Gummicube has industry-leading enterprise-class ASO technology and expert services. These innovative capabilities are proven to accelerate user growth and lower acquisition costs by increasing app visibility and app installation conversion rates within the global app stores. In fact, nearly every app Gummicube has engaged with has performed 2-3X better compared to the previously “fully optimized” landing pages that were guided by competitive ASO tools. Enterprise customers have validated these impressive results by helping Gummicube nearly double revenue year-over-year and execute on plans to nearly double their 80 ASO-expert headcount this year.

Airship will continue to support and enhance Gummicube’s technologies and services, while empowering joint customers with richer cross-platform data to better inform each step of the mobile app journey, from the experiences new app customers receive, to the insights that drive the next wave of organic audience growth.

Why does this acquisition matter? Gummicube’s data across organic and paid search shows that successfully optimized apps can generate up to 50% of their organic traffic from keywords related to features and functionality of their apps. That means that even for the largest, most well-known brands, failure to optimize apps for non-branded keywords means they’re leaving half of their growth opportunity up for grabs. That represents a huge addressable opportunity for brands of all types to expand their market share and addressable audience across the app stores.

Earnings report after earnings report shows app customers generate more than 3X greater revenue and transaction frequency than other shoppers. A customer preference for apps drives growth of global app downloads every year, but retention rates have barely budged. This “chasm of no return” is the biggest barrier to realizing even greater value from apps across every category.

An ongoing reliance on development resources and cyclical app updates has left many brands treating apps as just another promotional messaging channel. Messaging outside the app experience only goes so far. For better retention, brands need agility to create better mobile app experiences — experiences that foster reciprocal value exchanges so that brands can demonstrate customer respect and relevance, and reward them for their loyalty. Everyone wins. Just ask Chipotle, The Home Depot, American Eagle Outfitters, The Very Group, NBC Sports, Sirius XM, and many more Airship clients.

By linking Gummicube’s ASO technology and expertise with Airship’s App Experience Platform (AXP), which includes customer journey orchestration, no-code native app experience creation and app UX experimentation, customers can realize greater value and optimize the entire mobile app customer lifecycle.

I’m happy to say that all Gummicube employees have joined Airship, with co-founders Dave Bell and Anh Nguyen becoming VPs and co-general managers of the Gummicube business unit at Airship. We’re very excited to welcome the Gummicube team to Airship. The combined expertise of our teams will unlock greater value for every brand’s mobile app by powering better customer experiences from the point of discovery to loyalty.

Please reach out to us any time to learn about the possibilities that this acquisition opens up for your brand – and how we can help you master the full lifecycle of mobile app experience management. The good stuff is in the app.

The post Airship Acquires App Store Optimization Leader Gummicube to Create the Industry’s First Comprehensive Mobile App Experience Management Solution appeared first on Airship.

I’m very excited to share that we’ve added ReplyBuy to the Airship team! 

ReplyBuy makes it easy for customers to instantly message and purchase from brands over SMS, unlocking the revenue potential of one-to-one conversations and personalized text messaging for friction-free transactions at scale.

Adding ReplyBuy means Airship customers can unlock additional power for SMS including:

• Complete transactions and accept payments directly over SMS
• Drive deeper engagement through one-to-one conversations on SMS
• Use auto-replies for responsive experiences and sync conversation histories with CRM solutions

As we integrate ReplyBuy into our Customer Engagement Platform we’ll extend these fast, seamless commerce experiences to more marketing channels, messaging platforms and industries. 

The ReplyBuy team has deep expertise in commerce, SMS, payments, and ticketing, which will help Airship and our customers continue to find new ways to streamline mobile experiences. Bottom line: together, Airship and ReplyBuy will offer brands even more ways to improve digital customer engagement and grow revenue.   

Get in touch anytime to get a personalized demo, learn more about the new possibilities this commerce solution opens up for your brand — and see how ReplyBuy solutions can help you achieve your customer engagement goals. 

If you have any questions or would like to continue the conversation, please feel free to reach out. 

For more information, please see the Airship press release. 

Airship + Replybuy

Want to learn more about this new addition to the Airship team?

Ask us your questions!

The post Airship Acquires ReplyBuy, Bringing Mobile Commerce Capabilities to Our Customers appeared first on Airship.

Professionally we are all responding to a change in commerce as we know it. Some businesses and industries are more impacted by Coronavirus (COVID-19) than others, but no one is operating under “normal” circumstances. 

One constant in this environment is the continued importance of the mobile device as our number one source for information and connection. Life without it was already unimaginable—and today it’s even more so.

Our teams have been speaking with customers around the world over the past couple of weeks, and we’ve heard lots of ideas and creative initiatives as each business works to address their business objectives in the face of a new dynamic. 

We wanted to share what we’ve learned in the hopes that it may help others who are wrestling with similar challenges.

Marketers Haven’t Put the Brakes on Marketing, but They Have Adjusted Their Approach

Certainly, in the current environment as well as in times of economic downturn, the highest priority is to strengthen your connections with your current customers. When commerce begins to return to normal, these connections will be crucial for closing gaps between your goals and performance.  

Consider:

• Continuing to communicate and engage your customers with content that is relatable and relevant 
• Using automation and personalization to be responsive to customers’ in-the-moment needs—especially on mobile
• Motivating customers to opt into additional channels (mobile app, SMS, web notifications) to establish as many direct connections as possible
• Communicating through multiple channels to test and learn where customers are engaging most regularly during the current environment

Avoid:

• Over communicating just for sake of keeping up your brand presence
• Messaging as usual: Re-consider the campaigns you have in market and make sure the content and tone are still appropriate
• Sending any message that could be seen as opportunistic or taking advantage of the crisis

Communications Are Taking Shape in Four Categories

Leading brands are sharing customer messages that fall into the four categories listed below—which also serve as a great rule of thumb for future messaging. If a message does not fit into one of these categories, closely consider whether it should be sent. 

Inform: Sharing the facts about how your business is responding and shifting and how those changes may affect customers.

Reassure: Help customers interact with your brand with confidence by being understanding and responsive to their needs, sharing how important they are to you and detailing the ways your brand will continue to serve them.

Educate: Consumers will need to know how they can do business with you. Let them know how they can engage by educating them on the ways you are adjusting. For example; 

• If you have physical locations, are you sharing basic information about which of your stores are open, and what your hours are, reflecting real-time changes—on all your channels, but especially on your website and in your app? 
• Are you sharing details about new ways to interact, like curbside pickup or online ordering? 
• Are you providing new or adjusted offers (free trial, access to services or information that’s usually behind a paywall, etc.) that customers should know about?

Entertain: Social distancing doesn’t need to mean social disconnection. Find ways to engage your customers that create value and deepen their emotional connection to your brand.  Here are a few ideas for staying engaged with customers using content that entertains—many of these are inspired by what our customers and other leading brands are exploring at this time:

Create forums for your customers to interact: 

• For example, if you’re a clothing retailer, create a contest, social event or hashtag around favorite WFH outfits.
• Socialize your loyalty program. For example, offer loyalty points to customers who are posting photos of themselves wearing your clothes.

Sponsor an online event:

• There are thousands of examples of businesses large and small pivoting to support their customers via online services. Exercise classes, virtual concerts, virtual forums and more. These are all opportunities to support a need for virtual, social engagement— don’t miss out. 
• If you don’t have the resources at the moment to create your own online experience, consider partnering with or sponsoring a brand or influencer who does. For example, a brand could partner with a band or a DJ to host a virtual show —then use SMS, mobile wallet and other channels to share these events with your audience and encourage attendance.

Use gamification to maintain engagement:

• If you have a loyalty currency, use it to incentivize your customers to complete certain activities or accomplish challenges. These activities don’t necessarily have to revolve around transactions; look for innovative ways to keep them engaged. 
• Add a game component to your app
• Partner with complementary brands to create cross-brand games/promotions

Engage customers through interactive activities:

• For brands with a lot of content—like those in the entertainment, sports and travel industries—consider using that content to create activities like surveys, rankings, or other activities that involve their participation through voting and sharing. For example, create activities around: 
  • Ranking top games, sports moments or athletes
  • Voting on favorite movies or actors
  • Surveys on vacation spots

We’ll continue to capture and share these great examples of creativity and innovation with the hopes that it can help others facing these challenges.

If you’d like more information on what we are hearing from other marketers or if you’d like to brainstorm on things that may be more specific to your business, please feel free to contact your account manager or get in touch with us here.  Of course, we are also available to help you execute your ideas, as we know that many of you are operating with smaller staffs and fewer resources than usual. 

The bottom line: we are here to help. Don’t hesitate to reach out.

The post The World Is Changing: How Marketers Are Responding appeared first on Airship.

Today I am thrilled to share that we’ve added Apptimize to the Airship family. We now have the industry’s most advanced solution for testing and optimizing user experiences across mobile apps, websites and OTT. (Read the full press release here.)

Today’s most impactful companies are constantly reinventing customer experience, and a culture of experimentation is a critical part of driving that innovation. 

By combining Apptimize mobile app and web testing with Airship’s deep insight into customer engagement across channels, marketers and developers can focus innovation on the most critical areas while creating the seamless end-to-end experiences customers really want.

Together, Airship and Apptimize will offer even more ways to impact and improve digital customer engagement. Our customers will quickly benefit from:

• Expanded ability to optimize CX with powerful testing and optimization capabilities — as well as feature management — for mobile apps and beyond
• Code-free options for deploying experiments  
• Improved outcomes from embracing a culture of experimentation,  A/B testing everything from mobile onboarding flows to web conversion funnels 
• Controlled rollouts of new features for more consistent, personalized experiences
• And, of course, more.   

Growth in today’s market continues to depend on a brand’s ability to create outstanding, engaging and effective customer experiences — especially on mobile. By adding the Apptimize team we’re better positioned than ever to support this business-critical capability.  

Get in touch anytime to learn more about the new possibilities this acquisition opens up for your brand — and how we can help you achieve your customer engagement goals.

The post Apptimize Acquisition Gives Airship Customer Engagement Platform Even More Depth & Power appeared first on Airship.

The look is new, but Airship is built upon a decade of partnerships with visionary marketing leaders. As new digital channels and devices have emerged, we’ve provided the technology and expertise to mold these channels into innovative customer experiences. Today, this knowledge gained from across industries and around the globe has enabled us to deliver the state of the art in digital customer engagement for the enterprise.

The Customer (Experience) Is King

The customer experience (CX) revolution has pushed customer engagement into the heart of brands everywhere. According to PWC, 65% of U.S. customers find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising. At the same time, over three-quarters of consumers research products or categories digitally — and even more use their smartphones while shopping in stores.

In short, brand has become CX, and CX has become digital. Today’s most innovative digital customer engagement is the fuel that fires industry disruptors and the world’s leading brands.

As a customer, digital CX often reveals itself in brand-defining moments. Did you know about the flight delay before you checked out of the hotel? Did you get that special offer before you left the store? Do you know how your application or claim is proceeding?   

It’s Moments That Matter

Airship ensures you are there at these critical moments. We have consolidated the digital channels you need to reach your customers anywhere, and are built to incorporate new channels as they arise. We have the data and orchestration capabilities to reach customers on time and in context. And we have analytics and machine learning to determine the most effective (and welcomed) channel for every interaction. We were literally built for this.

So, take a look and let us know what you think. As technology and consumer behavior continue to evolve rapidly, there’s a lot more innovating to do. We’d love to have you along for the ride.  

Learn more about the amazing digital transformations Airship has enabled for our customers in our new brand announcement press release.

Get a personalized demo of the Airship Customer Engagement Platform and see how we can help you get closer to your customers.

The post One Airship, Many New Horizons appeared first on Airship.

Urban Airship and Accengage are now the world’s largest mobile customer engagement company, with rapidly growing notification, orchestration and data solutions for apps, websites, SMS, email, mobile wallets and other channels.

Our customers have unprecedented access to expertise and technology to power innovative digital customer engagement—now the primary venue for defining and building brand relationships. We can enable programs that span more channels, with more intelligence and at greater speed and scale than any other vendor can provide.

Our customers will quickly benefit from:

Additional engagement channels & expanded product expertise: As we mesh with Accengage, we will significantly expand our product and technology expertise, allowing us to rapidly add capabilities like new segmentation techniques, additional marketing cloud integrations, personal message volume limits, as well as Facebook Messenger and other OTT channels. And that’s just for starters.

Accelerated innovation: We are dedicated to maintaining high quality while increasing the speed of innovation. The exponential growth in our engineering and support teams world-wide will fuel that acceleration in every area of our solution.

Europe’s most comprehensive customer support: More than ever, we are able to invest in the success of our customers worldwide. We now have three times more employees located in Europe than we did yesterday, providing access to more local development, support and customer success professionals. We can now provide more expert resources for digital customer engagement than has ever existed in Europe – and have more local support than all other vendors combined.

We’ll offer even more support resources from our regional hubs in the UK, France and Germany, increasing local language support. And, of course, all of our solutions across Urban Airship and Accengage are now and will remain fully compliant with all GDPR regulations.

Extended support for the Accengage platform: Urban Airship will continue to enhance and fully support the Accengage platform as we bring the best of both solutions to a single combined platform — offering seamless access for Accengage customers to use new channels, data solutions, advanced analytics and AI solutions to determine most effective messaging strategies. All on the world’s fastest, most flexible and scalable messaging platform.

More than ever, business growth is dependent on rich, responsive customer experiences — and no company creates unique experiences for more brands than Urban Airship. By adding the amazing team from Accengage, we can now grow customer value for more businesses around the world while setting new standards for innovation and local support.

Get in touch anytime to learn more about the new possibilities this acquisition opens up for your brand —  and how we can help you achieve your customer engagement goals.

The post Urban Airship Acquires Accengage, Creating Unprecedented Opportunity for Brands to Engage With Customers Worldwide appeared first on Airship.

The first is $25M in Series F Funding, all of which came from current investors who are incredibly excited about what we’re bringing to the market. We’ll be using these funds to fuel growth and continued product innovations that will make our Digital Growth Platform even more powerful for you and your customers. (Learn more about the funding in our press release here.)

The second is that we have now delivered more than two trillion messages — doubling our total historical message volume in just a year.

And, ICYMI, we’ve been busy with just a few things in the past year or so…

• Launched our Digital Growth Platform, the industry’s only open orchestration platform that easily integrates any channel and connects any existing database or analytic tool

• Added native support for email, bringing a new level of customer responsiveness with real-time behavioral triggers 

• Added native SMS to provide even more options for businesses to connect with their customers

• Worked with Google Pay to create ticketing and boarding pass experiences that reset customer expectations for travel, hospitality and entertainment businesses

• Released AI-based predictive tools to optimize cross-channel engagement and message timing while adding a new real-time dimension to predictive lifecycle marketing analytics

• Launched a beta program for Alexa voice notifications

• Introduced in-app automation technology to directly embed automation and rich messages into mobile apps to instantly reach customers based on multiple in-the-moment behaviors

• Added to its growing presence in Portland, San Francisco, New York and London with an office in New Delhi

• Launched our multi-city Digital Engagement Forum roadshow series, Elevate, for 2018

We’re setting a new standard for the kinds of experiences and relationships brands can build with their customers. And we’re giving marketers more visibility, capability and flexibility than they've ever had before to deliver value. We’re excited, and we hope you are too!

Get in touch anytime to learn more about how we can help you achieve your customer engagement goals, set up a strategy session to create a roadmap for great customer engagement or to see a demo. We’re here to help and would love to connect!

The post Taking Urban Airship to an Even Higher Altitude appeared first on Airship.

Ten years ago, Apple released the first iPhone. This set into motion a cycle of innovation and transformation that has touched nearly every business in the world in some way or another. The size and scope of the opportunities the mobile revolution has created for businesses is hard to overstate. Perhaps the greatest impact of all is the way mobile has created — and continues to create — new opportunities for businesses to connect with their customers.

Today, mobile is quickly becoming the remote control for our lives. For businesses, it’s the hub of interactions across digital channels and physical locations, and it paves the way for more and better customer experiences in both the real and virtual worlds. According to Mary Meeker’s latest Internet Trends Report, smartphones are now in the hands of 3.4 billion people across the globe and engagement is on the rise, with users spending three hours per day on mobile — a 4% increase over last year.

There’s great opportunity in the midst of this change, and brands that stay focused on the big picture stand to gain the most. To get there, companies should take the time to level-set their efforts with three strategic exercises:

Reexamine your goals and strategy.

As the world becomes increasingly digital and connected, the number of potential touch points companies have with their customers is expanding — fast. To thrive in this new landscape, brands must understand that “mobile” no longer means “smartphone apps.” Today, opportunities for mobile connection are everywhere: BI Intelligence predicts that 75% of all shipped cars will be connected by 2020, and IHS Markit predicts that 130 million smart home devices will be shipped worldwide in 2017.

With more and more options for mobile interactions, businesses all too often get their digital strategy wrong — or don’t reassess it often enough.

At the highest level, digital initiatives should revolve around a clear plan about what to build and why. Do not just copy competitors or blindly follow the hype cycle. Instead, ask yourself these questions:

• What are we aiming to accomplish?

• Have we mapped out our customers’ digital journey?

• Will our mobile offering solve a real problem for our customers and deliver a unique, mobile experience?

• Do we need specific mobile device capabilities — e.g., camera, contacts, sensor data or geolocation — to deliver or improve the experience?

• What cross-channel customer behaviors can mobile help impact and influence?

Make sure to use the right metrics when measuring success and identifying areas for growth.

Remember: the promise of mobile is to make people’s lives easier, not to occupy their attention. Research shows that mobile has reduced attention spans and increased multi-tasking. With this in mind, brands should place less emphasis on downloads and time spent in their app, and instead focus on engagement, usefulness, and customer satisfaction. In other words, shift the focus from reach and frequency to the moments that matter most to your customers and your business. Repeat usage or transactions completed may be more meaningful metrics than time spent for a productivity app like Dropbox or a travel app like Alaska Airlines.

Think about Airbnb. While you might not spend a lot of time every day in the Airbnb app, it’s transforming the hotel and hospitality industry as we know it because of how useful it is. Brands also need to stop thinking about mobile as a siloed part of the business. Mobile isn’t a simple extension of desktop-based engagement models; it cuts across the entire business. This means the metrics used to assess mobile strategies should expand beyond the mobile interactions themselves. Look for evidence of mobile impacting web or in-store sales — that is a metric that counts.

And don’t underestimate mobile messaging.

Apps and mobile-optimized websites are tried-and-true ways brands connect with users on mobile, but they are no longer the only options — nor do they help proactively serve customers in their moment of need. That’s where mobile messaging comes in. For example, consider “lock-screen” messaging delivered through mobile web, mobile apps, and wallet passes that offer deals and content based on a customer’s location. Studies have shown that consumers want notifications (which are always opt-in), and that, in fact, greater notification frequency leads to greater mobile app retention rates.

According to Forrester, up to 75% of the interactions consumers have with mobile phones are micro-moments — a mobile moment that delivers information through only a glance to let the consumer either process or act on it immediately. Furthermore, Mary Meeker went on to note that “Messaging apps, with context and time, have a chance to rival the home screen as the go-to place for interaction.”

This underscores the importance of including mobile messaging in your strategy and designing interactions that take advantage of micro-moments. Interactive notifications with action buttons give users an effortless way to respond, while brands can collect rich insights for future segmentation and targeting, as well as use them to trigger follow-up messaging.

On average, we’ve seen notification opt-in rates and notification engagement rates improve every year for the past three years. What’s more, in the past three months alone, we’ve seen more notifications sent than we did in our first seven years of business combined.

Ultimately, mobile offers brands the chance to connect the dots between a variety of entry points, customer experiences, data sources, and interfaces. This opportunity is only expanding as those interactions proliferate beyond our phone screens. To take full advantage, companies must regularly assess their mobile strategies, align measurements with business goals, and focus on serving customers needs in micro-moments. For those that succeed, the future of mobile is wide open.

This article was originally published in the Harvard Business Review.

The post Your Mobile Strategy Can’t Just Be About Phones appeared first on Airship.

There hasn’t been a major world event in the last several years that wasn’t first published as a notification. We’ve been there for all of it, from “balloon boy” to Brexit. Hundreds of millions of people instantly in-the-know — from the tantalizing to the tragic — and this stream is increasingly curated by them and by all types of apps tuning into their signals across digital and physical channels.

What started as humble gameplay mechanics and “needy” app reminders, is now the key to a range of experiences — from livestreaming to augmented reality — that would flounder without notifications. Notifications are a central experience for smartwatches, and often the only always-active user interface for IoT devices. Notifications will prove to be a key enabler for chatbots and intelligent personal assistants — which must also transcend the web’s model of being at people’s beck and call, to proactively and predictively serve them.

Urban Airship powered the very first notification from a third-party app for Tap Tap Revenge on June 17, 2009.

The Path to One Trillion Notifications

Today, we’re particularly proud to have delivered our one trillionth push notification for customers. Growth toward this milestone has accelerated dramatically in the past few years. It took Urban Airship seven years to hit 500 billion notifications. Now, in less than a year, we’ve doubled that. Quarter-over-quarter growth is staggering. For example, on Election Day (Nov. 8, 2016) we set a new daily record delivering 2.5B notifications. Now we hit or surpass that daily volume often.

A trillion is one of those numbers that is immediately recognized as huge, but it’s so enormous that it lives in the abstract, lacking a tangible reference point to understand its scale. Here are a few interesting ways to wrap your head around it:

• One trillion seconds ago is 31,688 years ago

• One millimeter (mm) is tiny, one billion mm is the distance between San Francisco and Salt Lake City, one trillion mm stretches around the world 25 times

• One trillion bricks could build the Great Wall of China 258 times

• It’ll take the 26,000 trees in Central Park 769 years to produce a trillion leaves

We didn’t even count everything we send, only notifications sent to app users’ lockscreens — the most valuable marketing and engagement real estate on the planet. We also send in-app notifications, message center messages and notifications to Apple News, website visitors, mobile wallet passholders and other digital marketing channels like email and SMS.

Forrester recently acknowledged our massive scale saying, “… Urban Airship sends more push notifications per month than about 10 of the smaller vendors combined” (Forrester Research Inc., “How To Choose A Mobile Messaging Vendor,” April 10, 2017). Note: copies of this report are available for a limited time.

Notifications Can Make or Break Engagement with Customers

One trillion push notifications lit up a lot of device screens, many with audible cues or vibrations to solicit immediate attention. Unlike other channels like email, where a recent global benchmark report found the key to improving email engagement is sending fewer emails, a greater volume of notifications done right can have a positive effect on user engagement and retention.

• In 2014, we supported the official app for a major, month-long sporting event, sending 1.9 billion notifications—all of which were targeted to fans’ favorite teams.

• In 2016, a fourth annual study of retail apps during the holidays found notification volume increased for the third year in a row, as did average notification opt-in rates and average notification engagement rates.

• In 2017, a study on app user retention rates found that new users who received frequent, in-the-moment notifications were retained at rates 3-10X higher than those who didn’t.

Why Notifications Are the Future

At the highest level, there are three great things about notifications and why they’ll have an even more dominant role in the future:

1. User-Controlled: They are the ultimate opt in and, with a longpress and a tap, needy apps can be jettisoned; or, with a little more effort, notification privileges revoked.

2. Personalized: They can be highly contextual, curated by you and your data, to only serve up what you need, when and where need it. This will only get more magical as companies shed channel-centric mindsets and emphasize customer service and utility over broad promotions.

3. In-the-Moment: Notifications can be consumed in a glance, acted on in a tap or otherwise ignored, providing a lightweight yet powerful form of communication.

Preparing for Even Greater Heights

Advancements in mobile are bringing richer and individualized experiences to the notification paradigm. Notifications can now include rich media (video, photos, GIFs, audio) and interactive buttons to share, read later or react, offering deeper engagement and actionable data from the lockscreen. Rich notifications can also serve up live status updates from apps to provide real-time utility within the message. This, along with app actions exposed as notification buttons and apps connecting to each other through extensions, are key developments in re-imagining the value they can provide, whether opened or not.

With all this content and an increasing need to communicate with hundreds of millions of consumers daily on a one-to-one basis, businesses require highly scalable and reliable platform services. This need will only grow as more apps implement push notifications and adopt new rich, interactive styles (get the latest adoption data in Forrester Research’s April 2017 report, “The State of Mobile Marketing Tactics”). Note: copies of this report are available for a limited time.

Even more than that, 10 years of app user experience is now bleeding to web browsers and checkout lines, your messaging apps and inside your cars and homes. Notifications are coming to meet you wherever you are, and help businesses broaden their direct reach to customers. The list is long, but some of the initial ones we’re helping to address include Apple Pay and Android Pay, Apple News and Apple TV, as well as Android Things and chat messaging services. Our open approach to data and integration means we’ll be able to address new experiences and platforms as they emerge.

We’re proud of today’s milestone, however, our goal is to enable a future where companies meet consumers wherever they are to serve them on their terms and in anticipatory ways. As notifications take hold of the future of digital messaging, these scenarios demand real-time engagement models to not just be relevant and immediately useful, but to help make people’s lives easier, add value, be more human and even be a bit magical.

We’re looking forward to the next trillion notifications as we help businesses reach the right customer at the right moment with the right message, wherever that may be.

We’ve been there since the beginning, and we’re thrilled to be building the future of notifications with brands of all sizes all over the world. Schedule a personalized demo today and see how we can help you connect with your customers in real time with personalized notifications at every step in their journey — across all channels and devices. 

The post Urban Airship Rockets Past One Trillion Notifications Delivered appeared first on Airship.

1. Reap Before You Sow with Key Improvements

iOS 10 solves existing barriers that will make current mobile engagement efforts more effective:

• A “Raise to Wake” feature means TouchID users won’t blow past lockscreen notifications when unlocking their phones.
• Notifications are immediately visible as users pick up their phones.
• Notifications also become the default view for the Notification Center — a chronologically ordered archive that makes messages easier to find later.  

2. If a Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words, Then a GIF or Video Could Be Worth Even More

Grab your audience’s attention with notifications that inspire action. Rich notifications can include images, GIFs, audio, and video and interactive buttons embedded directly within push notifications. Our recent Android rich notifications data analysis found a 56% higher response rate to notifications with pictures versus those without.

3. Better Visibility for Richer, Actionable Notification Experiences

With iOS 10, users get visual and written cues that there’s a richer notification experience awaiting them. Lockscreen notifications arrive with rich media thumbnails and either “press for more” or “slide for more” depending on whether Force Touch is available on the device.

That’s stark contrast to prior Apple operating systems, which had businesses building these instructions into notification text to help ensure users swiped left to discover interactive buttons.

4. Mind Your Media, or Risk Ruin with Too Much of a Good Thing

Apple provides maximum file sizes for images, audio and video, but marketers would be well served to undercut those sizes dramatically. Rich media will impact consumers’ data plans, ranging from barely noticeable with judicious use of images, to potential reasons to delete an app for sending files that are too large or too frequent.

All files sent as rich notifications get downloaded in the background whether the user opens the detail view or not, and will add to the amount of data consumed by your app. These files will impact your bandwidth costs too. Think about opt-in campaigns where users can get a taste and choose to receive larger, more immersive and data-heavy experiences.

5. Don’t Be Blunt or a Blockhead with Rich Notifications

With brands running to emojis for a quick if quirky engagement hit, it would be easy but wrong to approach rich notifications in the same manner. When rich media is tailored to specific users’ interests, it adds immersive depth not interpretive color to messaging campaigns.

Also, remember, not all users will immediately upgrade to iOS 10. Messaging should be made to work without reference to embedded rich media — or sent specifically to the segment of your users that have adopted iOS 10. Some solutions (like Urban Airship’s) will allow you to provide alternative text if the rich media successfully downloads.

Get ready for rich notifications – iOS10 will be released on 9/13!

• Download our Rich Notifications Inspiration Guide to get ideas and examples for using this new functionality.
• If you’re already an Urban Airship Engage customer, the SDK update you’ll need to get started is here.
• If you’re not yet a customer, download the free version of Engage and try it out today!

This article was originally published in Mobile Marketing Magazine.

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