Matt Price, Author at Airship

5 Ways Retailers Can Leverage Stories to Drive App Engagement

Matt Price — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 19:40:33 +0000

App customers are always looking for the easiest way to ingest valuable content as seamlessly as possible. Brands are always trying to find the best way to get relevant content in front of their customers in a way that’s meaningful, actionable and concise. With more than 900 million people interacting with Instagram stories, it’s no wonder that brands are looking at ways to replicate this familiar look and feel inside their own mobile app experiences. That’s why Airship has launched Stories.

Unlike screens in an onboarding flow, Stories automatically advance, but can be paused with a tap, just like on social media. They can also be tailored and displayed to specific customer segments based on preferences, demographics or behaviors (such as viewing a specific screen or opening the app a certain number of times).

Here are 5 ways you can use Airship Stories to drive app engagement:

Idea 1: Promote a New Product or Product Series

There’s something about the temporary nature of Stories that appeals to customers; it creates the fear of missing out in a format that’s easy to digest.

For example, if you’re a fashion retailer, treat the customer to Stories about your new clothing collection as soon as they open the app. Feature clothing selections based on what you know about them and their button taps. Each story automatically advances and ends with a call to action.

Idea 2: Inspire Loyalty and Customer Authentication

A critical first-part of the app customer lifecycle is getting them to opt-in and authenticate in the app by signing in or signing up. That’s how you grow your understanding of their needs and serve them better over time.

Stories could target first-time purchasers once they tap “add to cart,” encouraging them to sign up to the retailer’s loyalty program to receive free shipping on their order. Repeat buyers that are still not part of the program could be shown Stories highlighting both monetary value and experiential benefits of joining.

Idea 3: Inspire Product Usage

Go beyond the product details page and inspire all the great ways that your customers can use your product.

Feature recipes for that bread maker they’re considering purchasing. Show them projects for woodworking equipment they’ve been evaluating in your app. Tap into their fitness aspirations by featuring your garments in action. The possibilities are limitless.

Idea 4: Inspire Discovery

Every year, without fail consumers participate in major shopping events like “back to school” or Cyber Week. Now you can build “shopping haul” Stories showcasing the season’s most popular purchases among like-minded customers, whether based on region, preferences, behaviors or any combination of insights. Highlight complementary products that go well together and inspire greater spend.

Idea 5 – Event Promotion

Inspire your app users to visit a particular store by highlighting grand opening events or giveaways.

Let’s say you’re opening up a new retail location in the southwest part of town. Use Stories to create highly targeted promotional content for app users who live near that location.

Holidays are an ideal time to encourage in-store visits and grow basket sizes. Stories can offer a high-profile way to make offers — such as the chance to win a shopping spree by entering the store with their app on in-store mode.

Get started using Airship Stories today and start inspiring your customers to take high-value actions in your mobile app.

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5 Key Takeaways from Aviation Festival Americas 2023

Matt Price — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 19:37:20 +0000

Aviation Festival Americas 2023 brought together aviation industry experts, thought leaders and innovators to explore challenges and opportunities in the aviation sector. Speakers proposed new ways to align business models and business processes with customer expectations around air travel.

This year’s event offered valuable insights focused on advancements in digital technology, sustainable practices and suggestions for enhancing the passenger experience.

Airship identified five key lessons and trends that emerged from the sessions:

Embracing Digital Transformation
Digital transformation strategy, and its impact on business outcomes, continue to drive the aviation industry. Festival speakers emphasized the importance of embracing technology to enhance efficiency, improve safety and deliver a seamless passenger experience.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic across industries and events worldwide, so it’s no surprise that aviation stakeholders had a lot to say about it. For example, AI-powered chatbots are helping airlines streamline customer support queues for faster resolution. AI virtual assistants are helping to improve data security in blockchain applications.

Airship had conversations with some of the world’s leading airlines about leveraging AI around A/B testing of customer app experiences, promotional campaigns, email copy and other areas.

Sustainability and Environmental Responsibility
The aviation industry is making significant strides in reducing negative environmental impacts. Sessions at the festival underscored the industry’s commitment to improving environmental management systems, including reducing carbon emissions and adopting eco-friendly practices. Airlines are increasingly investing in fuel-efficient aircraft, exploring alternative fuels and implementing sustainable initiatives throughout their operations, including carbon offsets. In particular, sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) have gained prominence as a viable solution for decarbonizing the industry and achieving net-zero CO₂ emissions.

Enhanced Passenger Experience

Enhancing the passenger experience remained a focal point at the festival. Industry leaders discussed strategies to personalize and streamline the passenger journey, from booking to post-flight experiences.

They emphasized the importance of incorporating cutting-edge technologies, such as biometrics, Internet of Things (IoT) and big data analytics to cultivate smooth and tailored experiences for travelers. “App-solutely Hooked,” a session led by Matt Price and Tom Stork from Airship, illustrated the ways in which enjoyable experiences can boost affinity towards a travel brand. As an example, they cited the transition from rideshare to airline to hotel, which airlines have made effortless for the passenger through their mobile apps.

Other sessions delved into how self-service kiosks and in-flight entertainment systems enhance passenger satisfaction.

Data-Driven Decision Making
Data-driven decision making emerged as a crucial theme at the festival. Industry experts stressed the importance of harnessing data and analytics to drive operations efficiency and improve decision-making processes. Airlines and airports are increasingly leveraging real-time data to optimize flight operations, including minimizing delays and enhancing safety measures. Data analytics also helps airlines understand customer preferences and behavior, so they can better tailor services and target marketing campaigns.

Collaborations and Partnerships

Collaborations and partnerships were highlighted as essential drivers of innovation and growth in the aviation industry. Airlines, airports, technology providers and regulators are collaborating to address industry-wide challenges and leverage emerging opportunities.

According to Aviation Pros, “This post-pandemic era has also made it even more difficult for many sectors within aviation, causing disruptions to the supply chain. Among the primary bottlenecks are staff shortages, a need for more raw materials, price increases in inventory and labor, and extensive lead times.”

By fostering collaborative relationships, stakeholders can pool resources, share expertise and create innovative solutions to propel the industry forward.

Airship at Aviation Festival Americas 2023

These key takeaways serve as guiding principles for shaping a more efficient, sustainable and customer-centric aviation landscape. Airship is at the center of this effort. We are a key provider to the industry, including 4 out of the 6 largest US airlines. We’re committed to enhancing the passenger experience through our innovations in personalization and data-driven decision making.

Talk to us. We’re here to help.

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Aviation Festival Americas 2021

Matt Price — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 23:01:04 +0000

Airship was excited and honored to sponsor Aviation Festival 2021 in Miami, FL last week. This was our third year sponsoring the event, but this year was extra special as it was the first in-person US conference we’ve participated in since the beginning of quarantine. It was great to connect with people in person again. The event revealed many insights into the future of the travel industry which has undoubtedly changed in unimaginable ways since 2019. The challenges faced by the many services that a traveler interacts with are increasingly complex. Travelers value safety in travel now more than ever. They want to leverage the convenience, personalization and real-time nature of mobile technology to access everything about their itinerary, including the expectation of being immediately notified of disruptions or changes. Privacy Consumers are now in the driver’s seat when it comes to privacy. They have greater control over the data that they share and brands must capture consent before tracking them. This is all for the better, but it will require product managers and user experience marketers to be more transparent about what information they are leveraging and how they go about collecting it. Your app is the most secure way you have to communicate with your customers so make sure to factor that into your communications strategy and your customer’s experience of your brand. Also make sure you implement good safety standards like password expiry and 2 factor authentication options. First Party Data In the post-cookie era the role of first party data is increasingly important. This will require brands to have a meaningful interaction with travelers to collect their preferences and provide personalized experiences. Some travelers may be looking for a great deal on their next vacation to Hawaii while others just want to receive text alerts of flight changes. Do you have the ability to capture user preferences and personalize your messaging strategy based on what your travelers want to receive? If not, let’s talk, this is a specialty of ours at Airship. For instance, Airship offers configurable Preference Center capabilities for app, email and SMS segmentation. Technology Can Solve Challenges Of A Distressed Labor Market Staffing is one of the biggest challenges brought on by the pandemic. With fewer ticket agents and flight crew available to help travelers it’s forcing airlines to think about the most efficient ways to provide service. This is where the mobile app plays an increasingly important role in the traveler’s interaction with an airline. Whether its

Sending travelers their mobile boarding pass on check-in
Providing flight change information
Offering a live SMS or in-app chat with a customer service rep for support
Capturing and storing rewards or credits

Your mobile app can really help scale your customer service efforts, making it possible to provide an optimal customer experience even with staffing challenges. Machine Learning and AI The travel industry is poised to see big benefits from machine learning and artificial intelligence in the years to come. There is virtually no part of the day-of-travel experience that won’t be streamlined by AI and ML. This includes things like autonomous buses, luggage carts and wheelchairs to get you to your gate and then drive themselves to pick up the next traveler. It also includes better predictions of delays based on massively trained data sets that factor in every travel scenario that has occurred in the last 20 years. Machine Learning and AI also present great opportunities to enhance your mobile app experience. If you can use Machine Learning to understand the traits of a highly-engaged app user or conversely one that is about to delete the app this provides a treasure trove of insights on how to improve the app experience. Perhaps it’s the business traveler who gets frustrated with the booking process in the app and is at high risk of churning. Maybe this influences the check-in experience in the app so you can retain that high-value business traveler. Safely and securely collecting and leveraging the data that they willingly share with you will be one of the defining characteristics of brands that succeed in this new world, and those that ultimately fail. The next year will continue to be transformative for the travel and hospitality industry. Mobile apps will be a catalyst for this transformation, guiding travelers on their journey and helping them stay safer as we start to emerge from the global pandemic. If we missed you at Aviation Festival Americas, hopefully we’ll get a chance to connect in London at the World Aviation Festival in December.

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The 3 Key Ingredients For Breaking News Alerts

Matt Price — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 19:34:45 +0000

2020 has seen no shortage of breaking news. Whether it’s the global pandemic, the polarized political landscape or natural disasters, this year has delivered more newsworthy events than any year I can remember. In the midst of this most active news cycle, consumers rely on reputable and timely news sources more than ever.

For these consumers, how quickly they get breaking news alerts is more than imperative. It can be the deciding factor on where they go for their news.

For Media brands, meeting these changing consumer expectations and growing their customer base requires three key ingredients for breaking news alerts: Speed, Channels and Preference Controls.

Speed Is Imperative

It may seem obvious that speed is important to delivering break news, but how important is it? And how much does it affect engagement and opens?

The answer: more than you think. To assess the impact for one of our clients, a major U.S. news source, we analyzed both direct response rates (users that tapped on a breaking news notification) and indirect response rates (users that opened the app shortly after receiving a breaking news alert) to see if speed made a difference. The results were impressive.

We found that breaking news alerts received within two minutes of a major news event have a 2X higher engagement rate over alerts received by users after two minutes. Notifications sent within two minutes saw a direct response rate of almost 4%, while the notifications sent after two minutes went down to a 2% direct response rate. That’s doubling the number of eyes that will open up the app and see the content.

We also found that the two-minute window is where mostengagement happens for breaking news notifications. The data also showed that 98% of total direct responses came from the users who received the notification in less than two minutes. Clearly, speed is a key ingredient!

Channels Matter

When it comes to digital media consumption, consumers rely on an ever-increasing number of channels to get their news. Having a great app engagement strategy is key to providing a good user experience. But mobile is just one component of a great media engagement strategy.

An omni-channel approach ensures you can reach your audience on the channel that’s most convenient to them—so they don’t miss essential news. Solutions that make it easier to coordinate those channels on one platform can make it easier and quicker to send important messages.

An often overlooked channel is web notifications. Consumers still look to media websites as a primary source for staying informed, and web notifications are a great way to engage those website visitors.

The Importance of Preferences

In the effort to reach your audience quickly across multiple channels, you don’t want to push your audience away by over messaging or sending irrelevant content. The key is allowing consumers to dial in their preferences for messaging.

According to a two-wave experiment conducted by University of Texas Center for Media Engagement, respondents reported that the frequency of notification and untailored content are what consumers like least about notifications. Somewhat less surprisingly, relevant content and useful information is what they like the most.

The more that your audiences can control their preferences, the more they will engage with your content. Audience interests vary, whether it’s sports, business, technology, the environment or politics. It’s fundamental to have a messaging strategy that tailors your messaging to audience member preferences. This includes giving them the ability to follow topics and events they are interested in, as well as the ability to choose how often and when they get notifications.

Don’t Miss a Single Ingredient

To offer your customers the best experience for breaking news alerts, consider these questions:

Can I send notifications faster than my competitors?
Can I use multiple channels to reach my audience?
Can I give my audience preferences for their notifications?

Make sure you’re using the best tools for messaging your app users. Request a demo or contact us and let us know how we can help you send notifications quickly and effectively.

Be the First to aler your audience

We can help you send notifications quickly and reliably

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