This blog offers insights on what “getting it right” looks like. It explores why some brands are able to drive exceptional results, while others struggle to lift their customers across the dreaded chasm of no return. 

For many brands, the struggle isn’t going so well. Aggregated mobile app retention rates have barely budged in recent years despite a large and growing increase in the number of global app downloads. 

The Onboarding Series
Traditionally, teams responsible for mobile app performance have used messaging to drive users back into engaging with an app after they’ve downloaded. The most important kind of messaging for this early engagement is what we call the Onboarding Series – designed to educate new downloaders about an app’s value and begin drawing them into regular usage. 

With the Onboarding Series, app teams can create goal-based, cross-channel journeys encouraging new users to opt-in, register and try key app features. Teams can also perform other high-value actions that are critical to sustaining customer engagement and growing value. 

Our analysis shows that creating onboarding campaigns is a proven way to lift retention. We typically see a lift in customer engagement around the time each onboarding message is sent.

Apps that invest in an Onboarding Series (for example, running A/B tests to determine optimal timing, triggers, orchestration rules and more) see results that far exceed the category’s average 30-day retention rate. Airship’s latest data shows that high-performing Onboarding Series drive an average 34% lift in 30-day retention rates. Many of Airship’s top customers find even greater success.

Getting it done  
There are two kinds of work involved in delivering great mobile app experiences – creating the strategy and executing. Many marketers and mobile product owners have a clear view of what strategy is needed to cultivate and retain new users. They understand what it means to make life after download a rewarding experience for customers. Yet too many struggle to make it happen.

A recent Airship study found that nearly three-quarters of marketers and mobile product owners think about improving app onboarding, feature adoption, opt-in and data collection experiences, on a weekly basis. Yet 96% of them remain reliant on developers to actually get the work done.

All of which explains why Airship is so focused on creating solutions that marketers can use by themselves to implement app enhancements. Instead of waiting for developer teams to deliver cyclical updates or new releases, Airship’s App Experience Platform (AXP) gives marketers the freedom and the power to move forward without developer support. 

It takes time to plan and execute an effective Onboarding Series, but getting started is always the first step. From there you can fine-tune and improve every part of the process, giving your customers more of what they expect from your ongoing mobile app investments.

Find out more about customer retention with Airship AXP. 

The post Onboarding Series Lifts First-Month Mobile App Retention Rates by 34 Percent appeared first on Airship.

In the reciprocal exchange of value with customers, you compete with other brands that are trying to do the same thing. How successful you are in (1) persuading customers to reveal their preferences and predilections and (2) providing them experiences that they appreciate, will determine your market share and monetization. That’s where Airship comes in.

Airship developed App Experience Platform (AXP) to allow brands to play and win in this market. It’s significant that AXP is the only enterprise-class SaaS platform focused 100% on helping brands master the full lifecycle of mobile app experience (MAX). MAX is how you engage audiences and hold onto them. But MAX is hard to do. That’s why everyone else treats mobile apps as just another channel. They rely on email messages to get customers to download apps. We all know that app acquisition by itself doesn’t get you very far. Brands need to engage customers with real time, moments-based messages triggered by their behavior on the app.

Hence the importance of customer data. With AXP, you’re able to combine information from external data feeds to create rich, interactive experiences that help with increasing customer retention and engagement. For example, AXP’s data enables marketers to send customers contextual content – such as weather updates, movie recommendations or traffic alerts – based on their current location, or recommendations based on their recent purchases or browsing history.

What about privacy?

The flip side of the value exchange is privacy. A key element to retaining app customers is giving them user-level control over their data and how they prefer to interact with a brand. Airship’s survey found that consumers are more likely to opt in to brand communications if they have control over the reason (43%), frequency (41%) and channels (40%) with which brands engage them. Conversely, the inability among app users to control the frequency and relevance of messages received are the top reasons app users opt out. Across all countries, the most common reason for opting out of a brand’s smartphone communications was receiving too many messages too often (51%). The second most common reason was “Information not relevant/personalized to my needs” (40%). In other words, just because you have something to say, doesn’t mean your customer wants to hear it. Customers engage freely with brands that respect their privacy. The converse is also true. Make the wrong move – either through a technology glitch or a fumbled communication – and you can expect to be ignored, silenced or deleted.

Again, Airship has your back. When you build your app on AXP, you enable customers to opt in and out of message types by utilizing subscription lists that span popular interests, topics and seasonal events – without the need for developer support. Using automation, your marketers can combine customers’ opt-in selections, real-time mobile behaviors, and preferences to send recommendations for hyper-personalized interactions.

Build trust with first and zero-party data

Customers are more likely to share their “interests relevant to a brand,” “their communication preferences” and “what they’ve browsed on a brand’s app or website” than basic information – such as postal address and demographics – if that is a way to receive personalized interactions and special incentives. Brands clearly have an imperative to learn about customer preferences during onboarding and continue that effort throughout the customer lifecycle.

This trend is supported by a recent Deloitte report, which found that high growth brands are leading the shift toward first-party data. They found that 61% of those growth leaders are moving toward a first-party data strategy, a signal that “high growth organizations more often recognize the pressing need to get ahead of a rapidly changing environment”.

AXP’s Mobile Data Hub is designed to receive, store and disseminate first- and zero-party data and connect it with existing customer information to create personalized moments-based app experiences for your customers, while simultaneously building trust with them.

AXP Next-level Personalization

Key Features

• External Data Feeds
• Advanced Personalization
• Create Rich Content
• Preference Center
• Segmentation
• Attributes
• Automation
• Reduced Reliance on Tech Teams

Find out more about AXP and AXP Next-level Personalization.

The post Customer Journeys: Leveraging Real-Time Data To Create Personalized Journeys appeared first on Airship.

Airship defines onboarding as the interactions that set the stage for long-term customer value. Personalized onboarding goes even further. Users receive hyper-relevant information to keep them engaged. Meanwhile, marketers learn which actions get customers to convert and, ultimately, stick around. 

But you may be wondering: What more can be done to personalize app onboarding and create a seamless bridge between downloading and engagement? Brands that use data from the moment of onboarding are at a huge advantage when it comes to driving personalized mobile app experiences. 

Branch + Airship work together to personalize mobile app experiences. A pre-built integration allows your team to automatically view Branch data alongside Airship data in the Airship dashboard. Brands that leverage both Branch and Airship data unlock the ability to predict app user behavior, understand user retention, and discover more personalized insights to inspire loyal users. 

How? Let’s learn more. 

Branch provides the most powerful mobile linking solutions (like deep linked push notifications) to ensure your users always receive the best experience, no matter which platform or channel they’re navigating. Branch also helps organizations streamline end-user acquisition, engagement and marketing measurement in a holistic manner across all platforms, devices, and channels. 

Branch’s mobile linking and measurement — coupled with Airship’s ability to make every message personalized, seamlessly coordinated, and perfectly-timed across all of your engagement channels — gives you everything you need to build personalized onboarding experiences. It also allows you to optimize them over time to be even more successful.

By embedding Branch links into Airship Journeys*(not to be confused with Branch’s web-to-app Journeys smart banner product!) for onboarding, you can construct the perfect, personalized onboarding experience. For example, if you’re an eCommerce company, depending on user intent, you could link to product pages, customer service pages, or even a help center page the first time someone opens your app.  

You can also set up automation rules or Branch Journeys to send your audience messages when Airship receives custom events (such as a purchase). Using event properties to personalize or modify your message for each audience member can help increase the message’s relevance. It can also help increase the likelihood that your audience will engage.

For example, to personalize a message using the custom ‘Purchase’ event from Branch, you can provide total purchase information to your marketing team and set up your messages to the user that reflect certain products.

Innovative brands need to ensure that after a user installs their app, the experience resonates with them in a way that makes them continue using the app. The answer? Personalized onboarding. 

Get started with Branch + Airship today! 

The post Personalized App Onboarding With Branch + Airship appeared first on Airship.

A customer data strategy includes all of the relevant events that need to be tracked, the set of identities that are accessible, and the various data objects that should be captured in order to achieve business goals. With a data strategy in place, you can better understand what data is available and more effectively use data to deliver great mobile app experiences.

The path to creating your data strategy is bespoke to your business. Teams often start with a single use case around customer data and don’t establish a comprehensive data strategy as they scale their digital presence. But this increases risk exposure when internal and external conditions change.

Inside most companies:

• Websites and apps change, with landing pages and app screens being added, optimized, or removed
• New campaigns are run, often requiring new data flows to measure success. New tools are required to optimize performance, thus requiring new integrations
• Event tracking changes as developers across different platforms work in silos over time
• Customers toggle between known and anonymous states, and across different devices, which requires dynamic identity resolution capabilities
• Users update their consent preferences to opt out of personalized experiences, and their information will need to be extracted from certain flows and tools
• Models are built and experiments are run which force several of these steps to be repeated

And in the market:

• New privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA fundamentally change the way you can collect, manage, and activate data
• Apple and Google create new platform rules that change how you can access cookies and device identifiers
• API requirements change as vendors continually update their offerings and specs

Teams end up making a faustian bargain in their pursuit of growth. The challenge becomes adapting to the changes — more use cases require that more tools added, the number of data objects grows exponentially, and the subsequent maintenance due to API changes increases, not to mention the introduction of new privacy requirements. It all becomes quite overwhelming.

This is Data Chaos. This is a universal phenomenon.

How to solve data chaos

General Stanley McChrystal defines risk as “threats times your vulnerability to those threats.” The reality here is that teams can’t always control external factors that threaten their data strategy, such as new regulation, policy and platform changes etc., but they can strengthen their vulnerability to those threats.

To effectively scale, teams need to first think about solving for their vulnerabilities. The focus should first be on improving adaptability to properly address the dynamic needs of the organization.

Implementing a trusted Customer Data Infrastructure that can protect data quality and improve data governance is the precursor to successful activation and personalization. Without this, teams will experience the common phenomenon of “garbage in, garbage out.” And with lots of channels and partners connected, that’s a whole bunch of garbage.

What about the alternatives?

Application-focused CDPs and Marketing Suites focus on providing rich audience insights and segmentation capabilities. These are only valuable tactics when there is a strong, adaptable data quality and governance foundation. The best dashboards and segmentation capabilities will not make an impact if the data is bad or the pipelines break at critical moments.

The Modern Data Stack and Reverse ETL providers offer an interesting activation solution for data engineering teams building a data architecture around the cloud data warehouse. The reduction in both the cost of storage and compute has made this appealing on the surface. And while this approach may solve some of the technical challenges around customer data activation, they too ignore the operational challenges related to perpetual market changes, as well as the huge opex burden created by the need to manage that change. Basic questions such as “how is data quality managed?” and “how is privacy incorporated?” are often brushed aside entirely.

By decoupling data from where it’s actioned and forcing clients to operate within rigid systems, these offerings do little to help teams battle the entropy in their systems.

The solution

Customer Data Infrastructure should provide the adaptability required to manage new data connections, privacy changes, and market shifts. Operating in a state of data order, teams can access high-quality, real-time data and use it to power personalized app experiences scale.

If brands want to solve the activation challenge, they need to begin by solving the data chaos challenge, including both the technical and the operational aspects. Customer Data Infrastructure should work alongside your Cloud Data Warehouse, and should support customer engagement tools such as Airship.  your activation tools including even an Application CDP.

With high-quality customer data being forwarded to Airship, you’re able to execute your data strategy at scale and power experiences that drive post-purchase up-sells, reduce checkout abandonment, and much more.

Efficiency, the ultimate measure of success during the Industrial Age, has given way to adaptability, now the most important driver of success in the Information Age. This is what mParticle was purpose-built to do–solve for data quality, governance, and connectivity to make sure teams can not only adapt to data chaos but become stronger as a result.

The post What is Data Chaos? And How to Solve it to Improve Your Mobile Data Strategy appeared first on Airship.

But those facts come with the burden of responsibility. When it’s your job to build loyalty and revenue, the question isn’t whether to invest more in your mobile app, the question is how.

The Airship Way
Getting a person to just download an app doesn’t make for a loyal customer. In fact, after a week or two, far too many people will never open the app again. What’s needed is a way to extend the app experience from acquisition and activation through to engagement and loyalty.

That’s why we invented the Airship® App Experience Platform (AXP). It’s the only enterprise SaaS platform that’s 100% focused on helping brands master the full lifecycle of mobile app experience (MAX) management. One platform, start to finish, designed to work the way your brand should work: seamlessly.

Read AXP (App Experience Platform). Here’s a preview:

Crossing the Chasm With AXP – Messaging outside the app experience only goes so far. Most apps lose customers in the “chasm” that occurs after Activation.

• Acquisition is about getting someone to download an app

• Activation gets them to open it and register

• Engagement is when they start interacting with the app

• Loyalty keeps them coming back

Beyond Messaging – Getting past the activation phase to engagement and loyalty requires brands to adopt a “beyond messaging” mindset. It’s about creating valuable experiences that reward customers individually for their loyalty. 

Inside AXP
Airship has powered data-driven mobile app experiences (MAX) long enough to know what it takes to span the entire customer journey.

• Powerful app experiences – Crucial to onboarding app audiences, building user understanding for next-level personalization, and advancing monetization goals through a data-led, value-based approach.

• Next-level personalization – Using data you already have, along with rich data collected in the app — to understand each user and deliver better, more relevant experiences.

• Customer lifecycle optimization — helping teams accomplish all the steps required to win loyal brand advocates: migrate the audience to the mobile app, activate them upon arrival, maximize account creation, reinforce the app’s value proposition, and incentivize high-value actions that lead to ongoing engagement and retention.

• Trusted MAX partner – Using our experience and passion for innovation to help many of the world’s most successful brands, across every industry.

The Customer Lifecycle With AXP – Follow the customer lifecycle through the first 30 days of an app install and learn how AXP helps brands master the critical first phases of mobile app experience.

Read AXP (App Experience Platform). 

For more information, visit www.airship.com, read our blog or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

In upcoming blogs in this series, we will dive deeper into each of the customer app lifecycle stages and how brands should think about them. 

The post Airship AXP: Help Brands Master Mobile App Experiences (MAX) appeared first on Airship.

Over the last two years, we’ve seen a steady shift in mobile app usage. Airship’s platform data shows a 31% increase in app users in 2020, which is nearly double the growth rate of 2019. The world’s leading mobile-first brands understand the importance of the mobile app and the relationship between app experiences, loyalty and monetization.

Mobile apps have become more than a promotional channel. They are quickly becoming the preferred destination for a brand’s most loyal customers. Brands are now being tasked with creating mobile app experiences (MAX) that move customers through the app journey to become loyal brand advocates who take high-value actions.

How do leading brands master MAX? It’s simple. They rely on the Airship App Experience Platform (AXP). It’s the only enterprise SaaS platform that’s 100% focused on helping brands master the full lifecycle of MAX management.

We’ve designed AXP to address the core executional challenges brands have been sharing with us over the past year:

• Access to meaningful data that enables personalized mobile app experiences
• Ability to manage and leverage data properly in an evolving data privacy landscape
• Tools to rapidly implement mobile app experiences that don’t rely on lengthy development cycles to deploy or update

What’s new? 

Airship AXP includes groundbreaking innovations, such as AXP Preference Center, AXP Surveys and AXP Scenes, which give mobile app teams full autonomy to create, automate and adapt rich, native app experiences for every step of the customer journey. And do it at the speed and scale of mobile.

And the best part – AXP reduces app teams’ dependence on development resources. Many rich app experiences require developers to not only write custom HTML, but also maintain it. AXP Scenes gives marketers an interface to customize and personalize app experiences from the ground up so they can launch campaigns quickly and cost-effectively. And much more!

Journeys: The AXP Journey tool enables single or multi-touch interactions that can be targeted to customers based on deep customer data, such as customer attributes and segments, available through the platform. These attributes and segments are the basis for your audience definition and, when combined with advanced design functionality, enables the creation of robust, personalized experiences that can be tested and analyzed for maximum business impact.

Scenes: From the moment customers open the app, AXP Scenes helps marketers guide them through each phase of their journey. Perfect for new customer onboarding or highlighting new app functionality, Scenes can also be used to highlight products, promotions, events, trends or anything else you want a customer to see while they’re in the app.  And Scenes doesn’t require development or hard coding.  It’s built entirely within the UI in a visual editor so you can design, launch and modify rapidly.

 Surveys: AXP Surveys gives marketers and mobile product owners the ability to collect granular feedback from users while they’re engaged with the app, resulting in actionable insights to improve app experiences without developer involvement.

Preferences: Let customers have the experiences they want by allowing them to opt in only to the content they care about. Marketers can create an AXP Preference Center without hard-coding it into the app, so any time they want to make changes or updates, they have the power to do it. They can set the Preference Center to collect and manage data from the app only or integrated with other preference and opt-in data within the enterprise. Data collection is also supported through our Surveys and Forms capabilities.

Who Should Care About AXP?

Brands that want to drive revenue through their mobile app will care a lot about AXP. Too often, app users fall off after 7, 14, and 30 days and never come back. That’s because traditional mobile marketing treats mobile apps as a channel. AXP changes all that – by treating mobile apps as the preferred destination where the value exchange between customers and brands is most respected and rewarded.

With mobile usage data trending upward, brands that want to win on mobile can no longer afford “good enough” solutions when it comes to their mobile apps. More than 25% of Fortune 500 companies rely on Airship to help them create and execute winning  app experiences.

The mobile app imperative is about creating mobile app experiences that drive more user activity, loyalty and ultimately higher app monetization. AXP is the foundational platform for enabling mobile app experiences (MAX) at scale. And all of us at Airship are committed to helping you become a master of MAX with the power of AXP.Don’t let your mobile app fall victim to “channel thinking.” Connect with us today to learn more about Airship App Experience Platform (AXP) and how you can drive higher activation, engagement, loyalty and revenue with mobile app experiences.

The post Only Airship AXP is 100% focused on MAX appeared first on Airship.