At my company, we get to work with clients who are using mobile in smart, innovative ways to drive sales growth and build and engage loyal customers while creating new revenue streams. Here are a few ways you can incorporate some of these cutting-edge trends into your mobile campaigns:

Acquiring Loyal Customers With Mobile Wallet Passes

Just like a credit or loyalty card you keep in your pocket or purse, you can store a mobile wallet pass in your smartphone’s native digital wallet like Apple Wallet or Android Pay. When we conducted a market research study surveying 2,000 consumers last year, respondents listed mobile wallet passes among the top four ways they prefer to stay updated on offers. The others were text/SMS, websites and email.

The cool thing for marketers is that wallet passes work even if you don’t have a brand app. Plus, they are location-aware, can be updated in real-time, and can send notifications to consumers on their smartphone lock screens. Marketers can easily integrate mobile wallets into traditional efforts, making them more effective and efficient:

• Coupons: With mobile wallet passes, you can update your coupons as often as you’d like — there’s no need for consumers to delete old passes and download something new. You could also notify users of a new offer with a change notification, or remind them in another communication channel like email, in-app messaging or text messaging to check the pass every week for the latest offer.
   

• Loyalty cards: Inform users when they make it to the next level of your loyalty or rewards program. With updatable fields on your mobile wallet pass, you can change a user’s tier or status as they move up the ranks of your loyalty program. Once they hit a new status level, you can easily update their pass and issue a change notification, either on their phone's lock screen or as an alert. (More uses cases for mobile wallet loyalty in this post.)
   

• ID cards: From gym memberships to insurance cards, companies can turn a once static piece of plastic into a dynamic and addressable mobile wallet pass, providing high-touch personalized messaging based on customer interactions or data. As with loyalty cards or coupons, you can associate physical locations with the pass so it will display automatically when customers are in proximity.

Mobile Apps As A Money Maker

For countless brands, investing in a mobile app pays off with deeper and more frequent interactions with their most loyal customers. Of course, apps can also help create revenue through in-app sales transactions — and more indirectly as a promotional tool for offers.

Some apps are also able to directly monetize through sponsorships. For the U.S. Tennis Association’s annual hardcourt tennis classic, the U.S. Open, we worked with the organization to deliver sponsored messages for partners including Time Warner Cable, which helped generate additional revenue and encouraged attendees to visit partner locations to take advantage of special offers. (See more about the experience in this post.) If you have a captive audience, you can easily grow sponsorship options through mobile messaging as long as it adds value.

You could also consider multiple messaging formats, such as interactive notifications, in-app messages and location relevancy. Where your customers are, where they have been and the time of day can make a huge difference in offers and messages extended to them. We’ve seen businesses achieve 4-7X response rates simply using location history as a segmentation variable. If you do have a venue(s), it gets even more interesting using proximity targeting and real-time automation for the proverbial right time, right message, right offer.

A More Meaningful In-Person Experience

Every business with an app can solicit users to explicitly provide their preferences and share their location, and glean their interests from in-app behaviors. New iOS and Android enhancements enable delivering push notifications with images or video, along with interactive buttons for effortless response. In addition, a wealth of APIs to services like Google Maps or Accuweather combine layering messaging with contextual information, like traffic and environmental conditions.

Growth Through Customer Insights

Attracting new customers, creating engaging and convenient experiences, and building loyalty through mobile leads to more revenue growth and happier customers. The more you know about your customers, the more precisely you can personalize content and offers for them. Even a single targeting variable can dramatically boost your customer response. We recommend targeting users who have been near a store in the last few months to notify them of upcoming events.

When I visited Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year (see my recap of the key trends here), I took note of something Ericsson’s Chief Innovation Officer said: “It's getting easier all the time to consume media, and therefore the experience needs to be more personal. When you use data to make content more relevant, people consume more.”

More than mere mobile marketing trends, these are innovations with practical applications for customer experiences. As corporate strategies increasingly focus on customer experience as the last and best bastion of differentiation, mobile may just be the only screen that can deliver that — wherever they may be.

This article originally appeared in Forbes.

Download our eBook Building Your Mobile Strategy today to learn about:
– Boosting your mobile conversions and campaign performance
– Defining, meeting and beating your app KPIs
– Optimizing mobile messaging for every stage of the app user lifecycle

Get your copy >>

The post How Smart Marketers Can Drive Mobile Innovations appeared first on Airship.

Initial solution partners Cordial, OpenMarket and SendGrid are joining us on a mission for more integrated communications that deliver a more connected and interactive customer experience. Businesses and technology partners interested in working with Urban Airship’s Digital Growth Platform can contact us here.

Check out our announcement for more details. 

The Only Moment That Matters to Customers is Right Now

Every day, approximately 150 times, we’re constantly reminded of how attached we’ve become to our mobile devices. Forrester Research calls these micro moments, or triggers that require only a glance to consume or act on immediately. It also doesn’t really matter where we are in the world — in a store, on our couch or somewhere in between — we're jumping from one mobile interaction to the next.

Interactions that were once anchored to desktops, like opening email, visiting websites, or posting social updates, are now much more likely to originate from mobile. And now, 10 years into apps, we see mobile-driven experiences spreading to the browser, the car, the home and all the “things” around us.

Mobile never really was a channel, as it blurs the distinction between physical and digital worlds. And now, every digital experience is becoming mobile. But this shift has far less to do with technologies and channels than it does with recognizing that consumers’ expectations to be served immediately and relevantly in their exact moment of need have never been higher.

Consumer Behavior is Changing Rapidly

From an evolutionary standpoint, it wasn’t that long ago that email introduced the world to digital communications. Now, we have inboxes everywhere, from multiple email and social accounts to those inside apps. And email, while remaining the workhorse of business-to-consumer communications, has become something we triage with technology (spam filters, promotion/social tabs) and with behavior. Many of us are accustomed to scanning to subject lines, senders, and maybe a snippet from the email to see what we can delete (this amount of information, by the way, is very similar to the amount of information you see in a notification).

Reading email on mobile is also sometimes laborious — even though upwards of 70% of email opens happen on mobile. But having to rotate devices, pinch to zoom, and squint to read text and graphics that weren’t built to be read on mobile and make reading email on a screen a not-so-great experience. A notification-style message, designed for smaller screens, solves many of these issues.

Now layer on platform-specific chatbots and different group messaging apps, and it’s abundantly clear, perhaps dizzyingly so, that our options to communicate are proliferating at an accelerated rate. 

At the same time, consumer attention has become a pricing model with popular app-based subscription services offering to eliminate advertising for a fee. On the Web, eMarketer estimates that 32% of all Internet users in the US will use an ad blocker on at least one device in 2017, with year-over-year usage of ad blocking software growing 30.1% on desktops and more than twice as fast on smartphones.

In addition, the number of consumers that say they respond to advertising has seen more than a 100% drop in the last two years, according to a Deloitte report, The New Digital Divide. Forrester found “Eighty-eight percent of consumers say advertising has little to no influence on them when making purchase decisions. … [noting (coincidentally) that] Eighty-three percent of all marketing investment goes toward buying online and offline ads, even though the better approach is to create contextually relevant interactions across the customer life cycle” (Forrester Research, Inc., “Thriving In A Post-Digital World,” April 26, 2016).

With information at their fingertips, advice or reviews a tap away, and intelligent personal assistants at their beck and call, consumers are increasingly more knowledgeable than your sales staff. In fact, Deloitte found that the percentage of consumers who prefer self-directed shopping journeys has grown from 30% to two-thirds in the last two years.

Communications Need to be More Effortless, Actionable & Connected

We’ve seen notifications spread from apps to websites and mobile wallets, and they are core to newer experiences enabled by chatbots, intelligent personal assistants and IoT. They are coming to your cars, your home and your TVs. From a consumption standpoint, there arguably isn’t a clearer expression of a call-to-action, while adding rich media and interactive buttons offers additional inspiration and effortless paths to respond. More importantly, notifications are easy to consume. It just takes a glance and I can determine if I have what I need, need to dig deeper, or ignore.

As much as people like to complain about push notifications — and we’ve all seen bad examples — their effectiveness is growing. Our fourth annual study of retail apps during the holidays found notification volume, average notification opt-in rates and engagement rates have increased every year for the past three years. Our most recent study on app user retention rates, found new users who received frequent, in-the-moment notifications were retained at rates 3-10X higher than those who didn’t.

The Message Transcends the Medium

With more and more consumers preferring self-directed journeys and shunning advertising and broad promotions, it becomes critically important to engage them on their terms and in the moments that matter. Each of your customers will have preferences for how they want to be contacted, so it really doesn't matter how the information arrives, just that it's relevant and important to them at the time they receive it.

Urban Airship’s Digital Growth Platform makes this easy by bringing the utility of a notification to any channel with a commitment to open data that allows any solution to take advantage of the mobile and non-mobile data we collect.

When data is open and flowing freely between systems, marketers can attain new levels of precision. Instead of sending a one-size-fits-all weekly email, offers can be tailored to what they just viewed on the website or added to their wish lists.

More importantly, marketers can rethink how to drive customer growth, recognizing that customer experience trumps promotion. They can prioritize impact over impressions and customer utility over message frequency. For example, marketers can:

• Follow a notification opt-in on their app or website with a welcome e-mail highlighting favorite features or upcoming specials.

• Remind users on their preferred channel of items left in shopping carts and wish lists, or coupons that are about to expire.

• Use point of sale data from physical stores to send receipts, warranty information and accessory upsells to customers’ preferred channels.

• Send a follow-up e-mail or SMS if the customer doesn't respond to a push notification within five minutes.

• Use the latest mobile behaviors or in-store interactions to provide precise promotions or high-touch service.

• Tie in with proprietary back-end systems for precise order status updates to customers on any channel, platform or device.

• Trigger chatbot confirmation notifications from online, in-app or in-store orders with an offer to track shipments.

• Email new mobile wallet loyalty members with program details and special offers

The future of marketing is about meeting customers on their terms, wherever they may be, championing an approach that emphasizes service over sales. This is marketing with a big “M,” which strives to make people's lives easier, anticipate what’s next, add value and even be a bit magical, and we hope you will join us on this journey.

Want to see the Digital Growth Platform in action? Schedule a demo any time.

The post Digital Growth: The Shift to In-the-Moment Communication appeared first on Airship.

While the team recovered this weekend from the jetlag, delicious wine and jamón ibérico, we’ve had time to huddle on the core themes and takeaways from this year’s event, which we’ve captured for you here.

Whether you were able to make it to MWC 2017 or not, we’d love to talk with you about the themes covered here — and your brand’s challenges and opportunities. Set up a complimentary consultation any time!

Customer Experience Is a Massive Differentiator for Brands

Customer experience was a huge focus at Mobile World Congress — a theme that ran throughout nearly all of the sessions and conversations. Whether a presenter was talking about the future of chatbots or big data, innovations brands are pursuing should all have improving customer experience as their core.

In one session, “Conversational Commerce,” a presenter shared a slide with a quote from Harley Manning at Forrester Research that said, “The only source of competitive advantage is the one that can survive technology-fueled disruption: an obsession with customer experience.”  

>> Related: How Customer Experience Can Make Or Break Your Business

Think Omnichannel

As brand new channels such as bots, AR and VR start to take off, MWC presenters encouraged businesses to take a step back and ensure they are working towards creating a complete omnichannel experience for consumers — rather than creating additional silos around channels.

Chatbots, for example, have been the industry’s darling for a while now. But the growing consensus is that they won’t be successful until they harness what brands know from other channels and put it to good use.

As Matt Asay, VP of Mobile at Adobe said during the “The Future of Messaging: Engagement, eCommerce and Bots” panel, “If chatbots are one more silo that isn’t tied into data and other parts of the experience, it won’t work. Building apps as a silo is not effective either.”

There is excitement about new channels and opportunities — but an increasing push for these new tools to be integrated so experiences and messaging build on each other, and create a positive, rather than fragmented, customer experience.

Creating Personalized Customer Experiences

At the session “The Power of Personalization,” panelists discussed the need for more — and faster — personalization and consumer-led interactions, the importance of personalizing based on your users’ behaviors (on mobile, online and offline), location, and peer networks. Top quotes from our notes: 

• Per Borgklint, SVP, Chief Innovation Officer & Head of Business Unit Media, at Ericsson: “It’s getting easier all the time to consume media — and therefore the experience needs to be more personal. When you use data to make content more relevant, people consume more.”
• Matt Beal, Director, Innovation & Architecture, Vodafone: “You have to give customers the choice of level of personalization they want.” This is true in apps as well, as fine-tuning push notifications is an important way to increase engagement, retention and loyalty.
• Amit Ahuja, VP, Mobile & Emerging Businesses, Adobe: It’s been a traditional approach with video to capture attention with short-form content, and then deepen engagement with longer-form content. But, he said, context is important — that might not always be the best approach. “In each case, think about your audience and what they want.”

Ahuja also made the point that delivering the right customer experience at the right time across every device is a differentiation point for companies now — and the ability to do that comes back to data and a deep understanding of the customer that data can help reveal. And it needs to be seamless to the customer — and much more natural.

In a related session, Thomas Crampton, Global MD, Social @Ogilvy & Mather, OgilvyOne cautioned attendees to stop relying on their own experiences, and instead dig into their data to see how their customers are really behaving today, and what they might want by way of personalization.Crampton also noted that targeting and personalization are related — and that if you’re only able to do one as a brand, he recommends targeting. Otherwise, you’re personalizing for people who may not be interested in your brand at all.  

Perhaps the most difficult part of the shift to personalization, concluded Crampton, is that there has to be a mindset shift within a company to make it work. Many brands are not built for it, organizationally, so it takes buy-in at the top, as well as a team with the skills to make it happen.

Reducing Friction Creates a (Way) Better Customer Experience

Many sessions discussed reducing friction to improve customer experience. In our own booth, Jonathan Rueda, a product specialist for our mobile wallet marketing solution, Reach demonstrated a frictionless, single-tap, NFC payment plus mobile loyalty program enrollment solution through Apple Pay.

Developed in partnership with USA Technologies, this approach is set to be a game changer for loyalty and rewards programs. It’s a particularly exciting opportunity because our survey of 2,000 consumers in the U.S. and U.K. shows that 82% of survey respondents are more likely to join a loyalty program if they can automatically enroll at purchase with no forms to complete.

>> Related: For more mobile wallet marketing stats and details, download our State of Mobile Wallet Marketing survey report

More details on the next evolution of mobile loyalty programs are in this press release; you can also sign up on this page to be considered for our early access program if you’re looking to streamline your mobile loyalty programs in a way that will delight your customers.

This is the Year for Voice & “Cognitive Conversations”

In a session titled “Artificial Intelligence: Chatbots and Virtual Assistants,” panelists discussed their different perspectives on voice interfaces.  

Gummi Hafsteinsson, Product Management Director, Google Assistant noted, “Just like mobile didn’t replace the desktop, voice will not replace apps and websites — it will be another way to interact.” And sometimes it will be the most convenient way.

It should also be a priority for these interactions should take place in the most natural way possible. Hafsteinsson noted that their goals for Google Assistant were: 1) Offer a natural way to interact with technology; 2) help people get things done (not just finding information, but accomplishing a task) and 3) making it very personalized — connecting it with your location, calendar info, phone, etc.

A cognitive chatbot should be about having a conversation, said panelists, that engages the user; focuses on the user’s broader concern; builds on an idea; and leaves the user inspired and satisfied.

Cognitive conversations can occur through almost any channel: mobile apps, web apps, IVR phone calls, messaging platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Slack, and personal assistance devices (Amazon Echo, Google Home, Siri, etc).

>> Related: See more about how Urban Airship customers will be able to put mobile audience intelligence to work in any of these channels with our Mobile Growth Platform

And conversational chatbots still have lots of potential, with many organizations already building advantage from them — presenters mentioned several companies using chatbots in innovative ways, including H&R Block for tax prep; 1-800 Flowers’ Gwyn for gift concierge services; and the Royal Bank of Scotland for account management.

Leveraging the Untapped Potential of Location

In their panel, “Cracking the Location-Based Marketing Code,” Michael Weaver, VP Product Strategy, MediaMath and Ilicco Elia, Head of Mobile, DigitasLBi encouraged attendees to broaden their thinking about location to think of location in three ways:  

1. Where is my customer right now? (hyper local and geo fencing)

2. Where has my customer been? (location-based audience targeting)

3. What has my customer done? That is, what is their context? (What device are they on; what are they doing right now; what kind of apps do they have; is there anything else happening around them that is relevant, etc.)

There are so many more signals available on mobile — which means there are many ways to understand a consumer — and individualize their experience.

>> Related: See how the U.S. Open leveraged location-based push notifications to drive a delightful user experience

Netflix CEO Touts Growth Marketing Principles: Experiment & Iterate

In his keynote address, Reed Hastings, Founder and CEO Netflix, described a lot of growth marketing and mobile growth principles Netflix has used to make decisions about their business.

Hastings told the audience that Netflix is focused more on telling incredible stories than screen size — they don’t design for mobile. Instead, they try to make sure their content looks great on whatever screen their customers are using.   

Hastings also said they have learned from experimenting because “ What’s amazing about technology is that it’s very difficult to predict. We learn and adapt rather than committing to one direction. We are flexible and we learn as we go.”

Flexibility, experimentation and iteration are also key for mobile growth. (Check out our eBook, 15 Essentials for Mobile Growth, to learn more.)

Google’s Android Messages Using Rich Communication Services (RCS) Is Leveling Up

There was buzz at MWC about Android Messages and Google’s focus on rolling out RCS on a much broader scale. If it succeeds, Google will be competing with iMessage and messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and What’s App. Some brands like Gamestop and Walgreens are already experimenting with Android Messages.  

We’re signed up to be part of the beta, and we’re looking forward to seeing how the service evolves. (If you’re interested in working with us on it, get in touch.)

See more history and context on Android Messages in these articles from Recode, Wired and CNET.

Using Mobile Data & Analytics Everywhere

Emily Buckman, Strategic Consultant at Urban Airship participated in a podcast with our friends Rafe Blanford and Ilicco Elia at DigitasLBi and covered some of the most exciting aspects of this year’s event, including enabling mobile technologies (like Aira glasses as a service) and smart cities that will efficiencies and make people’s lives easier.

They also discussed the need and opportunities for mobile audience intelligence analytics to power more and better customer experiences. Says Buckman, “I think the critical thing is having the right measurement in place inside an app to be able to monitor user behavior — what they’re browsing, where they’re getting stuck, when they’re dropping out of a payment or a registration process. All of those things help you understand where your customers are at in their experience with your brand. And getting this data allows you to act accordingly, automating messaging in real time at the right time based on what people are doing or are trying to get done inside your app.”

>> Related: Leveraging your mobile audience intelligence to create better customer experiences.

Listen to the full podcast below.

Final Thoughts & Insights

Connecting and consolidating data is critical in making a better, more personalized customer experience. After MWC, I’m even more excited about the evolution of our Mobile Growth Platform — and our Open Channels and Open Profiles which will allow our customers to use what they know about their customers from mobile interactions on any platform. Learn more about that here. The future is wide open — and customer centric — and we’re thrilled to be part of it.

What did we miss? Leave your key takeaways from MWC in the comments below, or send a tweet our way. And, as always, contact us any time to talk through any of the themes in this post. We’d love to help you deliver a better customer experience on mobile.

The post Our Key Takeaways From Mobile World Congress 2017 appeared first on Airship.

This kind of frustrating scenario can be solved — for you as an app owner, and for your customer — with one simple step: implementing an in-app message center.

As a central hub for messages within your app — essentially an app in-box — your message center can capture and store messages your users want to keep track of, creating a better customer experience.

But that’s not the only reason to add a message center to your mobile messaging mix.

Our research — and our experience with customers who have our message center SDK — reveals that in-app message centers:

• Generate 8 times the read rates as push notifications alone

• Allow you to leverage any kind of rich content you can put on an HTML5 page — from photos and videos to surveys and links to mobile wallet passes

• Give your users a place within your app they can go to read messages they care about at their convenience, since messages generally stay in place longer than a more fleeting push notification or in-app message

• Reach your entire app audience (not just app users who have  opted in to push notifications)

• Give you another way to target messages to specific users or broadcast to all users.

In a nutshell, message centers can support a wider variety of experiences and use cases than push notifications or other forms of in-app messaging — and serves as a place for you and your user to keep messages that matter.

So how do you get the most out of an in-app message center — and make it a feature your users will love?

With hundreds of clients using our message center SDK in our Engage solution, we’ve seen what works.

Get dozens of ideas and examples of how leading brands are leveraging in-app message centers to meet a variety of business goals – from better onboarding to boosting revenue – in our new Message Center Inspiration Guide.

Make Your In App Message Center a Win/Win for You & Your Users

Here are seven best practices from successful in-app message centers:

1) Think About How Message Center Fits Into Your Overall Mobile Messaging Strategy

Before you implement a message center, it’s important to think about how you will leverage this channel to complement your overall mobile messaging strategy.  

One common and very successful approach is to use a message center in conjunction with push notifications or in-app messages to drive engagement.

Because push notifications and in-app messages are temporary, users may miss messages sent in those channels. A message center extends the life of your messaging, and makes it easy for users to catch messages that are useful, educational or that have deals or offers they’ll want to redeem.

Here’s how that would look for the three most common types of mobile messaging:

• Transactional: “Your order has shipped, your tracking number is 1j5e2.” “Your prescription is ready for pick up,” “Your gate has changed; you’re now at 12A.” Push notifications are a great way to alert users of these kinds of real-time, transactional messages. But if a user misses the initial push message, it’s very convenient for them to be able to look at the message later in an in-app message center.
• Educational: Again, push notifications or in-app messages are great ways to send educational content. But, if a user misses those messages, you have another chance to reach them: in your in-app message center. For example, a news app could add updates to stories their users are following; a fashion app could share a video of the latest runway shows with a link to a page where users can shop these styles.  
• Promotional: A coupon, invitation to a loyalty program, or a buy one get one free message works as a push or in-app message, but becomes even more valuable to the user if they’re interested in the offer but can’t act on it right away.

Think about the kinds of messages you send, and consider how adding some of those messages to your message center might make them even more valuable for your users.  

2) Set Expectations for What Users Will Find in Your In-App Message Center

Let your users know what they can expect to find in your message center. Setting expectations helps build a habit of checking the message center, driving higher engagement and an overall better experience for users.

PGA Tour does a nice job with this as they send an initial welcome message that explains what users can expect. They let their app users know they’ll be adding information they think is valuable to fans and app users. They also let them know that whenever there is a new message they’ll see the notification badge on the MyTOUR section in the menu.

Use iconography or thumbnail photos to indicate message content categories. For example:

• A sports score app might use various team or sport icons

• Retail apps might use a consistent icon for sales offers or a new product

• An airline app might flag VIP messages

Messages should include a few lines of preview text. Avoid truncating this content. This helps a customer decide whether to read a message, and can reduce your concerns about sending promotional messaging, because uninterested customers will simply skip them.

3) Make your Message Center Stand Out

Be sure that your message center is visible to users so they can find it when they open your app.

For iOS, use badges to indicate you’ve added new messages. Badges are proven to draw people into your message center updates.

If you are using push notifications, consider which notifications could go into your message center for future viewing. This is particularly important for transactional messages such as those related to pickup in-store, or for shipping notices.

Barnes & Noble makes their message center visible with prominent placement in their app, and includes a badge indicating the number of new messages.

4) Extend a Warm Welcome With a Welcome Message…

Welcome your app users from the very beginning with a welcome message in the message center, reinforcing your app benefits and why they should come back to see what’s new.

Businesses looking to maximize their reach can deliver the same welcome message as both a push notification and a message center message.

The Home Depot app sends a welcome message clearly stating the value of message center content users will receive.

5) …Or Create a Welcome Message Series

It can also be very effective to have an automated welcome series in your app message center as part of your onboarding process.

For example, a luxury department store uses its message center to deliver a welcome series with the goal of driving a second and third app open within the first two days. Two hours after download, its users receive a push notification deep linked to its message center welcoming them to the app.

From this first welcome message, the retailer saw 27% of
 all message center messages being read and a 40% push notification engagement rate.

6) Keep it Clean: Expire Outdated Message Center Messages

Be sure to set messages up for auto-deletion. This is particularly important for promotional messages where an offer has an expiration date.

Auto-deletion keeps your message center tidy and up-to-date so your customers can focus on the timely content that matters.

7) Make it a (Good) Habit

Another best practice is to make message center visits a “habit” through a regular message or offer that builds anticipation, and that users look forward to.

A great example of this is Starbucks’ Pick of the Week — a special offer such as a free app or free music — delivered to their message center every Tuesday.

Get Started Today

With the OOTB message center SDK in Urban Airship Engage, our mobile engagement solution, you can implement a message center in your app in 4-6 hours.

And, as a marketer, once it’s part of your app, you can add messages without the help of your developer.

For more ideas from leading brands, check out our Message Center Inspiration Guide or contact us to talk about your options. Make an in-app message center part of your mobile messaging strategy today.

Ready to learn more? Check out our cheat sheet on message centers here, and download our benchmark report on message center read rates to get more data to build a business case for including a message center in your app. 

Download our In-App Message Center Read Rates benchmark report to learn more about: 

• The unparalleled reach marketing can achieve with high-performing message centers
• Differences in consumer behavior and tactics to boost message center read rates
• The massive performance gap between iOS and Android

Get your copy today!

The post 7 In App Message Center Best Practices appeared first on Airship.

In the first post in our mobile growth series, What is Mobile Growth?, we sketched out a definition of mobile growth. In the second post, Getting Into the Mobile Growth Mindset, we highlighted the essentials for continuing the shift to a mobile-first perspective.  In the third post, How to Set (and Reach!) Your Mobile Growth Goals, we covered key elements of a successful approach to meeting and beating your mobile growth goals. The fourth explored How to Leverage Mobile Business Intelligence to Power Mobile Growth, and the fifth was Don’t Miss Your Mobile Growth Opportunities.

In this, the sixth and final post in the series, we’re wrapping up with some mobile growth stats, along with five core principles for succeeding at mobile growth.

Mobile growth statistics to keep in mind as you plan your strategy for growing your business:

• Mobile now represents 65 percent of digital media time (via comScore)

• The desktop is rapidly becoming a “secondary touch point” for a large percentage of the US digital audience. (via comScore)

• Black Friday set a record as the first $1 billion mobile shopping day in U.S. history. The estimate marks a 33 percent increase over last year’s mobile sales total for the day. (via Adobe)

• Mobile accounted for 45.1% of web-shopping traffic in the first quarter of this year, just edging out desktops at 45%. (via Demandware)

• By the end of 2017, phones will account for more than 60% of digital traffic. (via Demandware)

• For the first time, in the first half of 2016, the leading 25% of mobile retailers saw 50% of their sales from mobile. (via Criteo)

• 30% of all online shopping purchases now happen on mobile (via Google)

• Apps convert 3x more product viewers than mobile web (via Criteo)

• 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing — and 40% will go visit a competitor’s site instead. (Google)

• Mobile advertising will represent 72 percent of all US digital ad spending by 2019 (via eMarketer)

Five core principles for capitalizing on mobile growth:

1. Future-proof your brand: take advantage of the historic shifts toward the mobile platform to reach more of your customers on their own terms, on a device that’s with them all day every day.

2. Make experiences with your brand easy and seamless across all the places you interact with customers.

3. Leverage user-level data to create individualized, 1:1 customer communication in real time at mobile scale.

4. Become your customer’s real-time source of useful and valuable content at the precise moment they need and want it, across all devices, platforms and channels  — from smartphones to watches to cars to in-home smart devices.

5. Think bigger, increasing the speed of learning curves on what customers want and expect —  and delivering it.  

Got questions about mobile growth? We’ve got answers. Get in touch anytime to talk with our experts about how your brand can get ahead — and stay ahead — of the mobile growth opportunity.

We also invite you to learn more about our Mobile Growth Platform — and sign up to be part of the beta.

Download the complete eBook, 15 Essentials for Mobile Growth at any time to get all of our ideas, insights and self-assessment questions.

The post Making Mobile Growth a Reality: 10 Must-Know Stats & 5 Principles for Success appeared first on Airship.

In the first post in our mobile growth series, What is Mobile Growth?, we sketched out a definition of mobile growth. In the second post, Getting Into the Mobile Growth Mindset, we highlighted the essentials for continuing the shift to a mobile-first perspective.  In the third post, How to Set (and Reach!) Your Mobile Growth Goals, we covered key elements of a successful approach to meeting and beating your mobile growth goals. The fourth explored How to Leverage Mobile Business Intelligence to Power Mobile Growth.

In this, the fifth post in the series, we’re sharing some ways to stay on top of new mobile growth opportunities and strategies. You’ll find even more insights in our eBook 15 Essentials for Mobile Growth, which you can download any time.

Here are some ways to make sure you keep up with your own potential for exponential mobile growth:

Stay on top of new mobile opportunities and technologies.  

The technology landscape is evolving faster than it ever has. In the big picture, that means lots of buzz about chatbots, Internet of Things (IoT), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and much, much more.

How these things fit into your mobile growth strategy may not be clear today, but you should consider how they may fit into it tomorrow and beyond.

Questions to Ask:

• When is the last time we tried something new or experimental?

• Who on our team is responsible for staying in the know about new mobile tools and trends?

• Where do we need to be to learn from mobile growth futurists and trend watchers?  

Related Resources:

• The Next Big Thing is Already Here

• It’s the End of the Beginning for Mobile

• Urban Airship’s Open Profiles & Open Channels

Think bigger—way bigger—on a regular basis.

Andrew Chen, who heads up growth at Uber, shared this insight via a recent blog post:

“I’ll talk with people about their road maps and I’ll ask them, ‘You have this great thing that’s working, but how do you 10x it?’ Maybe they’ll have some ideas, but then I’ll say, ‘Okay, now what would you do to 100x it?’ It gets to a point where you need to take really big swings to make that happen.”

Growth teams should have regularly scheduled periods of time to do “blue sky” thinking that could result in a drastically different approach to their product, their marketing, or both.

Otherwise, it’s too easy to get bogged down in fine-tuning what’s working while missing the bigger picture of what’s possible.

Questions to Ask:

• Are we still stuck in an incremental growth mindset that’s preventing us from leapfrogging ahead?

• Are stuck on the hamster wheel of adding features and functions — rather than fundamentally re-thinking what we can do on mobile?

• Could we spark exponential mobile growth by being more willing to blur the lines between product and marketing?  

Related Resources:

• Andrew Chen’s blog post “The State of Growth Hacking”

• The Mobile Growth Stack

• Urban Airship’s Mobile Growth Platform

In the next and final blog post in this series, we’ll sum up what mobile growth success can look like for brands. Download the complete eBook at any time to get all of our ideas, insights and self-assessment questions right away.

The post Don’t Miss Your Mobile Growth Opportunities appeared first on Airship.

In the first post in our mobile growth series, What is Mobile Growth?, we sketched out a definition of mobile growth. In the second post, Getting Into the Mobile Growth Mindset, we highlighted the essentials for continuing the shift to a mobile-first perspective. In the third post, How to Set (and Reach!) Your Mobile Growth Goals, we covered key elements of a successful approach to meeting and beating your mobile growth goals.

In this, the fourth post in the series, we’re talking about using mobile business intelligence to power mobile growth. You’ll find even more insights in our eBook 15 Essentials for Mobile Growth, which you can download any time.

Here are three things to consider when determining how to use mobile analytics and business intelligence to grow your business:

Your app is the best, most reliable source of user-level data to power growth.

In the past, marketers have done some crazy things in the name of understanding their customers. Focus groups, mall intercepts, survey hotlines printed on receipts — you name it, marketers have tried it.

But a lot of the data we’ve collected has been limited or even useless. The new — and exponentially more unbiased — way to learn what your customers really want is through your app.

In fact, mobile apps offer 5-10x the volume of behavioral data as websites, according to Forrester Research, Inc.

Questions to Ask:

• Is our app set up to collect the data that would be most useful in helping us understand what our users want and leverage what’s working (and stop doing what’s not working) for growth?

• Is our mobile messaging designed to capture and greatly amplify the user-level data we get from app sessions?

• Do we have the internal expertise to take real-time action on user-level data — and use that data beyond the app in our other product and marketing initiatives?

Related Resources:

• Leading Organizations Turn to User-Level Mobile Intelligence to Accelerate Customer Growth

• 1:1 Insight Drives Smarter Action

• Integrate Mobile Insights Everywhere

Mobile analytics can reveal the tactics and channels that will help you move the needle on mobile growth.

Different tactics, channels, and platforms can make a significant impact on mobile growth efforts. For example:

• When the National Hockey League (NHL) added a screen that explained the value of opting in to push notifications, they increased opt-ins by 10%.  

• In seven days, more than 10,000 users downloaded POLITICO Europe’s Brexit mobile wallet pass, growing their databases as 74% of those were net new contacts — and helping drive a 300% increase in website traffic.

• Overall, read rates for in-app message centers are 8x the direct open rates for push notifications.

• Push notifications that include images have a 56% higher direct open rate than those without.

• Highly targeted notifications drive 4-7x greater engagement rates than messages sent to all users.

Questions to Ask:

• What are the barriers to adding additional mobile channels and platforms to our mix?

• What data do we have on our current channels that might indicate the best additional channels and tactics to explore?

• How will we make sure that the new tactics we explore are tied back to our core growth goals?

Related Resources:

• Mobile Messaging Cheat Sheet: Choose the Right Mobile Messaging Communication Channels Every Time

• POLITICO Europe Uses Mobile Wallet for Brexit Coverage

• 3 Push Notification Best Practices to Get the Best Results

Create in-the-moment messaging that sparks engagement, action — and growth — with mobile messaging analytics.  

“How do we reach people wherever they are without just throwing stuff at them? Our approach has got to be to serve, not spam,” says Mike Herrick, SVP of Product & Engineering for Urban Airship.

The more individualized, responsive and real-time your interactions with your mobile users are, the more engagement, trust and growth you’ll be able to achieve. The experiences you create need to be win-win for you and your users.

Questions to Ask:

• Are our mobile interactions with our customers as individualized as they could be?

• Can we consistently and reliably deliver real-time, customized messages that deliver what our users want exactly when they want it?

• Is there a reason to consider building a different type of mobile experience — a separate lightweight, app, chatbot, mobile wallet campaign or something similar —  to go deeper into one or more valuable (or promising) user segments?

Related Resources:

• Making Sure Your Future, Our Future, Everyone’s Future is Wide Open

• Real-Time Marketing for Mobile Apps

• Custom Event Triggers Create & Automate More Timely, Personalized Mobile Notifications

In the next blog post in this series, we’ll be talking about ways to stay on top of new mobile growth opportunities and strategies. Download the complete eBook at any time to get all of our ideas, insights and self-assessment questions right away.

The post How to Leverage Mobile Business Intelligence to Power Mobile Growth appeared first on Airship.

In the first post in our mobile growth series, What is Mobile Growth?, we sketched out a definition of mobile growth. In the second post, Getting Into the Mobile Growth Mindset, we highlighted the essentials for continuing the shift to a mobile-first perspective.  

In this, the third post in the series, we’re covering key elements of a successful approach to reaching (and exceeding!) your mobile growth goals.  

Our eBook 15 Essentials for Mobile Growth has even more insights and self-assessment questions to help you in your mobile growth initiatives, including:

• How to set goals that help you and your team achieve exponential, not just incremental growth

• Why it’s important to build a system to create and sustain mobile growth — and the five critical questions and data points the system needs to address

• How to build a cross-functional mobile growth team — and options for structuring the team

Download the full eBook anytime to access these insights and more.

How can you be sure you're setting and pursuing mobile growth goals that will motivate your team and get results? Here are three things to consider:

Get specific about your mobile growth goals: what are you trying to do, and how are you going to do it?

It may sound obvious, but your specific mobile growth goals will determine how you measure progress, determine what’s working and make course corrections.

For example, companies like Facebook rely on daily user interactions to meet their goals will track daily active user (DAU) stats as part of their mobile growth model — whereas a company like Expensify would be more likely to look at weekly or monthly stats because that is a better fit for their user interactions and business model.  

Growth expert Brian Balfour refers to these goals as “key outputs” of your mobile growth system. These goals must take into account the entire lifecycle of growth — including retention and lifetime value of your customer.

Questions to Ask:

• How will we know when we’re moving in the right direction with our mobile growth goals?

• Do our growth goals match up with the core value proposition of our product?

• What are the key experiences that will keep our users coming back again and again?  

Related Resources:

• Mobile Analytics for the Growth Marketer: A Closer Look at Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

• Win Your Battle for Customers with Data

• Reading Between the Data: It’s All in the Details

Prioritization is essential for successful mobile growth. Always ask, “What is the highest impact thing we can be working on right now?”

Rigorous prioritization is critical to the success of mobile growth initiatives. “We’re always going to be limited by resources, whether it’s money, time or people. You have to prioritize. Asking: what is the highest impact initiative we can work on right now? That’s the key component of highly successful growth teams,” says Balfour.

Questions to Ask:

• Are we following where the data leads, rather than defaulting to working on the things that excite us the most?

• Do we need to revisit prioritization criteria based on short and long-term mobile growth goals?

• How often do we need to revisit our core business goals?

Related Resources:

• Urban Airship Blog Posts on Growth Marketing

• 3 Keys to Making Sure Your Mobile Analytics Move the Needle

Be disciplined and systematic about your mobile growth efforts — and document your initiatives and experiments.  

Your mobile growth strategy — and all of the ideas, tactics, experiments and analytics around it — should be the centerpiece of your growth team’s roadmap and decisionmaking.

Documenting your experiments (a simple shared spreadsheet works well) helps make the team accountable for specific results; improves your intuition over time and functions as a knowledge base for future initiatives. It also reduces team friction and helps you stay focused on making data-based decisions.

Here is an example of the kinds of data you might want to capture in your own mobile growth marketing experiments template (click to zoom):

Questions to Ask:

• What kinds of team interactions will help us stay focused on our top priorities?

• What systems can we borrow from other business functions (kanban, ticketing, etc.) to help?

• What is the best approach to making our experiments and initiatives open to the whole team?

Related Resources:

• Mobile A/B Testing Adds an “n”

• Growth Marketing Explained

• The Scientific Marketing Strategy Behind Exponential Growth [Includes Growth Experiments Spreadsheet Templates]

In the next blog post in this series, we’ll share tips for using mobile business intelligence and mobile analytics to power mobile growth. Download the complete eBook at any time to get all of our ideas, insights and self-assessment questions right away.

The post How to Set (and Reach!) Your Mobile Growth Goals appeared first on Airship.

To take advantage of the explosion of mobile devices and interfaces to grow your business (as covered in our first post in our mobile growth series, What is Mobile Growth?”) a deeper change in perspective may be required. 

In this second post in the series, we’re highlighting a few ways digital marketers can get into a mobile growth mindset — along with strategic questions to ask to assess where your business is on the mobile growth continuum.

Mobile is a mindset, not a channel.

According to Gartner, marketing leaders still view their mobile marketing as the least mature of their disciplines. That needs to change. In fact, a “set it and forget it” approach to mobile is a very easy way for a CMO to find themselves out of a job, said Mike McGuire, VP Research, Gartner for Marketing Leaders said at our recent customer growth event. McGuire also said, in a recent blog post, “Complacency about a mobile optimized site or mobile engagement is career suicide.”

Consider what your brand could look like through a mobile-first lens, then consider what steps, investments and internal alignments you need to get there. If you don’t get there first, a disruptor may beat you to it. (Consider Uber, Airbnb, GrubHub, etc.)

Questions to Ask:

• Are we thinking big enough about how we can capitalize on mobile’s ability to deliver real-time, personalized experiences to our customers?

• Are our competitors already taking a mobile-centric approach? How might that impact our growth opportunities in the future?

• Are we asking and listening to what our users want, need and expect from us on mobile?

Related Resources:

• It’s the End of the Beginning for Mobile

• The Next Big Thing is Already Here

Your approach to mobile can’t continue to be a collection of interesting tactics: you must have a strategy.

You have to know why you’re doing mobile, and what you expect out of it. Too many companies have an app because someone on their executive team said they needed one, not because they had a cohesive mobile strategy.

Questions to Ask:

• Is our app’s value proposition strong enough to get users to download it — and keep it?  

• How can we engage more customers with mobile experiences they'll value — whether or not they have our app?

• Are we clear on our mobile strategy, and is it aligned to what our customers want? How do we know?

Related Resources:

• Building Your First Mobile Marketing Strategy

Understand how your customers are interacting with you — across different channels, platforms and stages in their customer journey.

By bringing data from mobile, web, and “offline” (in-person) experiences together, you can get a more cohesive picture of how your customer is interacting with your brand.

Some call this the holy grail. We call it overdue. Your customer doesn’t think of their experiences with your brand in silos, and neither should you.

Questions to Ask:

• Can we connect what we know about our customers from every place we have data about them into one unified customer profile?

• Does our mobile marketing automation software provider allow its data to flow to any business system?

• Can data from any of our business systems be used to trigger real-time mobile messaging?

Related Resources:

• The Mobile Engagement Loop: A New Take on the Marketing Funnel

• Urban Airship’s Mobile Growth Platform

• Making Sure Your Future, Our Future, Everyone’s Future is Wide Open

Smartphones can and should connect online and offline experiences.

“Our fans can use their smartphones as the remote control to our stadium” says Kyle Eichman, Senior Director, Technology Solutions, Sacramento Kings.

(Read more in this article “Sacramento Kings Redefining Fan Experience At Golden 1 Center With New ‘Remote Control’ App” from SportTechie.)

From the moment Sacramento Kings fans set foot in the Golden 1 Stadium, they can use their smartphones to personalize their experience: watch replays from any angle, post to social media in a flash (thanks to blazing fast wifi), even order food to their seat and pay for it — all on their phones.

Related Video: See how Urban Airship’s Open Profiles & Open Channels enable one Sacramento Kings fan to learn about ticket discounts, VIP access, and the game day lineup through notifications across multiple channels web notifications, Facebook messenger and on their mobile phone in our video A Customer Journey Powered By Our New Mobile Growth Platform.  

Questions to Ask:

• How can I use mobile to help personalize and customize “offline” experiences with my brand?

• “What physical brand experiences can be made more exciting and engaging with mobile?”

• How can I leverage location, proximity and automation to grow with mobile?

Related Resources:

• The US Open Mobile App: A Personalized Mobile Concierge

• A Day in the Life of  Sports Fan – Re-Imagined Through a Mobile Growth Lens

• Sacramento Kings, Golden 1 Center Launch Venue App

In the next blog post in this series, we’ll share how to leverage your mobile analytics and mobile data to accelerate mobile growth. Want to get all the mobile growth tips we’ve got? Download 15 Essentials for Mobile Growth: Trends, Tips & Insights to Power Mobile-First Business Growth today!

The post Getting Into the Mobile Growth Mindset appeared first on Airship.

So what are we talking about when we talk about mobile growth?

For us, mobile growth refers to two things: the explosion of the mobile platform and mobile devices — and the resulting opportunity for businesses to grow with mobile.

The Mobile Explosion

Mobile user experiences and interfaces are fast becoming the model for all of our digital interactions — with our desktops, our cars, our in-home smart assistants and even our appliances.

As a result, a mobile-centric approach is the fastest growing way for brands to connect with their customers.

Consider these mobile growth statistics: in just a few years since the first smartphone was introduced in 2007:

• Mobile has become the preferred digital experience over desktop (7 billion devices vs. 2 billion PCs).

• comScore’s latest data shows that, while Web audiences are nearly 3X bigger than app audiences, app users are 20X more engaged.

• Mobile's influence has grown the fastest, according to Deloitte, where now more than half of every dollar spent offline is digitally influenced.

• New in-home, immersive experience powered by the Internet of Things (IoT) are on the rise — Gartner predicts 50 billion IoT devices by 2020.

Leveraging “Mobile Everywhere” to Grow Your Business

User expectations for digital experiences are also changing because of mobile. As users, we increasingly expect our digital interactions with brands to be:

• Real-time: Interactions that meet us in our moment of need, whenever and wherever that may be.

• Personalized: Communications should be individualized, with content based on our interactions with a brand.

• Seamless: No matter where we’re interacting with a brand — on a phone, in an app, on social media, in a retail location, etc. — we expect a consistent experience.

• Easy: User interfaces and customer experiences should be simple and straightforward. (Or, as Luke Wroblewski, author of “Mobile First” likes to say, “obvious always wins.”)

From a growth marketing perspective, mobile growth holds massive opportunity to combine user expectations with new tools and technologies available only on mobile — among them:

• User-Level Data: Because mobile analytics provide user-level data, marketers can get pinpoint precision on user interests, attributes and behavior. Every touch and swipe can be captured with the right solution to understand user patterns across their journey.

• In-the-Moment Messaging: The real-time interactions made possible by mobile mean you can send messages to users at precisely the moment that it will be most useful and relevant to them — messages that are automatically triggered by actions your customer has taken to interact with your brand.

• Real-Time Fine Tuning: Test multiple variations of a message to see what your users are responding to, and move swiftly to make changes that improve the experience and outcomes.

We recently announced our next big thing for supporting mobile growth: two new APIs, Open Channels and Open Profiles. These new APIs allow you to use data on any messaging channel, from chatbots to web push notifications to smart home devices and more. Your rich mobile data is freed up, allowing you to execute an omni device strategy. Learn more about it on our Mobile Growth Platform page — you can also sign up to be part of the beta there. 

Brands that understand and take advantage of the unique opportunities for an omni device approach to connecting with customers — leveraging unique real-time, user-level mobile — will win.  

In the next blog post in this series, we’ll discuss some imperatives for getting into the mobile growth mindset. Can’t wait for the next post? Download 15 Essentials for Mobile Growth now.

The post What is Mobile Growth? appeared first on Airship.