Yet many businesses struggle. Average retention rates have barely budged for years, despite ongoing growth in app downloads. Gaps across the mobile app customer lifecycle result in The Chasm of No Return — where new app users drop off, never to return. Most consumers will use an app only once or twice before deciding to delete it or not. First and second impressions are everything.

On the other side of the equation are customers. Customers continue to use brands’ apps primarily because they simplify their lives and save them time. Other benefits, like saving money and earning rewards, are farther down the list of reasons that keep them coming back — even in today’s economic climate. 

While apps are not new, an end-to-end focus on life after download is — and that’s where Masters of MAX: A Mobile App Experience Podcast can help. Every few weeks, executives and managers responsible for mobile apps can get the inside story on how brand leaders and experts are navigating the twisty path to mobile app experience mastery. In every episode, our guests will share their strategies, advice and hard lessons learned, helping to inspire and ignite others on their own MAX journeys.

Our first episode features Hasan Luongo, Vice President of Global Marketing for Chipper Cash, which is working to unlock financial barriers in Africa and beyond through its app-only approach. In this episode, Hasan talks with our host, Thomas Butta, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer at Airship, about the challenges of being mobile-only in a world accustomed to conventional banking, the importance of trust in the finance space, and the critical role of transparent communications with customers.

Besides being a coffee aficionado, Hasan is an entrepreneur, marketing leader and product leader with an extensive background in building and scaling high-growth technology companies and teams. Chipper Cash, which is ranked in the Fintech 50 by Forbes, has focused on personalization at scale — among other strategies — to serve more than 5 million app customers in five markets and process more than $1.5 billion in transactions per quarter. 

If your goal is to deliver extraordinary value for where your best customers choose to engage with your brand, Masters of MAX is the podcast for you. Never miss an episode by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or Audible.

Please tell us what you think of the first episode, send us your topic suggestions and let us know if you’d like to be a guest on future episodes.

The post Airship Launches Podcast on Mobile App Experience appeared first on Airship.

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 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.

In case you missed any of the webinars, blog posts, ebooks and podcasts presented during the month, you can access them by clicking on the links below. We organized them by theme and sub-theme.

Whether you’re a company executive, marketer, CRM professional, developer or mobile product owner, we think you’ll find this content as fresh and useful as it was the first time around.

Mobile App Experience

Strategy

• Webinar – Why MAX Matters Series # 1 – What is MAX and Why it Matters
• Blog Post by RevenueCat – How Brands Can Create Better Mobile App Experiences with Airship + RevenueCat
• Blog Post – Top 5 Insights from MAU
• Blog Post by Relatia – Animer vos applications sans développement technique (French)
• Webinar – Why MAX Matters Series # 2 – Wie Einzelhändler attraktive mobile App-Experiences bieten können (German)
• Podcast – The Value of Mobile App Experiences Interview with Laura Schwarz (German)

Loyalty, Retention & App Monetization

• Blog Post – Why MAX Matters Series #1 – Building Loyalty and Monetization
• Blog Post – Why MAX Matters Series #1 – Développer la fidélisation et la monétisation (French)
• Blog Post – Why MAX Matters Series #1 –  Kundenbindung und Monetarisierung (German)

Encouraging Opt-Ins

• Blog Post – Why MAX Matters Series #2 – Notifications: MAXimizing Opt-ins

Onboarding & Personalization

• Blog Post by Branch – Personalized App Onboarding with Branch + Airship

Personalization

• Blog Post – WWDC 2022 Highlights for App Publishers: Personalization is Front-and-Center

Personalization, First- and Zero-Party Data

• Blog Post – Why MAX Matters Series #3 – Personalization: Show Them You Know Them
• Blog Post – Why MAX Matters Series #3 – Personnalisation : Montrez à vos clients que vous les connaissez (French)
• Blog Post – Why MAX Matters Series #3 – Personalisierung: Zeigen Sie Ihren Kunden, dass Sie sie kennen (German)

Omni-Channel Engagement, First- and Zero-Party Data

• Blog Post by Radar – 5 Ways Leading Retailers are Exceeding Customer Expectations with Hybrid In-Store Experiences

Omni-Channel Engagement 

• Blog Post by Movable Ink – 1:1 Personalization is the Fuel behind Customer-Centric Mobile Marketing

App Experience Platform

Technology

• Blog Post – AXP Deep Dive Series #1 – Airship AXP: Help Brands Master Mobile App Experiences (MAX)
• Blog Post – AXP Deep Dive Series #1 – L’AXP Airship : l’allié des marques pour les expériences sur apps mobiles (MAX) (French)
• Blog Post – AXP Deep Dive Series #1 – Airship AXP: Meistern Sie mobile App-Experiences (MAX) (German)

Retention & App Monetization

• Webinar – AXP Deep Dive Series #1 – How to Boost App Retention and Revenue
• Webinar – AXP Deep Dive Series #1 – Comment booster la rétention et les revenus des applications 

Customer Journeys, Personalization, First- and Zero-Party Data

• Blog Post – AXP Deep Dive series #2 – Customer Journeys: Leveraging Real-Time Data To Create Personalized Journeys

Data Privacy

Mobile Data Privacy, First- and Zero-Party Data

• eBook – 8 Privacy Principles and Practices for Building Better MAX
• Webinar – Practical Privacy Series #2 – 8 Privacy Principles & Practices for Building Better MAX
• Blog Post – Practical Privacy Series #2 – Don’t Get Pushy: Adapt to the Mobile Data Privacy Evolution
• Blog Post – Practical Privacy Series #3 – How to Get Practical with Privacy
• Blog Post – Practical Privacy Series #2 – Ne soyez pas trop insistant : adoptez les nouveaux usages en matière de confidentialité (French)
• Blog Post – Practical Privacy Series #2 – Seien Sie nicht aufdringlich: Achten Sie auf mobilen Datenschutz (German)

Consumer Behavior, Customer Lifecycle, Mobile Data Privacy, First- and Zero-Party Data

• Webinar – Practical Privacy Series #1 – Consumer Behavior on Mobile Privacy w/ Forrester

Customer App Lifecycle

• Blog Post by Mixpanel – Using Data Across the Customer Journey: A Deep Dive into User Activation

Retention, First- and Zero-Party Data

• Blog Post by Purchasely – Leveraging In-App Subscriber Data to Maximize Retention

Strategy

• Blog Post by mParticle – What is Data Chaos? And How to Solve it to Improve Your Mobile Data Strategy

Strategy, first- and zero-party data

• Blog Post by Foursquare – Five Steps for a Better, More Engaging App Experience Using Location Data

The post #MAXMonth Round-Up appeared first on Airship.

But what the data doesn’t show is a vast disparity among mobile app experiences. We’ve all experienced apps that are delightful and seem to know and value our unique needs. And we’ve all had frustrating experiences—including too many notifications or are not user friendly.

Good or bad, these experiences are happening in apps, not inboxes. That’s why when businesses focus on email-centric communication platforms, they end up missing out on pivotal opportunities to engage, retain, and grow their user base. Companies that deliver a superior customer experience grow revenues five times faster on average than their competitors.

If you’re a brand with a mobile presence, it’s time to focus on building great mobile app experiences, especially for your most valuable customers: your subscribers. 

It doesn’t have to mean hiring more developers

Consider the idea of identifying who your most valuable customers are, knowing what actions they’ve recently taken in terms of their subscriptions, and delivering custom experiences based on these unique characteristics. Just a few years ago, this would have taken 1–2 years of work and a dedicated team of 3-5 full-time engineers. Today, it’s possible in days or weeks with Airship and RevenueCat. 

Airship gives you the means to configure custom in-app engagement strategies for your users based on their unique characteristics. RevenueCat provides the important user context around payments and subscription status, which is time-consuming and complex to gather on your own. Together, these tools can help you build better mobile app experiences without extra engineering resources.

How RevenueCat and Airship integrate

RevenueCat is fully integrated with Airship, giving you the unique ability to track high-value subscription users and engage with them directly throughout their lifecycle. 

Once Airship and RevenueCat are synced – which takes less than five minutes – it’s easy to track and target each cohort of customers. In-app events, such as starting a trial, an initial purchase, renewal and cancellation, are all automatically routed from RevenueCat to Airship in real time. 

This means you can design personalized Airship Journeys and Automations based on purchase behavior. For example, if a user has a billing issue or if their trial is about to expire, you can identify this event with RevenueCat and, from Airship, choose what should happen – such as sending a customized in-app message to the user that can be changed on the fly. 

Using RevenueCat and Airship: Examples

The most successful mobile app experiences reflect both what you’re trying to accomplish and what you know about the user. Let’s take a look at some examples at different stages in the customer lifecycle. 

Acquire

To acquire a loyal customer, it’s important to take advantage of that moment when they first start a free trial in your app—you might never get a better chance to earn their trust. With Airship Scenes, marketers and mobile product owners can easily create, edit and manage native full-screen, interactive walkthroughs that showcase the latest features, how the app will make users’ lives better, and how to get started. With RevenueCat, Scenes can be easily triggered on a customer starting a free trial with your app.  

Grow

To ensure that your app has sustainable growth, you need to find ways to provide win-wins for your customers to help them get the most value out of your app. With RevenueCat and Airship, you can identify untapped areas—such as a subscription pause—and send targeted in-app messages, such as a promotional offer to renew at a lower rate.

Retain 

When a customer’s subscription is about to expire, or their free trial is about to end, it’s a make-or-break moment from a retention point of view. With Airship and RevenueCat, you can identify these key cohorts and target them in the app. As they prepare to make a decision, you can ensure that they feel appreciated and have all the information about why your service is a great purchase. 

Support

Building great mobile app experiences is an ongoing journey, not a one-time challenge. With Airship Surveys, your brand can collect granular feedback from users while they are engaged with the app, resulting in actionable insights to improve app experiences without developer involvement. Using RevenueCat, these surveys can be tailored to different cohorts, such as users who have just canceled their subscription, to learn essential details about customer pain points. 

Conclusion

You don’t need to hire more engineers to improve how you engage with your customers on mobile. A rich ecosystem of third-party tools can work together to help businesses address customers’ needs more quickly, without relying on additional resources. Airship and RevenueCat are used by some of today’s biggest brands to build better mobile app experiences. We hope you’ll give this integration a try and see how it can help you engage and strengthen your valuable subscriber base. 

With the most accurate and up-to-date subscription data collected from your users and available in Airship, you’ll have all the necessary tools to increase your users’ engagement. To learn more, take a look at the RevenueCat docs.

 1. Forrester Research, Inc., Transform Customer Processes and Systems to Improve Experiences, February 22, 2021

The post How Brands Can Create Better Mobile App Experiences with Airship + RevenueCat appeared first on Airship.

A defined analytics strategy is the simplest way to evaluate and improve the customer journey and user activation. Strong product analytics helps you to find what data you need to track, what your users are doing, and how to implement the optimal experience. Without an analytics strategy, you risk making mistakes by tracking the wrong data and sending teams to work on incompatible solutions. 

Using analytics to improve the customer journey

Customers are what make a product successful. Any analytics strategy should focus on the full customer lifecycle. Without these analytics, your product and development teams will be flying blind. 

Your data and metrics should answer key questions, such as: 

• How many users are filling the top of your funnel? 
• What is the reach of your product?
• Are you adding new users, or awakening dormant users? 
• Can your app activate users by converting them to consistent and valuable customers?
• Why are users staying engaged with your product?

Across all your mobile app experiences, you should be finding why users are behaving the way they do. Even if a user churns, you should evaluate what happened and take a data-driven approach to a solution. By looking at these stages, you can map out what your customer lifecycle looks like, and see whether there are blind spots where you need more insights.

Improving product-led growth through user activation metrics

Once you have product analytics, you can determine how to activate users. Activation is what separates visitors and casual users from active power users. Instead of merely downloading the app, active users generate value through purchases, bookings, and downloads. 

Keeping users engaged and retained is key to product-led growth. By using product analytics, you can direct customers to moments that generate value. From there, you can keep users engaged, retained, and active. Once users are convinced of your product’s value, they can drive product-led growth.    

Which metrics are important to driving value?

When it comes to metrics, companies often struggle to find a starting point. In our experience, the best place to start is “time to value.” Your metrics should find how long it takes for someone to complete a “value moment.” A value moment is that feature in your product that generates value and keeps your users coming back over and over again. By collecting data that shows where users are going and what actions they perform, you can quickly identify value moments. 

Once you find value moments, you can evaluate different types of user activation and find the areas where customers are experiencing success. For example, users may be stymied by a few steps in the registration process, and then find value once they explore the app’s functionalities. By splitting the process into component parts, you can optimize each step of the journey so users find value faster. 

Your user activation process depends on your particular product. If a user can browse or use your product before logging in or creating an account, you should not only track the time from login to purchase, but also user actions before they logged in or created an account. 

What does activation look like for different industries?

Because customer journeys are different in each industry, user activation depends on how the product is used.

For convenience apps (grocery delivery, takeaway, streaming services), we have seen rapid user activation: the customer already knows what the product does and the app guides them to a value moment in a few minutes. On the other hand, in financial industries, time to value will always be longer due to user’s lessfrequent interaction with the product. 

Across the board, we’ve found companies tracing to lower barriers to entry for their products. If a new user downloads your app today, it’s more important than ever to quickly and seamlessly get them to create an account, make a purchase, or view content. 

How Mixpanel’s tools help optimize the user experience

Product analytics tools such as Mixpanel enable companies to find key metrics and improve the user experience. With Mixpanel Funnels and Flows, you can build reports from millions of user interactions for each defined step. From there, you can use an outreach tool such as Airship to re-engage users who drop off, nudge them to return, and improve conversion/retention rates. 

Mixpanel Funnels can evaluate how users reach the booking step, where they drop off, and whether conversion is going up or down. Mixpanel allows you to see data breakdowns and find which segments perform better than others. 

Mixpanel Flows is similar, but more exploratory. You can select a defined event to either start or end your Flow, and Mixpanel will show you what users were doing before and after they triggered that event. If users are navigating the app in a way you didn’t expect, or dropping off in a new location, you can identify it through Mixpanel Flows. Mixpanel allows you to narrow the report with any properties or user segments you choose.

Once you have detailed reports in Mixpanel, you can use an outreach tool like Airship to target specific groups. For example, you can find user cohorts in Mixpanel and use Airship’s messaging tools to re-engage them with your product and track campaign success. By using Airship and Mixpanel, you can build a continuous loop of engagement that improves your customer lifecycle. 

Gain insights into how best to convert, engage, and retain your users with Mixpanel’s powerful product analytics. Try it for free.

The post Using Data Across the Customer Lifecycle: A Deep Dive into User Activation appeared first on Airship.

This puts a lot of pressure on developers to create apps that:

1. Deliver a delightful consumer experience from day one

2. Provide brands with the consumer insights needed to constantly improve user experience

3. Help brands better engage with users through personalized messaging

In this post we explore five steps developers can take to leverage location data and technology to achieve success across all three categories.

Step 1: Surface the right message at the right time

To drive users to opt in to location sharing, developers should use notifications explaining how certain app features are powered by location sharing to help them see its value.

The most impactful messaging will be short and clearly explain what the value exchange is for the user, how location data is used, and what your sharing practices are. Prompts should not interfere with the user experience but should educate the user about the value exchange that occurs if and when they opt in to sharing their location. If a user does not opt in to location sharing at onboarding, developers can prompt users as they navigate to app features that require location permissions.

Foursquare puts this to the test with our own apps – as well as with partners like GasBuddy, Shopkick and Flipp – and has found that transparency and clarity are key to increasing the number of location-enabled users. Read more about how Foursquare tested opt-in messaging with our own apps here.

Step 2. Get to know the permission landscape

Naturally, most developers want users to opt in to location sharing, as this gives developers a view into users’ movements and therefore a deeper understanding of their behavioral preferences. For developers to get a view into their users’ movements, they first need users’ consent to share their location data (background or foreground / when in use). In looking to create a better, more engaging app experience, developers should become familiar with the user-permission practices for Apple and Android operating systems as the industry moves to give consumers more control over their privacy.

Foursquare’s in-house experts can help Pilgrim SDK partners optimize their user permission flow and messaging to maximize location permission opt-in based on experience with our own apps. Read more about Foursquare’s Pilgrim SDK offering here.

Step 3: Give users engaging features

Your users can also enjoy the direct benefits of accurate and rich location data. Point-of-Interest (POI) data – such as Foursquare’s Places database – can be built into an app to enable:

• Navigation and exploration: surface place recommendations in user vicinity (i.e. places to eat, drink, shop, etc.)

• Need-to-know facts: Provide users with all the info they need about a venue – including how far away it is, prices and operating hours

• Geo-tagging: Enables users to geo-tag their photos and add detailed, contextually relevant information about the location in the photo

• Reviews: Help users surface place-related content directly in users’ guidebooks, giving them a fuller depiction of what is surrounding where they are staying

• Social handles: Let users easily add the venue’s social media presence to posts with ease 

Step 4. Better understand your users

Location-based features can help developers uncover where users like to go, why they make purchase decisions, and how to reach them with powerful messaging. A few ways that location-based features can deliver immediate value to developers include:

1. Ping users the moment they approach or enter a location to remind them to complete a location-specific action, such as scan a receipt, take a survey, or activate an offer

2. Generate detailed behavioral insights and visit histories to create more targeted communications

3. Understand how consumers move through the world to build a robust profile of attributes for your user base

Foursquare’s SDK partners use Pilgrim’s technology to support location-based features within their apps and to personalize their user experience. By integrating with supported MMA platforms such as Airship, apps can leverage Pilgrim attributes (such as venue entry) when creating a journey to create relevant, location-based push notifications. Read more about Foursquare’s Pilgrim SDK partnerships and use cases on our blog here.

Step 5. Power data-driven marketing

To build effective marketing campaigns across platforms and devices, developers need to target the right audiences with personalized messaging. With over 750 predefined user segments, Pilgrim SDK Segments provides the data-driven insight needed to create user segments and improve targeting and personalization, or to engage with key customer segments and improve customer loyalty. There are several options for user data-delivery methods, including export via SFTP, S3 or webhook to support MMA partners like Airship.

Key Takeaways

Location data and technology can go a long way to help developers achieve their mission of delivering superior app experiences. By using tools like Foursquare’s Pilgrim SDK and Places, developers can: 

• Better understand your who your users are, where they go and their behavioral interests

• Create engaging in-app experiences 

• Reach users with contextually relevant and geo-aware content 

To learn more about how developers can deploy location data and technology, reach out to us at Foursquare.com.

The post Five Steps for a Better, More Engaging App Experience Using Location Data appeared first on Airship.

Airship’s research shows that the strongest motivation for opting in was “immediate value”, which topped the list among 35% of global respondents, whether in the form of discounts or loyalty rewards. Tied in second place at 25% were alerts for “shipping, delivery, or curbside pickup” and receiving “order confirmations or receipts”. “Gaining early access to big sales events” was the third most popular motivation at 21%.

On the other end of the scale, “personalized offers based on behavior/past purchases” is least likely to motivate mobile users to initially opt in, and “information not relevant/personalized to my needs” is one of the most common reasons for opting out. In other words, consumers want personalized, individualized interactions, but first require evidence of immediate value to opt in. This could take the form of discounts or loyalty rewards, followed by white-glove services, including shipping/ delivery/curbside pickup alerts, order confirmations/receipts and early access to big sales events.

A key element to retaining app users 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%).

For further insights about what’s driving mobile app experience, see 9 Experience Trends in 2022 for the Mobile Consumer and visit MAX (Mobile App Experience), and AXP (App Experience Platform).

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