It turns out we were right: in November 2015, messaging volume to in-app message centers increased 152% compared to the prior year! Why? Retailers really caught on to the benefits of using an in-app message center. Did you miss the wave? If so, now is the time to catch up. 

In this post, we’ll share why you should consider adding an in-app message center, and some examples of top retail brands who are using message center creatively. 

Why Add an In-App Message Center to Your Retail App?

Our data shows that apps without a message center are missing a huge opportunity. Medium-performing iOS apps (the 50th percentile) achieve eight times greater message center read rates than direct taps on a notification.

When we look at retail apps alone, our data showed customers read nearly half of all message center messages.

Need we say more? 

Retail Message Center Read Rates for High & Medium-Performing Retail Apps

Data from Urban Airship’s Message Center Read Rates benchmark report. Get your copy here. 

Examples of Retail Apps Using In-App Message Centers

Message centers provide a consistent place for app users to go to access the latest and greatest holiday offers and content from their favorite retailers.  

GameStop’s Message Center Gets Dressed Up for the Holidays

We love how each message in GameStop’s in-app message center is highlighted with a festive color scheme, and includes a fun image and subject line. Tapping on any of the red, green or black subject lines takes you to a rich HTML5 landing page describing the offer in more detail.

Backcountry App Uses Push Notifications to Drive App Users to Thier Message Center to Get More Details on Sales & Offers

Outdoor retailer Backcountry’s app takes an extra step by combining their message center content with a push notification. There is a call-to-action in the notification to remind users to check their in-app messages for more details.

The great thing about a message center within a retail app is that there’s more room than a push notification to provide details, context, and even images and videos to support a holiday offer. And, if a user has not opted in to receive push notifications, they can still access message center content.

Redbox Uses Their In-App Message Center for Customer Aquisition & Onboarding 

Redbox’s app combines push notifications with its message center and lifecycle automation to deliver a free movie rental code to new app users within one hour of their first app open. Open rates for these message center messages are 33% higher than its typical promotional offers – including 300% greater redemption.

The message center offer also helps Redbox with conversions: to redeem this offer, users must sign up for a Redbox account, which allows Redbox to streamline future purchases and gather additional data about their customers. 

Neiman Marcus and Starbucks Promote Their Charitable Giving Through Their In-App Message Centers

Beyond sales and offers, an in-app message center offers a chance to share less time-sentisitve marketing messages that help increase customer loyalty and boost brand value. Neiman Marcus and Starbucks have used their app in-box to share their charitable giving commitments and connections. 

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 Why Add an In-App Message Center to Your Retail App? Check Out These Read Rate Benchmarks appeared first on Airship.

Defining personalization has been a hot topic at Urban Airship. Recently, our very own John Greene and Greg Weinger wrote about big P vs. little p in terms of personalization. On a more, ahem, personal note, I also shared my experiences with “mass personalization” at different stages of my own pregnancy. Pulling findings from those experiences together, we’ve noted  three things to keep in mind when it comes to defining personalization for mobile messaging:

It's More Than “Little P” and It’s Unique to Your Business

Personalization is more than incorporating your user’s first name or order number into the message. Every brand should take additional steps to define what “Big P” personalization entails for their business. Personalization for a high-touch, high-service luxury retailer app is going to look a lot different than personalization for a utility app. Each brand must scope the necessary people, process and infrastructure needed to support their unique version of personalization.

When It Comes to Using Data, Feel Free to Start Simple

At the core, data is key to creating personal experiences. But that doesn't necessarily mean you have to start with overwhelming big data integrations. Start simple. How can you address a brand new app user differently than a lapsed user? What are the top three customer data points you could collect that would make a big impact in how you message your users? For example, explicit preference or their browsing behavior. Start by tracking metrics like this and expand to more advanced data points later.

True Mobile Personalization Equals Utility for Your Customer

Going back to my experience using pregnancy apps … while it was great to read up on everything there is to know at week 36 of my pregnancy, it would have been even better for the app to serve up content based on my individual behavior patterns. I've been freaking out about what the first few weeks with a newborn will be like, and as such, have been obsessively searching for relevant articles. Serving up content from the archives about how to survive would be highly personal to me and helpful as it would save me hours of obsessive Googling.

Mobile Messaging Strategy Questions?

Want to talk to us about how you can personalize for your users or have a general discussion about your mobile app strategy? Reach out and let’s get the conversation started.

The post Mobile Messaging Personalization Defined appeared first on Airship.

Consider In-App Notifications

Subtle in-app notifications are served up when the user is in the app and they don’t have to have push notifications enabled to receive them. Thank your new app users for downloading your app the first time they open it with an in-app welcome notification to get them used to hearing from you in this manner. Consider updating this message seasonally.

Dedicate a Spot for Targeted Messaging

Implementing a message center is another great way to reach all of your app users regardless of opt-in status. I received an email from Zappos recently that incentivized me to check out the in-app message center by offering $10 off my next app order available only through that channel.

Connect Mobile Messaging and Email

Email is another great way to reach your mobile users to drive them into the app. By implementing a cross-channel communication strategy, it is possible to target push notification opt-outs with an email — provided they’ve authenticated in your app so you can connect the two systems.

When It Makes Sense, Try the Opt-In Message Again

Finally, while these are great ways to engage with app users, they may not provide the same experience or utility as a push notification. Consider asking the big question again around the context of utility. By building logic into your app to recapture opt-outs when it makes sense contextually, you get another bite at the mobile engagement apple.

More In-App Messaging Best Practices

Learn more about in-app messages and read up on in-app message truths and lies, reasons to implement an in-app message center and how to differentiate in-app message content from push notification content.

The post In-App Messaging: The Forgotten Mobile Messaging Channel appeared first on Airship.

Utility Must Be Clear

Pregnancy and baby apps strive to provide utility, as should every app. The core utilities I came across nearly every app were:

• Personalized, on-the-go reference guides

• Reminders

• Data logs (bump size, feeding times, etc.)

• Community portals for real-life parents

• Inspiring content, including videos

Mass Personalization of Content

I want to touch on personalization in more detail, as I think this is one of the most important features of these apps. The amount of information out there regarding pregnancy and the early stages of child rearing is astounding. It is hard to know what to read up on — and when.

These apps help by providing a newsfeed format, displaying only what you what you need to know, when you need to know it, based on your pregnancy or child’s developmental stage.  While extremely valuable, I call this mass-personalization, because the content can come off as canned and not dynamic (based on me as an individual user).

Did I show interest in learning more about the ins and outs of breastfeeding? Then point me in the direction of your most valuable breastfeeding content. Push and in-app notifications could help surface hidden content that could be uber-relevant to only me at a specific point in my life cycle.

Mobile Messaging Must Provide Value

In order to keep the user engaged with the app’s content and utilities, mobile messaging is key. Get the user to opt in to your notifications early on, and be clear about what you’ll offer them. I love how WhatToExpect Pregnancy puts the push notification ask into clear context:

BabyCenter uses the notification title to display the current week. It also seems like they are trying to fit the entire weekly update in the notification itself, which may not be the best approach, as there just isn’t enough space.

The Bump uses first- and last-name personalization. They are also trying to fit a ton of content into a small area, so the name personalization seems like a waste of valuable space.

WhatToExpect Pregnancy takes a teaser approach and includes a clear call to action. This type of notification is the most likely to drive me into the app to learn more about this particular developmental stage.

Some apps allow you to customize notifications down to personal reminders, like doctor appointments and taking that always-forgettable prenatal vitamin.

A couple of apps used notifications for their own purposes without providing a clear value to me. The Nurture app apparently missed me after I hadn’t used the app for a mere 3 days! There was no way to turn off these retention notifications while still keeping the other notifications that actually provided utility, like my vitamin reminders.

If you’re going to bombard app users with lifecycle messages, be sure to give them control over notifications by offering a well-designed preferences center. Most of the apps I downloaded offered a main “on/off” switch or only the most basic notification types.

Ushering Users Into the Next Phase

After the baby arrives, what can pregnancy apps do to keep me engaged as a new mom?  Some apps are dynamic and will automatically switch to child rearing content. If not, they should consider educating me as I approach the end of my pregnancy lifecycle to check out other recommended apps.

Reaching out and asking if the baby has arrived and sharing a simple congratulatory message at the end of pregnancy will also go a long way to ensure that I recommend the app to friends in the future.

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Stephanie Capretto is part of Urban Airship’s Strategic Services team and while she’ll shortly be out on maternity leave, our other consultants would love to help you better understand shifts in mobile marketing that can impact your initiatives. Contact our strategic services experts today.

 

The post Motherhood & Mobile App Retention: True Personalization Wins appeared first on Airship.

There are so many things about the moviegoing experience that people look forward to — the thrill of seeing a feature film on opening night, dipping into a fresh bag of popcorn, people-watching as you stand in line for a ticket…

Well, maybe not that last one. And if you’ve ever bought a ticket in advance to avoid the lines, remembering to print it out or digging through your email account to find the order confirmation can be another frustrating ordeal. It’s even worse if you cannot find your ticket to print.

Enter mobile movie tickets!

A mobile movie ticket can be delivered to a user’s mobile device in multiple ways. An “add to wallet” call-to-action can be placed on the order confirmation page or email, as an example. With the tap of a button, the moviegoer now has a mobilized version of their ticket on their phone.

For a hassle-free and seamless experience, a user’s wallet movie ticket can be triggered to appear on the lock screen as they arrive at the theater. This type of location-aware pass makes it a snap to use. Go ahead, swipe that pass and skip that line!

“Yes! Loyalty Pays Off!”

The value of the mobile movie ticket doesn’t end there. Let’s say the moviegoer is a member of the theater’s loyalty program and recently qualified for a free popcorn. The pass can be dynamically updated to remind the user to redeem their free popcorn at concessions.

Continue Mobile Engagement Long After the Film

Finally, after the movie ends, the strip image at the top of the mobile ticket can be updated to feature upcoming new releases. As a theater chain, imagine being able to sell that valuable space to studios to promote their upcoming features to millions of mobile ticket pass holders (or targeted groups of them).

In addition to mobile tickets for individual movie purchases, theaters can offer loyalty members the ability to download a mobile version of their loyalty card. The same functionality applies – location awareness, dynamic strip images and 1:1 messaging based on loyalty status.

Interested in exploring Urban Airship Wallet? Check out our Wallet product page, where you can learn how to seize the mobile wallet opportunity and extend your mobile marketing goals, or get started today.

The post Congrats! You’ve Earned Free Popcorn appeared first on Airship.

In the course of strategic consulting and technical implementation work with customers of all sizes, we hear many common threads driven by both market forces and the maturation of mobile within their broader organizations. Following are some of the top observations and trends to help guide your path forward in the months to come.

Web vs. Apps: the pointless debate rages on

Every single customer in the aforementioned panel cited the mobile web is where most of their traffic came from, while apps are for their most loyal customers who spend more and convert at a higher rate. For businesses, the Web is their billboard to the world, awaiting anyone’s search query click, while apps are the front door to their business, offering streamlined, contextual experiences for frequent customers. Investing in the Web or apps is not an either-or question.

While some of the differences between Web and apps will start to fade, as apps become more discoverable through app indexing and deep-linking, and the Web gains better engagement through web notifications, others are more inherent; for example, the greater friction apps face in getting on devices and the greater context and capabilities they can offer once there. Businesses will continue to get more sophisticated in giving customers great reasons to download and keep their apps. Consider Walmart, who grew its app audience from 4 million to 14 million after introducing Savings Catcher to streamline its lowest price guarantees.

Borrowing Mobile Moments

On the same note, not all customers are going to download your app. Forrester Research, Inc. urges companies to borrow mobile moments by going where your customers already are. Social networks like Facebook and Snapchat, messaging apps like WeChat and Line, and newer AI assistants like Siri, Cortana and Google Now, make up a continuum of “borrowing” opportunities that are either in broad use today or may develop into new ones.

Between Facebook’s 1.44B users and visions of natural voice queries eliminating app hopping for simple tasks and transactions, many “borrowing” discussions skip over engagement opportunities present today in mobile wallets native to most smartphones. As mobile giants invest millions to build out payment ecosystems, the top reasons consumers want mobile wallets on their devices is for loyalty points/rewards and coupons/offers with mobile payment credentials coming in last. Check out the data in Forrester Research, Inc.’s Feb. 2015 report “The Future of Mobile Wallets Lies Beyond Payments,” and then gain some inspiration for mobile wallet’s massive and dynamic engagement opportunity.

The Power of Buttons

As the simplest and arguably most powerful user experience spanning both hardware and software design, the humble button is gaining new appreciation. In 2015 we saw Amazon introduce its Dash Button, and initial pondering of whether it was an April Fool’s hoax was quickly replaced with recognition of its simplicity and brilliance for household products we always want in stock. Buttons were further buoyed with Instagram’s “Shop Now,” Pinterest’s “Buyable Pins” and Stripe Relay’s universal sell button. While only 22% of retailers implemented buy buttons in 2015, that number is set to jump to nearly 60% in 2016, according to a study commissioned by Campaigner.

Nothing is easier for users than buttons. They obfuscate complex, behind-the-scenes processes, and beg to be clicked. They also help brands be where their customers are and borrow mobile moments from other apps with streamlined experiences that boost bottom-lines. This same sort of streamlined, borrowed experience is driving greater adoption of app extensions too, where people can access ancillary capabilities of one app without leaving another.

If you think about being where customers are, there’s nowhere more pervasive and ripe for opportunity than the lockscreen of their phone. Interactive notifications offer effortless button taps with powerful controls to respond to messages, set preferences and execute actions within a brand’s app and other apps, such as setting calendar appointments or initiating phone calls.

Personalization Gains New Dimensions

It’s not just effortless experiences that buttons enable, it's the additional insight those interactions provide. For many apps, the insight they are able to gain from quick button taps to the home screen of devices will offer more frequent and definitive opportunities to learn what customers care about most rather than relying on their in-app behaviors alone. Together with automation, button taps and in-app behaviors can kick-off a “choose your own adventure” path to mobile engagement where subsequent messages are responsive to users’ behaviors and expressed affinities.

Personalization can be particularly powerful whether applied to push notifications, in-app messages or rich message center messages. We’ve found that highly targeted push messages drive 293 percent more response on average than messages broadcast to all users, with some industries achieving nearly 7X greater response. We’ll see analytics and optimization playing a greater role in personalization efforts, from determining the right message to send with A/B/n testing, to drilling into recency and frequency metrics for particular products to determine the most likely purchasers.  

From Big Data to the Right Data

Marketing’s cliché mantra of sending the right message to the right person at the right time and place belies the technical complexity and channel-agnostic focus businesses must have to pull this off. Mobile will be the galvanizing force to finally realize this nirvana, since it’s the only screen customers are never without and provides in-the-moment context that nothing else can.

At a user-specific level, app usage is estimated to be 5 to 10 times higher than Web activity, meaning mobile offers the strongest signals of their interests, preferences and intentions. But all of this insight is locked up in existing approaches—predefined reports, aggregate data and batch exports—that lack timeliness, customer-centricity, and instant connections to other business systems.

By being able to zero in on the exact user-level behaviors necessary to drive the best and most targeted actions in any business system, and doing it in real-time to respond within customers’ interaction cycles, the best companies will be able to organize efforts around customers and their growth, not channels.

The post Five Mobile Marketing Trends to Watch appeared first on Airship.

Some considerations when integrating email with mobile messaging:

Active vs. Passive Audiences

While there is likely overlap between your email subscribers and mobile app users, the mobile audience is different. They are the cream of the crop —  your best prospects —  customers that have actively given your brand valuable megabytes on their phone. If they’ve also opted in to receive push notifications, they believe your mobile messaging will provide value and they are actively giving you permission to reach them directly with that information.

Email subscribers are a bit more passive than mobile app users. There’s no commitment to download an app, and the subscriber has the option to use a separate email address that they’ve set aside for marketing lists. In some cases, a user is unknowingly opted in to a list after making a purchase. Many ISPs (i.e. Gmail) automatically filter marketing emails into separate tabs or folders that are checked less frequently, such as spam or Gmail’s “Promotions” tab, making it even harder for brands to get noticed. Recipients can easily tune out emails that don’t provide value.

The Medium is the Message

At their best, push notifications provide true utility and focus on concise, actionable information and location awareness. Mobile messaging goes beyond push notifications, though. With the ability to reach all app users through message centers hosting HTML5 landing pages and in-app notifications, there are other options to reach app users on their own terms. Additionally, mobile wallet passes allow you to reach all mobile users, with or without an app, creating an easy, low barrier way to engage with your brand on their device.

Email tends to be a forum for the brand to communicate important information in a longer form and can often be perceived as “now or later” reading by the user.

Who’s Who?

An email address is often a preferred unique identifier, allowing a brand to tie an email subscriber’s preferences and behavior to a larger database of historical customer information. Mobile app users still have the ability to fly under the radar as an anonymous user, unless your brand requires the user to authenticate in order to access gated content and features.

Now that we have a general understanding of the differences between the two, we can talk about some specific ideas to allow email and mobile messaging to work well together. Customer expectations and preferences are continually evolving, and when it comes to how they prefer to be contacted by their brands, the channel can matter. By setting expectations about what types of communications they’ll receive from you on each medium, you’ll set up your brand for success.

Three Ideas to Integrate Mobile Messaging and Email

Share data across channels to learn about user preferences and behavior

• In order to connect a mobile user with an existing customer database, provide the user with a reason to authenticate in your app, for example, accessing account information or receiving exclusive content and offers. Once you know who the mobile user is, observe their preferences and behaviors, then use that information to drive segmentation across all channels. You may find that one user does not open emails, but instead engages with your brand through your app. There’s an opportunity to focus on mobile messaging for those users and scale back on email deployments, to provide the most utility to both the user and your brand.

Cross promote

• Use one channel to grow another. Send an email to your subscribers telling them about the special value of your app and enabling push notifications to encourage new app downloads.  
• Email subscribers with a link to download a coupon, or their membership card, to their mobile wallet on their phone for a seamless user experience — people always have their phones on them. Physical gift cards or coupons? Not so much.

Use one channel to reinforce the other

• Some brands will send an email first and then reinforce the message with a mobile message. For example, a daily deals provider might send a digest of all available deals via email, but only send a push notification for the one deal that is most relevant to the user. Further target the audience by segmenting only those that did not open the email version.

While mobile messaging and email can complement each other, and should be considered together to create a cohesive customer communication strategy, it’s important to differentiate between the two. To learn more about the differences between mobile messaging and email, check out our blog post “6 Reasons Why Mobile Messaging Is Not Like Email.”

The post Integrating Email with Mobile Messaging appeared first on Airship.