstrates how.

Mobile A/B Testing Best Practices

If you haven’t used A/B testing much, all you need to get started is at least two versions of a message. Sure, I just talked about the value of testing more variants and, if you’re an avid tester, testing numerous versions is a great strategy. But if you’re just getting started, we recommend you start with two variants and then build more sophisticated tests as time goes on to really be able to pinpoint what’s working.

Here are a couple of simple best practices to consider as you get started.

#1. Start with segmentation, then optimize with A/B/n testing

The goal of A/B testing is naturally to increase your engagement rates. And if you’re consistently getting double digit engagement rates, A/B testing will definitely help you optimize further.

However, if your messages are performing in the single digits, it’s likely that you haven’t addressed your segmentation strategy. Because mobile is so personal, segmentation is even more important than on other channels. Our research shows that by segmenting on as little as one user attribute, your engagement rates can increase 4-7x. So start with segmentation first and then build your first test to further optimize.

#2. Include a meaningful variation in your test to get results

This may sound elementary, but all too often we see tests with variants that have very small degrees of variation. For example:

Variant A: The time is now. Set up your free trial today.
Variant B: The time is now. Set up your free trial today…

Did you notice the difference? If you didn’t, don’t feel bad. The ellipses on the end of Variant B are hard to catch. More to the point, the change isn’t meaningful enough to make a difference. These types of tests rarely bear statistically significant changes.

Instead, we recommend varying your message with a different way to approach the same goal. For example, a media company recently tested these two variants to notify users of a new edition:

Variant A: New edition ready to view!
Variant B: US economic supremacy is fading

In this test, Variant B dramatically outperformed Variant A. The company ran this test multiple times with multiple content headlines and found that the headline outperformed the generic “new edition” messages the majority of times.

#3. Make sure your tests are valid

Once you have your test in place, the next thing to consider is sample size: is it big enough? In general, an audience of greater than 500 is a good start. There are also sample size calculators available online if you want to measure for statistical significance.

You will want to make sure you measure and compare your variant responses to a control group. Urban Airship provides a handy traffic regulator that allows you to easily define how much of your audience you want to hold for your control group, which will help determine if the results are significant and should be actionable. (You can see it at work from our short demo video.)

It’s Easy to Get Started

That’s it. If you haven’t used A/B testing until now, it’s a great tool to wrap into your mobile engagement repertoire. And, if you’re an A/B testing pro, we invite you try out our new A/B/n capabilities to find your best outcomes.
If you’re new to Urban Airship, A/B/n testing is available on all of our paid plans. Get started today or contact your account rep for more information.

The post Mobile A/B Testing Adds an “n” appeared first on Airship.

On the other hand, the marketing funnel does a poor job of representing the dynamic way information flows through our customers’ minds. While we like to think of decision making as a linear process, it’s more accurate to think of them as a series of fits, starts and do-overs.

Thinking of dynamic decisions on a linear model doesn’t do them justice. What’s more, it leaves a lot of opportunity on the table, because once someone is out of the funnel, you are no longer communicating with them.

In today’s world, people have an immense amount of information at their fingertips through their favorite phones and tablets, as well as an unprecedented level of choice.

For this reason, I argue that the classic marketing funnel is dead. It’s an artifact of the traditional days of broadcast marketing.

Enter the mobile engagement loop.

Mobile is the Cornerstone of Customer Relationships

Why mobile? Well, it’s increasingly the first place users turn. And, more to the point, it allows you to create 1:1 messaging that can scale, since our devices are with us virtually all the time.

With the right user-level data collection, marketing automation and messaging, you can create highly-personalized experiences based on your customer’s latest signals. With this power at your disposal, marketers can move away from a simple conversion-oriented view of leaky buckets to a holistic view of building customer relationships.

The mobile engagement loop takes advantage of the ongoing opportunity for growth and sustained engagement both inside and outside of apps through a cyclical, multi-tiered approach. It includes four stages: onboarding, conversion, retention and re-engagement. Each stage should not only be considered individually, but as part of a whole, for a comprehensive, thoughtful mobile engagement strategy that strengthen relationships with your customers.

Onboarding

Successfully onboarding users after they download your app is your first opportunity to make a good impression. Showcase the beneficial features of your app with a welcome series that helps educate and onboard users.

Provide an overview of the benefits they’ll receive by opting in to push notifications and location services. For example, the NHL grew its opt-in rate by 10% by adding a customized screen before the standard OS opt-in dialogue. The screen clearly explains how enabling push notification and location services helps create the best possible experience for the user.

Proper, thoughtful onboarding increases the likelihood that a user will opt in, creating a direct communication channel between your brand and customers. Other businesses find it helpful to go a step further and offer new users an incentive toward their first purchase to drive conversion. (We’ve outlined our top 10 tips to get the opt-in.)

Retention

The retention stage is where brands should focus on providing value so users do not remove your app from their mobile device.

Consider what utility or benefit your app provides, or how it’s simplifying your users’ lives — the key to retention is to understand and learn how your users want to use the app and then serve them content based on what is important to them.

In the retention stage, it’s especially crucial to get your communication cadence and strategy correct. Too much communication can annoy users, while not communicating enough may lead to lower app usage.

Conversion

Conversion actions will vary based on industry and brand objectives, but should focus on providing value to users with every interaction. A user adding a product to their shopping cart, “favoriting” a news story, booking a reservation or requesting product updates could all be considered important conversion actions.

In a mobile marketing strategy, these types of conversion actions are critical because they enable brands to personalize in-app messages and push notifications to their app users. Personalized messages are four to seven times more effective than generic ones and establish a stronger connection between your brand and the user.

In the graphic above, the bottom half of the loop is filled in by the words “Branding Halo.” The Brandin Halo – a user's positive perseptions of an connections with your brand – is the result of several successive conversion-to-retention cycles. It follows the premise that the more transactions a user completes, the deeper the app becomes entrenched within a user’s patterns, ultimately creating more brand value.

Re-Engagement

Invariably, a portion of your customers may lose interest and become dormant or uninstall your app. The mobile engagement loop recognizes that users sometimes fall out of a relationship with a brand.

However, this doesn’t mean that they’re gone for good. Your brand still has an opportunity to win them back and resurrect the relationship if you have the right strategy and technology in place.

Determine what actions or communication may entice your users into coming back — do they just need a gentle reminder, or maybe an incentive to spark their interest? Do they know about the latest functionality just added to your app? This is a great opportunity to re-engage them with a win-back ad campaign. Or you could use a different channel such as e-mail, re-targeting, mobile wallet or other channels.

You can also ask dormant customers for feedback on why they left. Show them you care by finding out how you can improve their app experience. This can be valuable for retargeting efforts for users who have deleted your app.

More about Mobile Engagement

To learn more about connecting with customers on mobile — building a conversion strategy, getting the opt-in, common industry benchmarks, engagement best practice, etc. — visit our Content Library or contact us.

The post The Mobile Engagement Loop: From Onboarding to Re-Engagement appeared first on Airship.

As a mobile messaging channel, in-app messages are highly effective. In our latest Mobile Engagement Benchmark Survey, we found that in-app messaging typically receives 8x the direct response rates of push notifications. In combination with push notifications, in-app messages receive an average engagement rate of 26% for medium-performing apps. High-performing apps (those in the 90th percentile) receive a read rate of 44%, so the opportunity for engagement through in-app messages is high.

People have an immense amount of control over their mobile experience; it’s the most personal communication channel available. They actively give you the privilege of placement on their phone. As a result, they expect information tailored to them. In-app messages are an ideal way to communicate with them on the latest relevant points of interest when they open your app. Good app messaging techniques are important to success, so you send the right message to the right person at the right time.

Benefits of In-App Messages

1. Reach your whole app audience. Push notifications are vital to a messaging strategy that gets users back into the app. However, according to our latest research, they reach 45% of your audience on average. (Read our Push Notification Opt-In Rate Benchmark Report for rates specific to your industry.) However, since in-app messages are part of your app experience, they don’t require an opt-in and can reach most — if not all — of your audience depending upon implementation.

2. Built into the app experience. In-app messages are best when they are integrated into the look and feel of your app. If you are sending promotional messages, it’s important to use targeting to make sure your message is relevant. For best success, promotional messages shouldn’t feel like marketing, they should feel like service. Even in promotionally-driven apps, the promotions should be highly-targeted and personalized.

3. Easy to author. Similar to push notifications, in-app messages can be very simple to author. Whether they are straightforward text-focused banner messages or rich HTML5 full-page displays, they provide marketing and content teams an easy to way to communicate key news without making a code update.

4. Highly personalized. Depending on the provider you use, in-app messages can be highly targeted. Urban Airship provides numerous capabilities to make sure your messages are delivered to the right person at the right time based on their latest context. In addition to personalizing content, you can also customize the link destination with deep-linking technology that allows you to assign a destination anywhere in your app or mobile website.

In-App Message Types

There are numerous types of in-app messages, so it’s important you have a good understanding of options.

Banner Style Notification: The simplest type is the “banner style notification” — a ribbon-like notification that is placed at the top or the bottom of the screen of your application. These are typically invoked on the first screen of your user’s session.

In addition to displaying the message, they can also contain up to two action buttons allowing you to dictate a user path based on their interests.

Full-Page Displays: In-app message can also be full-page displays that provide more screen real estate to convey your message.

In addition to text, these messages can display rich content like videos and images to make a bigger impact with your users.

Deep-linking and social sharing are powerful features in these message types that allow you to direct a user to a specific conversion event like buying tickets. You can also embed social sharing capabilities in these messages to activate your user’s network.

Create a Content Marketing Destination

Like push notifications, in-app messages are temporal in nature by default — unless you add a message center.

A message center gives in-app messages a destination in your app for storage and organization. In addition to making it easy for users to find content, it also provides a dedicated content marketing channel that allows you to prioritize your most valuable content to your most loyal user base.

Think about all the content you are already generating in other digital channels like your website, e-mail campaigns or social feeds that could be easily repurposed. Nike does a great job of showcasing their latest products and content to soccer fans, creating a virtual content stream of their brand to their users.

Common Use Cases & ROI

Some of the most common and powerful uses of in-app messaging are for:

• Onboarding: Welcoming a new user is an essential component to a successful app strategy. Onboarding is highlighting the things they need to do to get started. Approximately 80% of your users are likely to defect after 30 days if you don’t communicate with them. By adding a welcome message or series you can reduce that trend by up to 50%.

• Feature introduction: When new features are introduced or important features are underused, use in-app messaging to call attention and explain how it should be used and the benefits.

• Promotional messaging: The US Open and Nike examples above are great representations of this common approach to using in-app messaging. The key to success is using segmentation to make sure the message is going to be valued. In the US Open example, they used location targeting and previous in-app behavior to identify users near the event that showed recent purchase intent and received a 32% conversion rate!

• Customer service / transactional messaging: Providing users with service updates on their account or recent purchases is another great, highly-relevant way to use in-app messages.

To get a comprehensive list of how you can use in-app messaging and other important considerations, check out our In-app Campaigns Inspiration Guide.

The post What are In-app Messages? appeared first on Airship.