Over the course of two days, many opinions were shared, but three themes stood out.

Driving customer loyalty is more important than ever
eMarketer reports that loyal app users generate 3.5x more revenue and are 3x more likely to make a repeat purchase. This statistic seems to be particularly relevant to the travel industry as the importance of driving customer long-term value through loyalty was addressed consistently across both days of the event. 

Travel companies have typically been focused on new customer acquisition, but the costs are high and, in unprecedented situations such as the global pandemic we’ve just been through, it was thanks to loyal customers that many brands were able to survive the difficult period. Benjamin Foster, Senior Marketing Manager, Central London Cluster, Marriott Hotels, referred to their core ‘tribe’ of loyal customers who truly appreciate and love Marriott brands, continued to engage throughout the pandemic and booked first when the travel ban lifted. 

According to Foster, Marriott Hotels focuses their initial marketing spend on this small group of people, which they rely on as the source of truth for all their marketing communications. Once the marketing is right for the tribe, Marriott believes the masses will follow. Phil Salcedo, Head of Market, UK & North America at HolidayPirates Group referred to the importance of being patient when it comes to driving loyalty. He believes that social media can be a key driver for loyal guests but only when the brand is willing to post consistently with truly relevant and useful content. Salcedo believes that brands who are using social media as a way to monetize their posts, or who still communicate only about the positives of a travel destination, are missing a trick. 

Social media platforms are accessed by savvy customers that can distinguish between being marketed to and being addressed authentically. HolidayPirates social strategy to drive loyalty provides content about travel destinations that addresses both positive and less positive features, so people can make informed travel decisions. This human and truthful approach supports the brand to drive more loyal customers. 

For David Ruiz Martinez, VP of Design & Customer Experience, SNCF Connect & Tech, customer loyalty is achieved through better customer experience. The French train operator recently improved its customer experience by integrating two of their apps into one so customers can find the best route for their journey and also buy tickets. Backed by significant research and a design-led approach, this change in the app promotes autonomy for the passenger and helps deliver a consistent and continuous experience to drive more loyal customers. 

Mobile apps are key to meeting the needs of future customers
Mobile apps offer travel brands a highly visible way to communicate with the customer far beyond the day of travel. According to industry thought leader, Lucia Rubio Zornoza, mobile apps are key to enabling travel brands to meet the needs of the future customer. Not only can mobile apps simplify the travel process before the journey with useful information and reminders, and during the journey with access to in-app check-in or even as a room key, but also post-journey for rewards, travel inspiration and to solicit feedback. 

Brands can encourage customers to download their mobile app by making it compulsory, or by making it a convenient travel companion for storing their loyalty cards or tickets. However, to achieve long-term success, brands need to be better at activating new app users as soon as they download the app. That includes showing them the benefits and usefulness of the app as part of onboarding communications and within initial app experiences, as well as having a plan in place to continuously engage them throughout the lifecycle. 

Engaging with customers beyond the time of travel is a top challenge
During the panel discussion between Wizzair, easyjet holidays, CheckMyBus and Airship, the audience was surveyed on their challenges when it comes to digital platforms and apps, and 52% of the audience said that keeping customers engaged beyond the day of travel is their top challenge. 

It’s to reward the mobile app customer with appealing experiences throughout the entire customer lifecycle. For example, if the mobile app can make the travel experience significantly better by offering key information or simplifying and speeding processes, it will encourage the customer to want to use this brand again – versus a competitor’s that doesn’t offer such a smooth experience.

SNCF Connect, along with parent company SNCF, is doing just that, by rewarding mobile customers with both SNCF-specific as well as general travel information, incentivizing customers to make wide use of the app while keeping the SNCF brand in mind. 

Driving good customer engagement also requires communicating content that is relevant to the specific customer – the audience of one. This can be done by ensuring collection of first-and zero-party data from customers whenever possible. Karisma Hotels has been doing that well by leveraging surveys and gamification through affinity-based quizzes at different stages of the customer lifecycle and then leveraging the data collected to send customers communications they are likely to find useful. According to Karisma Hotels Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Elizabeth Fettes, they don’t want to push upsells to guests who wouldn’t be interested. To avoid being pushy, they run a room match quiz through the app in which they ask guests to identify what is important to them in a room. Based on results, the guest may receive the option to upgrade the room should the results indicate that they would prefer one. 

By leveraging a mix of interactive quizzes, app messaging and other communications that include useful information or inspiration for things to do, travel brands can make the mobile app customer experience far more enjoyable and useful than just the day of travel. 

Conclusion
If we were to take just one conclusion from this two day event, it is the following: only when brands engage customers digitally with the same level of care as they do in person will they start to convert new guests into long-term customers that truly love the brand.

The post Top 3 Travel Themes that Brands Must Address to Meet the Needs of the Future Customer appeared first on Airship.

In Part I, David discussed the origins of mobile marketing and how it has changed over the last few years. In Part II, he cited brands that have been most successful recently delivering MAX and identified areas of MAX in which brands are lagging. In Part III, David described his personal experience – and exchange of value – with several apps. In Part IV, he summarizes the opportunities available through data, personalization and mobile app experience

Steve: Do you see any particular trends in the market that might be seen as a challenge to brands that are trying to deliver better MAX?

David: I can only speculate, but I would mention a couple of things:

First, does the brand really want to deliver a differentiated experience for each of its users? Is there a willingness to get your hands dirty and make it happen? This stuff isn’t necessarily easy. Yes, there are companies like Airship that can do a lot of the heavy lifting. But it’s like anything in life. Your friends can tell you to exercise more or drink less, but it doesn’t happen until you decide for yourself you want to change. The momentum to deliver a personalized experience has to start with the brand.

Second, however keen the brand might be, do they have the tools and the ingredients they need to cook up this personalization recipe? Tools can be brought in. But when it comes to the ingredients, it’s largely about data. Can you convince your app users to share their personal data with you? Can you be open and transparent in leveling with your users and telling them what personal data you want to collect, and why, and what’s in it for them? 

And then, are there other ways of getting that data? A company that does a lot of events with us has a gamification platform that enables brands to create gamified experiences for consumers that they can enjoy, in return for sharing their name and email, all in a proper, opted-in, consent-seeking basis. There are lots of ways that brands can try to get more first-party data, such as in-app surveys, on-pack promotions and competitions, but again, the willingness to do the hard work has to be there.

Steve: Since brands started working towards delivering better mobile app experiences to customers, what have you seen emerging in the industry as key benefits for those brands?

David: If I may, I’ll quote a couple of things that your own Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Tom Butta, told me when I interviewed him a few weeks ago. Your own figures show that on average, app users produce 3.5x more revenue than non-app users and are 3x more likely to make a repeat purchase than non-app users. So, if you’re looking for benefits, those are two that go straight to the bottom line.

More generally, we’ve all seen enough stats to know that people spend a lot of time each day on mobile, and I think the last figure I saw was that about 80-85 percent of that is spent in apps. We all know this, because we are all, apart from working in this great industry, consumers first and foremost.

There’s a massive opportunity here, because whatever you think the mobile demographic might be, the truth is, it’s just about everyone. When COVID hit, we all became more mobile and more digital overnight, finding new ways to communicate and buy things without going near a shop or a pub or a café, because we weren’t allowed to.

When things started opening up again, you could go to a pub for a meal and a drink, but you couldn’t go to the bar and order it. You had to scan this thing called a QR Code, and then you could order via the pub’s app or website, and then you probably had to load a credit card onto your phone to pay for it. A lot of people – technophobes, older people – were forced to learn new ways of doing things, often involving an app, that they are never going to forget.

Steve: For the brands in the room that may still be treating their mobile app as a promotional channel, how would you recommend they start working towards delivering mobile app experiences that matter to their customers? And who in their companies should be involved in that process?

David: In terms of who, I think it clearly starts at the top. Otherwise, how does the Customer Engagement Manager or the Data Strategist get the buy-in and the budget to spend with a company like Airship to make those wonderful customer experiences a reality?

They could look at churn rates. I saw some figures recently suggesting that half of all apps are uninstalled within the first month of being installed. Think about that for a moment.

The average app’s retention rate is around 20% after the first 24 hours, 7.5% after 10 days and less than 2% after 90 days. You have to ask yourself why this is. To me, it seems obvious that it’s about the app’s approach to engagement. Are you taking things carefully, one step at a time, or do you ask for every permission the app might ever need the first time someone opens it up so you can start selling them stuff? Apart from the in-store experience of a customer engaging with an employee to ask where they can find olive oil or tomato soup, an app is one of the most direct relationships a brand can ever hope to have with a consumer, so to abuse that privileged position and just treat it as a sales tool is not a good idea.

I would also say, start thinking about how you can use every interaction with a customer on the app, and ideally in other channels, to build on the next one. Last week, a customer bought a tennis racket from your website or one of your physical stores. Can you feed that into your next comms with them in the app to surface tennis shoes or balls or whatever it might be? And if you can’t, can you start to investigate why you can’t and what you would need to do and how much you would need to spend to be able to. If you did that, can you forecast with a reasonable degree of accuracy the impact it would have on revenues so that, yes, that project will cost $1M, but we believe it will deliver $10M of incremental revenues. Then the boss might just take the whole thing a bit more seriously.

The post Evolution of Mobile and the MAX Imperative: Seizing Opportunity – Part IV of a multi-part blog series appeared first on Airship.

In Part I, David discussed the origins of mobile marketing and how mobile has changed over the last few years. In Part II, he outlined MAX success factors. In Part III, he describes his personal experience – and exchange of value – with several apps.

Steve: If you could choose one company that is doing it really well, from how their app is rated and can be easily found, to a good onboarding experience and personal engagement, to providing the customers with continuous reasons to stay loyal to their brand and using their app, which one would you choose and why?

David: In terms of getting the app discovered and the good onboarding experience, it’s difficult because the apps that I use regularly have mostly been on my phone for quite a few years now and I don’t tend to go looking for an app to do something without knowing the app I want. That said, I know that if for some random reason tomorrow I were out and about and needed to check whether something would fit in a space in my house and I didn’t have a tape measure, I’d go straight to the App Store searching for a tape measure app. The first apps I would see when I searched for “tape measure” would be those that have taken the time and care over the screenshots, the app’s description, and the ratings they have encouraged people to give over the years. App Store Optimization is a massive thing and it’s something I imagine a lot of brands don’t take as seriously as they should, based on conversations I’ve had with companies that help brands with this.

In terms of a personal favorite, I’ll give you two. One is The Trainline. Not the most exciting thing in the world, but when I need to be somewhere – happily, we all do again – it has transformed journeys that I make often, such as from my home to Waterloo or Victoria Stations. If I’m a long way from home and I open up the app, it knows where I am and will suggest the closest station as my starting point. If you have a Railcard, once you have the train you want, you can buy your ticket through the app and get the ticket delivered to your phone. In other words, you can go from possibly having no clue how to get from A to B in time for a meeting at noon tomorrow to having the ticket with a few clicks.

The other app that does things really well for me is Duolingo. I’m sure I’m not the only person in the room who can tell you that my horse drinks water in Spanish as a result of using this app. I started on it when I was on holiday in Costa Rica a few years ago taking three- or four-hour trips on poor roads with wi-fi on the bus. Initially, I had the free ad-funded version, which they seemed to make just irritating enough so if you’re serious about learning Spanish, paying 8 quid a month seemed like a no-brainer. The ads themselves are a bit annoying, to be honest. Apologies to the brands in the room, but they do interrupt the process of trying to learn the language. And when you’ve made a certain number of mistakes, you’re locked out of the app for 12 hours or so.

I started paying a couple of years ago, and maybe because I’m paying for it, I haven’t missed a day since. I’m on something like a 750-day streak, and one of the reasons for this is that the app itself is great fun to use. It’s broken down into genuinely useful real-life topics like Opinions, Online, In town, In love, Travel, Work, Shopping and Requests.

Also, the whole thing is gamified. I’m currently in the Emerald League, which is about the third highest out of 10, I think, with 30 other people. Which suggests that there are 300 people in the world on Duolingo right now. Actually, the app has around 40 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs), so there are thousands of Emerald Leagues and other Leagues, but it doesn’t matter. When you see you’re about to be demoted because other people have been logging on more than you, you take the time to do a few lessons.

The post Evolution of Mobile and the MAX Imperative: Exchange of Value – Part III of a Multi-part Blog Series appeared first on Airship.

In Part I, David discussed the origins of mobile marketing and how mobile has changed over the last few years.  In Part II, he outlines MAX success factors.

Steve: As we celebrate the end of the MAX Month, let’s start by getting your opinion around what brands have been most successful at in terms of delivering good mobile app experience to customers over the last couple of years?

David: Brands that have been most successful in mobile have put the customer in control and engage with them on their own terms. To give you an example, I’ll start with what I have personally seen a lot of in terms of bad practice: I’ve just downloaded an app, I open it for the first time, and the first thing I see is permission requests. The xxx app would like to know my location, would like to send me notifications and would like to know my inside leg measurement.

I haven’t engaged with the app yet and it’s seeking all these permissions. Why don’t you give us a chance to get to know each other a little bit first? And why don’t you tell me why you want these permissions? For example, I share my location, you tell me if I’m near a store that’s having a sale. I allow you to send me notifications, you tell me when that product I tried to order recently is back in stock. It’s not rocket science, it’s just a value exchange.

Today, there’s a lot of discussion around privacy and personal data. People are much more aware of the value of that data. In many cases, brands are doing the bare minimum to comply with Apple’s App Tracking Transparency rules in terms of asking for permission to track consumers as they move around websites and apps. 

I like it when brands are a bit more upfront about all the tracking and again, give the consumer real control. There’s an online fashion platform that’s a good example of this. When you open it up, you see a screen saying something like: Want a tailored experience? We need your consent. Below that, there’s a blurb saying how it collects user data and why, which is “to keep our apps reliable and secure, to measure their performance and to deliver a personalized shopping experience.”

It then explains that if you click the “That’s OK” button below, you are giving your consent, but you can say no to this. There’s another button labeled “Set Preferences.” When you click on that, it lists every instance in which the app wants to collect data under five headings:

• App Performance and Analytics
• Messaging
• Personalization
• Functional and
• Essential

You can switch data collection and tracking on or off for each of these sections. What’s really interesting is if you click on “Set Preferences” within any of these five areas, you get a detailed breakdown of what data is collected, for what reason, the legal basis for collecting that data, where the data is physically processed, how long it’s retained and a link to the privacy policy of the company that actually collects it. If I counted them correctly, across those five areas there are 50 data collection instances, and the app user can switch every one of them on or off individually. Not everyone is going to want to customize the app to that degree, of course, but that to me is what really having respect for your customers’ data looks like.

Steve: And which areas do you feel brands are mostly lagging behind to be able to deliver better mobile app experiences for their customers?

David: I guess in all the areas I just talked about, where that fashion platform  is doing so well, most companies are not at that stage and are just doing the bare minimum.

On a more day-to-day level, what I mentioned earlier about the onboarding process – seeking the user’s permission at the right moment and in the right way: don’t be in such a mad rush to take the relationship to the next level when you haven’t even had the first date yet.

Another key point is the one-size-fits-all approach. If you take any eCommerce app, the range of users is going to be immense: from those people who downloaded the app, used it once to browse and never opened it since, to a whale (to use a gambling term), who is a loyal customer and has spent thousands on the app over the years. The question is, do those people see the same stuff in the app every day? Do they get the same offers? Is there any intelligence to say, based on what they have bought from us, this person is into golf, whereas this individual is into football, so can we personalize the experience? I personally don’t see a lot of that in the apps I use frequently.

The post Evolution of Mobile and the MAX Imperative: Success Factors – Part II of a Multi-part Blog Series appeared first on Airship.

David Murphy, Editorial Director & Co-founder at Mobile Marketing Magazine and co-founder of Masterclassing, spoke with Airship’s VP and GM of Customer Services, EMEA, Steve Tan at the Closing Celebration of Airship’s MAX Month in London on June 29, 2022.

Introduction

Steve Tan: Companies have long had websites and there have been many iterations of mobile apps. But only a few companies have focused on seamless customer experiences that realize the full business potential of apps. As digitalization has accelerated over the last couple of years, mobile apps have transformed from being just another promotional channel to playing the central role in relationships between brands and consumers. Apps have become the digital center of customer experience, which drives the imperative for brands to deliver better mobile app experiences.

David Murphy, an expert in the field of mobile, has seen firsthand the market changes and evolutions in mobile over the recent years, and will be able to talk us through that evolution and his expectations for the future. 

David, thank you for joining us today. Let’s get started with some questions about the past.

Steve: Where did Mobile Marketing Magazine come from?

David: Rewinding to 2001-2002, I was freelancing for marketing press and writing about online marketing, which I had followed since the birth of eCommerce in 1995. Amazon had launched the year before. I started getting commissions to write about mobile with the imminent arrival of the PECR legislation, and what impact this would have on the mobile marketing space, which was in its infancy. 

There were only three or four mobile marketing companies to speak of in those days – Flytxt, Sponge, 12snap, Incentivated, Aerodeon – and they all told me the same thing: that there would be no impact from PECR because everything they did was opt-in. The consumer was in control. This was in the days before ads on mobile were a thing. It struck me that if brands could get this right, mobile could be a very powerful channel, the sort that 1:1 engagement brands had always dreamed of. 

I looked into launching a title then, but there were no real blogging platforms available, only printed magazines. And then WAP came along to provide the first versions of mobile web. They weren’t very good, and brands that had dipped their toe in the water were disappointed by the experience.

A few years later, in 2005, as handsets were getting better and the networks were getting better, brands came back into it, mobile advertising became a thing with AdMob, and I launched our site as a Typepad. To my amazement, 17 years later, we’re still here.

Steve: How has mobile changed over the last few years?

David: It’s changed beyond all recognition. The early days of mobile were all about text messaging, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) from the early aughties, and downloadable Java brochures. I remember [the automaker] Peugeot was into those, a couple of years before the first apps launched on the iPhone in 2007.

Mobile has gone from being a niche channel, where only nerds would be seen, to the most unbelievable ecosystem of apps, games, shops, music, movies, information, entertainment and social media. We are literally all walking round with supercomputers in our pockets that know where we are, which way we are facing, whether we are standing still, walking, running or moving at some greater speed, and all of this is available to brands with user consent to tap into and leverage in their comms with their app users. I think the mobile marketers of 2005, which is when we launched Mobile Marketing Magazine, would kill for the opportunities that today’s mobile marketers have at their disposal.

The post Evolution of Mobile and the MAX Imperative: Looking Back – Part I of a Multi-part Blog Series appeared first on Airship.