Have you read all of the 23,000 articles out there about reducing churn?

There are some really great ideas about how to improve your onboarding, how to communicate better, how to segment better. Even how to save customers right before they click the “cancel” button.

The underlying problem that these tactics address is the same. SaaS churn happens when customers don't see enough value to justify their investment of time and money. And there are really three core strategies for addressing that problem:

• Increasing the value realized. For example, adding more features to your product, at the same price, in many cases will make your product more effective at achieving the user’s goals.
• Reducing the investment required to see value. For example, improving ease of use means it takes less time for a user to do what they want to do. Or lowering the price means your customer has more money to spend elsewhere.
• Increasing the visibility of that value. This might mean that you show the user how much money or time you’re saving them. Or how many of their customers you’re helping them reach. Or how good you make them look at work.

This isn’t article #23,001 about more tactics! (Though I do mention some of those in here.) It’s not even about some new type of tactic that doesn’t fall into one of the big three strategies above.

Instead, it’s about a way of pursuing all three of those churn-reduction strategies, simultaneously. One that not everybody is taking advantage of, and one that opens up a whole new range of creative, surprising, and highly effective ways to reduce churn: a mobile app.

Consider a Mobile App (Or Consider New Ways to Use the App You've Got) to Reduce SaaS Churn

Here are four proven ways a mobile app can help increase engagement, boost customer loyalty, and create a better user experience — all of which also help reduce churn.

1) Be There for Your Customers Whenever They Need You

A mobile app is an important way to give your users the convenience of using your app when it seems useful for them, at any time.

It also further entrenches your software into a user’s daily life. For example, many people don’t think of GMail as a SaaS business. But it fits all the usual criteria — it’s software, it’s hosted for you, and you can even pay for an ad-free subscription through Google’s G Suite product. GMail is one of the most popular SaaS offerings around. It’s so popular that people forget it’s a business!

Would it surprise you to learn that there’s a GMail app? Of course not. If you can’t access your email on your phone, you might as well go back to using a StarTAC, or maybe one of those backpack phones from the 80s.

The GMail app isn’t strictly necessary. You could always use Apple Mail or Outlook or some other client to access your email. But imagine you couldn’t access your email on the go at all. GMail (and your phone) would be a lot less useful.

if you use GMail on your phone, you’re more likely to use it on the web, and vice versa. You’re certainly much less likely to switch over to a competing email service.

The speed and convenience advantages of a mobile app aren’t just for email; anything that your user wants to do on their laptop, they’ll probably want to do on their phone.

Our Predictive Churn analytics solution can help you understand which of your mobile app users are at high risk for churning, so you can take action before they go. Learn more about it. 

2) Send Relevant Updates in Real-Time

So you build a great mobile app, and users love it. They see your logo every time they look at their home screens. That’s powerful branding!

But your app is also a communication channel. Even if a user installs your app onto their device, sets it up, and never touches it again, it can still be an important way both of making your user’s life easier, and of reminding them how you help them. Great SaaS doesn’t just create value for the user — it makes that value visible.

For example, an enterprise project management app can send notifications of upcoming tasks and teammate activities. Done right, this reduces churn in three ways:

• The information is itself useful. Getting a specific update on a project in real-time may allow a project manager to set another task in motion, or give more accurate updates to stakeholders.
• The notification encourages engagement. For example, interactive notifications make it easy to reply to a question as soon as it’s received, which means that the interaction stays within the app.
• The notification can remind users of why they’re using your app. When a project is complete, if all stakeholders get a notification with that information, they have visible evidence of how much the app improves coordination.

There are lots of possibilities for messaging, and many of them don’t even require opening the app (see table). It’s an easy sale to send a message to your user when they’re about to run out of storage space, with a link to upgrade their plan. Or to send a message about an upgraded package to a user who uses a particular feature a lot. Mobile messaging is a powerful way to increase customer loyalty.

3) Add Features & Functions Only Possible On Mobile

A mobile phone isn’t really a phone, as Benedict Evans at Andreessen Horowitz reminds us. A mobile phone is really an internet-connected pocket supercomputer, with lots of interesting sensors — camera, microphone, touch, GPS, Bluetooth and more — and the ability to communicate with anyone, anytime, instantly.

The more useful functionality you can provide in your app, the more value your user will realize, and less likely they are to churn. A mobile app lets you take advantage of these sensors and other mobile-only capabilities to deliver functionality that you wouldn’t be able to in a desktop app.

Take Expensify, for example. Expensify can use your phone’s camera to upload receipts — functionality that a web app can’t match, since the camera on a phone is much easier to use, and a user’s phone is likely to be with them as they’re at a meal or traveling.

Many apps find clever ways to take advantage of GPS data, as well. For example, an enterprise social networking app could let colleagues know who’s in the office, and who isn’t — much harder to accomplish without a GPS sensor. And any app dealing with sensitive information can require fingerprint authentication for enhanced security.

4) Design a Better User Experience & Build Brand Loyalty

Remember “mobile-first” design? The idea is that we should design apps to look good and work well on mobile first, and then add more features and functionality to the desktop version, as needed.

It's true, mobile is a huge portion, if not the majority, of web traffic, and over a billion people use the mobile web. So mobile-first is still an appropriate way of thinking about product design, in order to serve the greatest number of users most efficiently.

But even if that weren’t the case, mobile-first design is a useful tool for focusing on creating the best possible user experience, which is important for reducing churn.

Apps have limitations. Mobile device screens are smaller, and there’s no keyboard or mouse. Users on mobile devices are also often paying less attention, or are stealing moments between other activities. And mobile devices sometimes suffer from degraded connectivity, or lose it altogether.

Working around these limitations on mobile can be helpful for the experience of your desktop app:

• Designing for users who have less time forces you to make workflows easier and more straightforward.
• Designing for users who don’t have a keyboard and mouse in front of them forces you to be thoughtful about how much information you require your users to enter, and when.
• Even building in an offline mode can help laptop users who are trying to use your app while traveling.

If your mobile app has the same features as your web app, the mobile app can be a really useful tool to optimize the user experience.

And even if it doesn’t, the functionality that your mobile app provides can be an incredible complement to the desktop app. Take Apple’s iWork suite. Is anyone creating a Pages deck from scratch from their phone? Probably not. But lots of people respond to comments, make quick edits, and even present from their mobile devices. The ability to do these things from the mobile app makes the full-screen app much more valuable.

Getting Started

Whether you’re building a mobile app from scratch, or have an existing app you can use to implement these strategies, we can help. Our mobile engagement, mobile wallet marketing, mobile analytics and mobile growth platform help you deepen your relationship with customeres — and get them hooked on your SaaS and your app.   

Want to learn more? Contact us anytime – let's brainstorm ways a mobile app could reduce SaaS churn, and grow your business. 

This article originally appeared on SaaStr.

The post 4 Proven Ways to Reduce SaaS Churn with a Mobile App appeared first on Airship.

But are you choosing the right mobile channel?

The next time you want to communicate with your audience, use this checklist to consider which mobile messaging channel (or combination of channels) is the best fit.

Want more detail on the do’s and don’ts of each channel? See my article “Secrets For Choosing the Right Mobile Messaging Channel” over at the KISSMetrics blog.

No App? No Problem. 

SMS Text Messaging

• Best for simple, urgent, transactional messages.

• Examples: flight status updates, announcements, confirmations, etc.

Mobile Wallet 

• Best for sending an item you’d offer in paper or plastic.

• Examples: Coupons, loyalty cards, tickets, etc.

• Learn more: See our cheat sheet Mobile Wallet Explained — or grab our Mobile Wallet Inspiration Guide for examples and ideas.

Website

• Whether it’s web push notifications, a banner ad or pop-up messages only mobile users see, or some other kind of mobile-friendly website messaging, this channel is best for non-urgent messages that users can act on while on your site.

• Examples: subscribe to newsletters, register for upcoming webinars, schedule a demo, etc.

• Learn More: See our blog post 3 Ways to Use Web Push to Connect With Your Customers.

>> Related Content: 5 Things the Best Mobile Notifications Have in Common

If You Do Have an App…

If you have an app, your options broaden considerably.

Push Notifications 

• Push notifications are best for getting users to take a quick action (special promotion) or delivering small amounts of information in real-time. You can also consider making your push notification even more engaging by making it an interactive notification, a rich notification or both.
• Examples: Sports scores, breaking news, sales information.
• Get more ideas in our Interactive Notification Inspiration Guide and our Rich Notifications Inspiration Guide

Caveat: Push notifications only reach users who have opted in, which is usually less than half of your app users. And choose this channel wisely: users are more likely to turn off push notifications — or even uninstall your app — if they think your push notifications as obnoxious, unnecessary or irrelevant.

In-App Messages

• In-app messages are messages delivered to your users while they are directly active in your mobile app. This channel is frequently used to feature new products or services and for app onboarding.
• Examples: Messages about new products or services, or app onboarding messages.
• Learn more: Check out our In-App Messaging Explained cheat sheet. (Bonus: our custom event triggers can help you automate these messages.)

Message Center

• If you don’t already have a message center inside your app, you should strongly consider it. It’s essentially an in-box within your app, great for sending non-urgent messages your users might want to keep.
• Examples: Special offers, free downloads, feature announcements, etc.
• Learn more: Our data shows that combining push notifications and a message center can increase message read rates up to 200%.

Wearables

Apple Watch and Android Wear let users get information the second they need it, without their even having to take out their phones. Wearable notifications are like even more intimate versions of push notifications — great for sending even more condensed, but time-sensitive, messages that you are sure your users will want to receive.

• Examples: Shipping notifications, upgrade upgrade opportunities or location-specific notifications.
• Get more ideas in our Watch Notifications Inspiration Guide.

Conclusion

When you understand your mobile channels and the unique communications channel each one represents, you’re more likely to choose the mobile messaging channel that will help you connect with your users in ways they’ll welcome.

But keep in mind, even the best channels won’t make a bad, thoughtless or otherwise off-target message good. See our “From Good Push to Great Mobile Engagement” ebook for more help on creating push notifications that earn attention and even delight your users.

And don’t forget to listen to your users — let their responses and preferences (and the data you glean from user behavior) guide your decision-making.

How are you using your mobile channels? What surprises have you run into — or lessons have you learned? Share your experiences with us on Twitter @urbanairship.

Ready to go? Get started with Urban Airship’s Engage platform for free today, or book an appointment with our Strategic Services Team to better understand your mobile messaging channels, increase engagement and grow your program ROI.

The post Mobile Messaging Cheat Sheet: Choose the Right Mobile Messaging Communication Channels Every Time appeared first on Airship.

The exact definition depends on how you measure mobile engagement:

• If you have a breaking news or social app for which you’re measuring daily active users (DAU), a “dormant” user could be one who hasn’t engaged in a week or two.

• For a shopping or retail app that’s integrated with other promotional and relationship channels, more infrequent usage might be OK, especially if you are evaluating a customer’s activity level across all your channels.

• Gaming apps may implement success metrics like DAU, monthly active users or something else like purchase volume.

Whatever way you choose to measure a dormant user, they pose challenges to data hygiene and often uninstall the app. But avoiding uninstallation isn’t your only goal. Disengagement is much more common and has the same effect — lack of conversion and, likely, loss of revenue.

Why Users Go Dormant

The most consistently named attribute of frequently used apps is that they make a user’s life easier. Apps like WhatsApp, Gmail and Waze provide clear benefits to their users and are consistently highly-ranked in the app store.

An app has to be valuable, and your user must also see that value. Google’s survey named the three following factors as the most important for frequent app usage:

1. Ease of use. Good user experience, clear instructions and good onboarding all help users realize the value that your app provides.

2. Aesthetic appeal. Thoughtful art direction is a key part of good user experience, and is also a key factor in establishing credibility with your users.

3. Consistent cross-device experience. Whether a user visits your website, uses your app or receives an email from you, consistency is crucial in helping your user accomplish their goals.

Users can go dormant for lots of other reasons, of course. If your app crashes frequently, or is otherwise unreliable, users will stop using it. If you bother or annoy users with unwanted messages, expect uninstalls. No app is perfect,but the users who go dormant have found the flaws in your app outweigh the benefits. Reducing those flaws, or finding other ways to make the app more beneficial, will keep your users from leaving in the first place.

Re-Engagement Strategies

As you work to improve your app overall, use the data you have. Use it to see how long users are dormant before they uninstall. For example, you might know that once a user hasn’t looked at the app in 15 days, their chances of uninstalling the app rise dramatically. In that case, focus your efforts on keeping them from hitting that 15-day window.

Specific offers can also often help dormant users get more value out of your app immediately.  Experiment with compelling offers like:

• Discounts or coupons for items that you know pique their interest. These are most effective for retail, travel and local apps. Use your knowledge of what the user has engaged with before — perhaps even what’s in their cart — to get them back into the app.

• Special content. For a sports app, can you provide an exclusive guide to building the perfect bracket, available only through the app? 

• Updates on friends and family who have joined. One way that LinkedIn and Facebook got so popular is that they let users search for people they know on the service. And they keep them coming back by sending updates. Tell your users how many of their friends have joined since they left.

• New product and feature notifications. Let dormant users know about what been added since their last visit that makes the app more useful for them.

Utilize All Messaging Channels

Since your users aren’t engaging in the app, the best route is likely to message them via push. Push notifications show up on their home screen, and bring the user back into the app with one click.

Within your notification, deep link users back to the specific app screens that support the your message. This isn’t a good time to send them back to the front page of your app and hope they’ll convert. You need to give them a focused task that helps them remember why they installed the app in the first place.

And lastly, make sure to use a highly-targeted message. A disengaged user should actually be easier to get back than they were to acquire, since you already have data on their preferences. For example, if they have an abandoned shopping cart, offer them a discount on one of those items. Or if you know their geographic location, send them relevant offers.

You Already Won Once

Dormant users at one time found enough utility in your app to download it. You’ve done that hard work. You now have an opportunity to win those users back with the right strategy and technology in place. A focus on demonstrating that initial utility, which you should have data on, is they key to driving increased mobile engagement.

More about how we approach the mobile buyer lifecycle can be found in The Mobile Engagement Loop, which also explores a new approach brands can take to view their customer relationships — including re-engagement.

The post Addressing — and Winning Back — Dormant App Users appeared first on Airship.

• Collecting their information (name, email, preferences, etc.) and storing it.

• Segmenting your users based on that information.

• Building communication templates, personalizing them and figuring out which segments they should go to, and when.

• Handling the technical work of delivering your messages.

• Reporting on, and analyzing, the results of your marketing automation efforts.

But traditional marketing automation platforms don’t work for mobile. They’re mostly built to help you gather, sort and use email addresses — not to communicate via channels like push messaging and wearable devices. They’re not built to work in real-time, or to incorporate location and other mobile-only data into your marketing activities. They can’t help you fulfill the demands of mobile marketing.

In contrast, mobile marketing automation platforms include the capabilities more traditional marketing automation platforms have, but apply them for the mobile era. This includes functionality like:

• Managing the constantly expanding set of mobile channels.

• Segmentation and personalization built for 1:1 communication.

• Real-time messaging.

• Analytics and A/B testing.

• Deeper integration with installed apps and other relevant data sources.

If you’re a marketer, sending your message directly to someone’s mobile device is a privilege. It’s permission to talk with your customer at any time, no matter what else they may be doing, and to get exclusive data on their habits and preferences that traditional channels can’t access.

What you send has to be valuable, relevant and personal — a mobile marketing automation platform helps you meet those needs.

Managing Mobile Channels

Email is email. It isn’t changing all that much. It’s everywhere, including on mobile devices, but mobile marketers can now communicate over a constantly-expanding set of channels:

• Push notifications

• In-app messaging

• Wearable device notifications

• Apple Wallet and Android Pay

• SMS/MMS

Communicating over these channels without a mobile marketing automation platform is complex, not to mention prone to error. Why? Each channel has its own content restrictions and different delivery methods. New channels pop up all the time and communication requirements change each year as new devices and operating system versions are released. Requirements also vary across devices. An in-app message sent to an Android device, for example, has completely different requirements from an in-app message sent to an iOS device.

In addition to the technical complexity of simply sending messages, mobile messaging is more interactive and personalized than a lot of traditional channels. For example, you can send an interactive push notification with “yes” and “no” buttons that let a recipient respond with their specified answer. Or you might send a mobile wallet pass via Apple Wallet and Android Pay that is delivered once, then refreshed when the data source updates.

On its most basic level, mobile marketing automation software handles all this complexity, so you can focus on creating great content. Instead of asking a team of engineers to handle the intricacies of Android or iOS push notification services, you can compose your message, set parameters for its delivery and send it off.

Building all this capability in-house can be extremely difficult and, while it’s possible to work around having a marketing automation platform when you’re dealing with email, it’s much harder when mobile is part of your business strategy.

Segmentation and Personalization

In email marketing, personalization happens in two different ways. You can send different email campaigns based on what’s relevant to a user (or what stage of the funnel they’re in), such as an onboarding campaign for new signups. You can also personalize individual emails with the recipient’s name, or with different information based on their role, for example.

Mobile marketing automation also follows this notion. A mobile marketing automation system will provide ways to tag and group your users based on useful attributes, such as demographic or app usage information. You can collect this data from users by asking them (via a rich page or preference center in your app), or your platform might provide some data automatically —  for example, telling you which users have installed or uninstalled your app, or which users are using iPhones.

Personalization also goes deeper on mobile since your customers carry their mobile devices around all day. That means you can target them based on location — either geographically, or with by specific location inside a store, for example. Location is a unique differentiator mobile offers and a key advantage of mobile marketing automation systems.

Real-time Engagement and Automation Triggers

Mobile channels let you engage with your customers and users in real-time — and that’s what your users expect. A push notification with the latest news updates should arrive when news breaks — not hours later.

A high-quality mobile marketing automation platform lets you take advantage of these real-time opportunities. From a technical perspective, you want a highly reliable, trusted platform that handles high message volumes — and the more customers it serves, the better.

Sophisticated mobile marketing automation platforms also offer lots of event data that can be used to trigger real-time communications. For example, the first time a user installs and opens an app, you could send a series of onboarding messages to help them get familiar with the app’s functionality to encourage repeat use and retention.

Analytics and A/B Testing

As you build your relationships with your users and customers, it’s critical to have an analytics platform that lets you understand exactly what’s going on and lets you find opportunities to increase engagement. For whatever messages you send, expect to see basic data like open and clickthrough rates. Most mobile marketing automation platforms will also provide data on app installs, uninstalls and usage.

But, to get the most from your mobile marketing activities, you’ll want to define and report on events that matter for your business. If you’re a retailer, you’ll want to track purchases in your app. If your app serves video content, you’ll want to see how often those videos are watched, and who’s watching them. As priorities change, you may want to zoom in on different aspects of your strategy to see what’s working and what isn’t; custom events let you measure whatever’s important.

Once you have your data, testing your engagement strategies is a powerful way to achieve your goals. Most marketing automation platforms provide A/B testing, which let you test one variation at a time. Depending on how many messages you send, it can be efficient to set up multiple variations at once to speed up your optimization efforts.

Data Integration

Organizations getting the most out of mobile don’t have a separate mobile strategy — they just have a strategy, period. They’re making their user experience consistent between mobile and all other channels, and using what they learn about mobile users everywhere else in their businesses.

A truly powerful mobile marketing automation platform provides simple ways to share data with the rest of your business systems. For example, you might want to:

• Send persuasive win-back emails the moment a user uninstalls an app.

• Notify a sales associate when a VIP customer enters the store.

• Present a can’t-miss Facebook offer based on the product a user just researched.

• Feed mobile campaign and audience data to analytics systems to understand mobile’s full ROI impact on the business.

Integrating your mobile marketing data with your other business systems can vastly increase the quality of your marketing efforts across all channels.

Beyond Mobile Marketing Automation

Mobile marketing automation is one thing, but mobile as a channel provides you with so many more possibilities..

But don’t settle for mobile marketing automation by itself — the next phase is a mobile engagement platform that helps you manage all of your customer and user interactions to achieve critical business goals. Want to learn more? Check out Urban Airship’s mobile engagement platform, Urban Airship Engage.

For more on best practices in marketing automation, please follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter at @jwyattd.

The post What is Mobile Marketing Automation? appeared first on Airship.

1. “Mobile messaging” isn’t a channel.

Email marketing is a single way of communicating. Some users might use Gmail and others might use Outlook, but all email messages are experienced pretty much the same way: images, text and links, accessed through an email app when it’s convenient for the user.

But mobile messaging isn’t just one channel or one technology. It comprises every way you can reach your customers on their mobile devices, including push notifications, in-app messages, wallet passes and message center messages. Your users will respond to each in a different way, and each channel offers unique possibilities for interactivity, timeliness, and content.

2. You have the user’s attention.

Email open rates are around 25%, on average. But engagement is much higher on mobile: for push notifications, for example, open rates can be over 90%. Why is that?

One reason is that you’re not fighting with hundreds or thousands of other voices for your user’s attention. Most email inboxes are vast junkyards of poorly-targeted promotions, with just a few messages that the user is prepared to act on. A user may not see an email at all, but even if they do, it’ll be buried among many other emails trying to get their attention.

With mobile messaging, on the other hand, users are usually much more careful about what they agree to receive. If you can get a user to install your app, you’ve made it easier to send messages they’ll actually see. Not to mention that your user is carrying their phone around in their pocket all day. That means you have a constant line of connection to offer them relevant information and experiences.

3. It’s easier to send relevant content.

What’s the key to great content? Relevance. Giving the user information they’re looking for in that moment.

On mobile, achieving relevance is easier. For example, your user is on their way to the airport for a flight, and you can update their boarding pass in real-time with the correct information. Or your user wants to know the score of the big game, and you can send that to them as soon as the game is over. If there’s a sale happening in one of your nearby retail locations, you can let them know that, too.

4. Mobile messaging is meant for interaction.

Sending an email is a shot in the dark. Tracking can be unreliable, you don’t have full control over how your email looks and you’re limited in what you can include. And when you want your user to act, all you can provide them is a link to your website. That’s assuming, of course, that  you can get your voice heard over all the other email your customer is receiving.

Mobile messaging isn’t like that. An interactive notification can let your users take complex actions, like voting or sharing content, with a single tap from the homescreen. A Wallet coupon can pop up at the right time and place, like when your user is heading out for a cup of coffee. Users don’t have to be “checking their email” to see your message; instead, it’ll pop up on their homescreen or when they’re already in your app, ready to hear what you have to say.

Analytics work better, too; you can more reliably see who’s received your messages, who’s opened them, and exactly what action they’ve taken in response. This lets you get a better sense of what’s working and what isn’t so you can refine accordingly.

5. With great power comes great responsibility.

Have you ever received an email that wasn’t relevant to you? We all have. But do you actually do anything about it? If a sender is particularly annoying or you happen to think of it, you might hit the unsubscribe button. But most of the time, you’ll just ignore it.

But if someone sends you an irrelevant push notification, you’ll probably be irritated enough to turn those notifications off, right then and there. So as a marketer, you have to be careful to send messages that provide real value to the user, and further the relationship. Otherwise, you risk getting your messages blocked, and possibly even having your app uninstalled. Mobile messaging is more engaging and powerful, but it carries more risk.

6. It’s important to understand the technology.

Email marketing has been around for decades, and the technology, and what you can do with it, is pretty well understood and doesn’t change much.

Mobile isn’t like that. Every year brings a new set of devices and capabilities. A year ago, the Apple Watch didn’t exist, but now it’s opened a whole new channel to communicate with users.

You’ll have to get smart on how these things work in order to market effectively over mobile.

Want to learn more?

This is just a quick overview on how mobile engagement is different from email. If you really want to improve your mobile messaging game, check out our guide to the mobile surface area, which explores when to use all the different engagement channels available to you.

The post 6 Reasons Why Mobile Messaging Is Not Like Email appeared first on Airship.