Mobile: A Lifecycle & Lifestyle

Mobile is more than just a channel. It’s an integral part of how we live — our relationships, homes, health, money, shopping, information, news, vacations, and much much more. With the bulk of internet traffic (and now online sales) originating from smartphones and most of consumers’ mobile time spent on apps, it’s evident there’s a new preferred destination for experience today.

Yet, the challenge remains: average Day 30 activation rates have barely budged in years, and most consumers (57%) decide whether to delete an app in one or two uses. Lewis zeroes in on the Activation phase of the mobile app lifecycle, which spans the first 30 days after download, and highlights its significance in shaping user behavior and driving long-term customer engagement.

By implementing 3 key strategies, brands can enhance app activation rates and improve key business metrics, such as purchase conversion. Let’s explore.

1. Identify Your Customers
Lewis emphasized the value of identifying users early in the lifecycle. Airship research indicates that identified users have 4X higher activation rates and are more likely to convert than anonymous users. By leveraging customer profiles and historical data, brands can personalize experiences and foster deeper connections with their audience.

Identified users purchase 43% more
frequently than anonymous users.*

2. Get Opt-In Permissions
Obtaining opt-in permissions for push notifications is crucial for driving app engagement and retention. Lewis stressed the importance of using soft prompts or native app screens to explain the benefits of opting in before presenting users with operating system prompts. Brands that effectively communicate the value proposition of push notifications and optimize how they ask users for opt-ins can achieve higher opt-in rates and ultimately increase purchase frequency.

Opted-in devices have a 13% lift in purchase
frequency compared to opted-out devices.
Top performers see a lift as high as 39%.*

3. Gather Preferences
Understanding user preferences is essential for delivering personalized experiences that resonate with customers. Lewis discussed various methods for collecting preferences, including preference centers, interest-based surveys and contextual data. By progressively gathering and leveraging preferences, brands can enhance targeting accuracy and drive higher conversion rates.

Campaigns that use preferences for audience
targeting see a 59% lift in purchase conversion.
Top performers see a lift as high as 91%.*

Opt-In Insights from Sustainability B-Corp, Olio 

Jennie Lewis chatted with Honey Hodgson, Engagement Marketing Lead at Olio, a certified B Corporation focused on creating a circular economy within communities. They discussed the importance of activating customers within the first 30 days of app download and strategies for encouraging opt-ins to push notifications. They also shared insights from their favorite brands, such as Duolingo, and discussed aspirations for the future of Olio, including optimizing communication preferences and testing new features. 

Olio customers who are opted-in are
2.5x more likely to list an item in the app.

Olio recently implemented an opt-in campaign that had a 51% conversion rate. Amid concerns of potential decline following the Android 13 rollout, their aim was to drive opt-ins from users who had previously opted out and users who had not yet made an opt-in selection. After deploying an A/B test with Airship and seeing record conversion rates, they achieved a 24% increase in opt-in rates YoY and were able to guide future campaign approaches. 

Overall, Lewis and Hodgson emphasized the importance of personalized communication and ongoing engagement in driving long-term retention and success in mobile. 

Capture Customer Attention with Airship  

Mastering mobile app experiences requires a strategic approach to Life After Download, and that begins with improving user progress through the activation stage of the lifecycle. Apps that outperform their category in activation focus on user identification, opt-in permissions and preference gathering. By implementing these strategies and committing to continuous experimentation and optimization, you can effectively capture long-term value and lasting customer relationships.

Watch our on-demand webinar, Capture Customer Attention: 3 Strategies in 30 Days, to gain valuable insights and delve deeper into each strategy.

To see how your app compares to your category on critical activation benchmarks, please download our Activation Benchmarks Report.

Get in touch to learn how Airship can help you acquire, activate and engage app customers.

The post Mastering Mobile: 3 Strategies for Capturing Customer Attention appeared first on Airship.

In this week’s episode of Masters of Max, Tom Butta welcomes Harry Parkes, VP of Product at OVO, a major energy supplier based in Bristol, England. Harry brings a wealth of experience from the product and design fields, and is at the forefront of boosting consumer engagement and facilitating the transition towards sustainable energy use at OVO. Founded over a decade ago, OVO emerged as a challenger in the UK energy sector and now boasts 4M customers.

The conversation dives deep into the philosophical and practical aspects of product design and management. Harry underscores the importance of understanding the user’s context when designing a product or service, drawing parallels between product management and the design field. Both disciplines, he argues, revolve around problem-solving within the situational context of users. 

A significant part of the interview highlights OVO’s innovative approach to engaging customers through its mobile app offerings. With the energy sector’s shifting landscape, OVO has benefitted from their customers’ newly sparked interest in conserving energy. The company has invested in app features that allow users to check their energy usage, understand how energy flows through their homes, and offer insights to reduce their carbon footprint and save money. The app plays a critical role in getting customers to engage with their energy and start thinking about where it comes from, fostering an ongoing relationship to advance the decarbonization agenda.

For businesses looking to enhance their mobile engagement and app offerings, Harry provides valuable insights. Emphasizing the significance of understanding customer behaviors, perceptions and profiles, as well as using AI, to add real value to customers’ experiences. Harry also highlights OVO’s focused approach to becoming net zero by 2035. 

Subscribe to “Masters of MAX: The Mobile App Experience Podcast” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, Audible or YouTube.

Make Connections:

• Connect with Harry Parkes on LinkedIn
• Check out OVO Energy for iOS and Android
• Connect with Tom Butta on LinkedIn

The post How OVO’s Mobile App is Critical to Reaching Net Zero – Masters of MAX ep. #22 appeared first on Airship.

For apps, peak install periods are the most significant value creation opportunities — and also the most costly due to more paid install competition. To quantify the opportunity and bring greater urgency to value-capture efforts, our team at Airship analyzed mobile app lifecycle and retention data aggregated across more than 60 million new shopping apps first installed between Oct. 1 and Nov. 27 (Cyber Monday), 2023. 

Some of our key app install findings include:

• Peak Day: Going on a decade, Black Friday is the top day of the year for customers to install a shopping app — double the daily average rate for October.
• Peak Week: Six of the top seven peak shopping app install days were Nov. 19-25, which is much more tightly grouped than prior years. This peak week saw 40% more app installs than October’s weekly average. 
• Pre-Holiday: Five of the seven lowest daily app install days were Oct. 1-7, providing a one-week pre-holiday cohort to compare against peak-week customers.

A June 2023 report titled “Unlock Your Revenue Growth Potential” from Forrester Research explains why the stakes are so high with these users: “When acquisition costs are high, customer lifespans need a long enough runway to amortize those costs and generate returns. In other words, brands must hold on to newly acquired customers for dear life.” 

Wake Up, Retailers! 
The core finding of our retention analysis should be a wake-up call to retailers everywhere: by Week 3 after install, any advantage gained in this merriest time of year is wiped out as peak-week customers go on to average 18% lower weekly retention rates than customers acquired pre-holiday. By Week 15, peak-week retention rates plummet further.

A three percentage point difference at Week 15 — +27% greater than peak week’s rate — can equate to massive future value. Research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company found a 5% increase in retained customers yields 25-95% more profit. More recently, Google/Ipsos found that 74% of retail decision-makers say investing in mobile apps is key to driving profitability and important for long-term success (85%). 

Despite the peak growth opportunity and overall importance of apps, the two cohorts exhibit a similar retention pattern, suggesting retailers don’t treat peak-week app customers any differently from pre-holiday customers — despite the holiday frenzy’s urgent, transactional focus. Essentially, retailers allow peak-week customers to remain transactionally focused, which is reflected in lower retention rates before Christmas has even arrived. In addition, both cohorts see 38% of new users only open the app once within the analysis time frame (Week 0), helping to account for the Week 1 retention rate. 

Capturing Value Requires Advancing Customers Through the App Lifecycle
Rather than focusing on rear-view retention rates, retailers should focus on advancing customers through the mobile app lifecycle — from acquisition to activation, engagement and loyalty. To help, we compared the peak-week and pre-holiday cohorts with a subset of metrics used to gauge and optimize progress through the activation and engagement lifecycle stages. 

During activation (Day 1-30 after download), the most successful apps focus on understanding customers’ preferences and interests while gaining ways to communicate with them. Identified User Coverage, which is the number of devices with a unique customer ID divided by total devices, is a key metric as it allows brands to link customer data from prior interactions and across channels to better personalize and orchestrate future interactions. Customers gained during pre-holiday have 3% higher Identified User Coverage rates than peak-week adopters. Perhaps due to seasonality and promotions or rewards requiring registration, both cohorts come in above the February shopping category averages: 10% higher for pre-holiday customers and 7% higher for peak week.

Metric comparisons for the engagement lifecycle stage included Average Sessions Per Active User, Average Session Length (in minutes per month), and Airship’s Engagement Score, which indicates how many monthly active users return on a daily basis. 

• Pre-holiday customers’ February 2024 Engagement Scores are 8% higher than the shopping category average and 14% higher than peak-week customers’, further illustrating the transitory, transactional nature of the latter cohort. 
• Pre-holiday customers also lead in Average Sessions Per Active User, with February 2024 totals 17% higher than peak-week customers and 9% higher than the shopping category average. 
• The only engagement metric where peak-week customers outperformed pre-holiday customers was Average Session Length, with .006 more monthly minutes in February 2024 (+.4%). Both cohorts are 9% below the February shopping category average for session duration.

While customers are flocking to shopping apps to find the best deals, earn rewards and gain exclusive access, retailers need to focus on how they can turn installs and first transactions into ongoing use. 

For best practices, additional metrics, and benchmarks to compare activation and engagement performance across app store categories, check out Airship’s reports: Mobile Lifecycle Benchmark: Activation and Mobile Lifecycle Benchmark: Engagement. You can also check out Airship’s April 11 webinar, Capture Customer Attention: 3 Strategies in 30 Days, for insights on how to elevate your activation game.

The post The Holiday Gift That Doesn’t Keep Giving: Black Friday’s Doubling of New Shopping App Customers Sees Long-Term Value Quickly Erode appeared first on Airship.

Recently, we featured three guest speakers with high-level user experience design expertise: Evidation’s General Manager of the Consumer Business Meg Dryer, Sam’s Club VP Head of Product & Research Martin Granström and Fetch’s CMO Birk Cooper. While their products and services are different, the companies share a reverence for experience design. Following are their key insights on designing effective and customer-centric mobile app experiences. 

User-Centric Design: The Heart of Memorable Apps
The foundation of every successful app is user-centric experience design. Why? It anticipates and drives customer activation, engagement and retention. 

Take inspiration from Fetch, America’s leading rewards app, which provides customers with rewards from 650 brand partners. Its large volume of offerings could initially overwhelm new users, so Fetch intelligently introduces brands to users over time through personalization. In addition, Fetch incorporates fun features, such as gaming and a leaderboard, to quite literally make earning rewards fun and encourage frequent use. 

Evidation, a pioneer in health engagement and rewards, leveraged customer feedback during an app rebrand. This process improved the overall UX and prevented a stylistic faux pas. When evaluating new brand colors, a customer revealed that purple symbolically represented death in their culture. Being a health-focused company, Evidation swiftly removed the color from their palette. This scenario underscores the importance of centering users in all design aspects, from functional to aesthetic. 

Innovative Features for Customer Retention
Customer engagement and retention are essential to brand loyalty. Companies achieve this by proactively identifying user pain points and integrating solutions within apps. After noticing a pattern of dips in user engagement, Evidation designed features to combat “off moments.” They began offering customers the option to switch the app’s focus to a higher priority goal.  For example, customers can shift monitoring from exercise to sleep. Additionally, by connecting to a wearable device, users are rewarded points for actions they do every day, such as walking. Through design strategies that proactively anticipate app disengagement, Evidation retains users long-term.

Infusing Brand DNA through Experimentation
The design and functionality of mobile apps do more than just engage users — they mirror your brand’s heart and soul. Customers want app-enabled conveniences and streamlined services, but you only get one chance to make a first impression. 

Brands forge stronger bonds with users by integrating their mission and values into the app design. A brilliant approach is through creative experimentation. For example, Evidation, engages a community of advisors for beta testing before introducing design changes to all users. This process demonstrates their commitment to trust and transparency and aids in continually upgrading app experiences.

Fetch ingeniously integrates their ethos into design. Their mantra? Make it fun for customers to earn rewards through simple activities like scanning receipts. By consistently iterating ways to embed their brand identity into app experiences, they can retain 74% of new users after month two. 

Retail giant Sam’s Club combines physical and digital design elements for cohesive member experiences. Experimentation in their unique design studio, Clubhouse, helps develop innovative solutions to address member needs across journeys spanning the mobile app, website, and physical stores. By dedicating space and resources to building cohesive experiences, both employees and customers benefit. Customers seamlessly experience the brand, whether it’s through the mobile app, store or gas pump. Associates obtain consumer-grade digital and physical tools that equip them to increase customer satisfaction. 

Elevating App Experiences 
Creating a mobile app that delivers on brand values, addresses customers needs innovatively and offers an ongoing value exchange to become indispensable is key. Take a moment and check out our Masters of MAX podcast for more tips and insights on elevating the app experience, boosting customer engagement and building brand loyalty. Also, the next time you open a favorite app, take a moment to revel in the experiences and functionality that keep you coming back for more. 

The post Keys to App Experience Design: Hear From 3 Experts appeared first on Airship.

The reason for using ASO is to foster growth by expanding the user base and capturing more market share. ASO is the #1 driver of app acquisition and is crucial for app market success, the equivalent of search engine optimization for websites. According to Apple, 70% of App Store visitors use search to discover apps, and almost 65% of downloads happen directly after a search, not from being featured by Apple or Google. Additionally, “searching and browsing the app stores” continues to be the top way every generation globally discovers new apps to download, according to our survey of 11,000 global consumers. 

In our recent webinar, ASO expert Dave Bell, GM of Airship’s Gummicube, shared valuable insights and best practices on app store visibility, conversion rate optimization and improving ASO strategies to drive user acquisition and maximize your market share. You can watch the full presentation on-demand or get the highlights here:

1. Take Advantage of Custom Product Pages and Custom Store Listings

Custom Product Pages  (CPPs) allow you to create 35 different product pages for your store listing, with unique URLs to include in your advertising campaigns. When a user clicks on an ad, they will be brought to the specific page you linked, which you can optimize to reflect the environment the user came from.

With every unique CPPs listing, you can obtain actionable data about what content and features increase conversion rates across various marketing channels and then apply these insights to your broader acquisition and ASO strategies. App Analytics in App Store Connect will be your hub to track the performance of CPPs (impressions, downloads, re-downloads and conversion rates).

Customizing app store listings to target important user demographics with seasonal and culturally relevant content or listings relevant to different searches allows marketers to increase conversion rates and lower the cost of user acquisition across all traffic sources — paid, organic, earned and owned. Apple and Google have made it much easier to get started achieving these benefits with CPPs and Custom Store Listings, respectively.

2. Leverage In-App Events and Promotional Content for Engagement

Apple’s in-app events and Google Play’s promotional content are essential for boosting app discovery within the app stores and can help you reconnect and re-engage inactive app customers. Optimizing these features can contribute to a competitive edge, including the opportunity to be featured across a multitude of app store pages: Search, Apps/Games tabs, or the Today tab. In-app events are timely events within apps, such as challenges, competitions, premieres, special events, live-streamed experiences and major app advancements.

Once a user has downloaded your app, its listing in the app store becomes almost invisible. Also, both iOS and Android archive apps if users become inactive, reducing on-device visibility. In-app events reclaim visibility and ensure your app doesn’t lose out on real estate relative to competitor alternatives presented in search results.

3. Measure ASO Effectiveness for Success

Measuring the effectiveness of ASO requires understanding how external events can impact results and filtering out that noise. When measuring ASO, consider the impact of seasonal variations, sporadic external events, certain external marketing channels, and fluctuations in the app’s ratings and reviews. 

User ratings and reviews play a significant role in ASO success. Gummicube says four-fifths of users do not trust an app with ratings below 4 stars. Higher ratings can attract more downloads and improve an app’s ranking in search results. Conversely, low ratings can harm an app’s reputation and decrease visibility. 

4. Proceed Carefully With Google’s AI Helper

Google’s AI Helper, still in Beta, is not designed for ASO and may not always produce content that complies with Google’s own guidelines. Humans need to be in control. Inaccurate or incomplete details generated by AI Helper can seriously impact ratings and reviews if new app users feel misled. Additionally, AI Helper doesn’t have a prompt for desired keywords and doesn’t seem to use historically high-converting language from past experiments. 

Likewise, AI Helper does not take compliance into account. Aside from generating inaccurate or inappropriate content, AI Helper may generate language in the short and full description that does not comply with Google’s recommendations and guidelines. In addition, AI-generated app store descriptions may not satisfy Google’s  “accurate and compelling” requirement. Out-of-compliance language may cause an app to be ineligible for promotion or rejected.  

For now, we recommend restricting your use of Google AI Helper to sparking ideas that a copywriter and ASO expert can use to help create original content. 

App stores are evolving beyond mere distribution points; they have become dynamic environments where users discover new apps and services. The four strategies discussed here are not isolated tactics but should be integrated into a holistic approach encompassing keyword optimization, creative testing and frequent updates. Get in touch to learn how Airship can help you implement and master App Store Optimization strategies.

Watch our on-demand webinar, The New Era of ASO: Conquering the Modern App Stores, to gain insights about App Store Optimization.

The post 4 Ways to Master App Store Optimization (ASO) appeared first on Airship.

Whether it’s buying a new piece of clothing from your favorite brand, ordering your favorite food or planning your dream vacation, we all want to get what we want when we want it — and brands live and die by how well they deliver on those expectations. They must know enough about their customers to deliver what customers need and only what they need. “Knowing enough” requires capturing, storing and accessing often very complex data. For most brands, that‘s a struggle.

The Problem of Complex Data

Brands need to better ensure they’re collecting the right customer information and storing it correctly. The required information is often a complex data set, such as all items currently in the customer’s cart or all the upcoming flights they’ve booked. With all the different touchpoints a brand has with customers  — messaging engagement data, web and app usage data, social media cues and qualitative feedback like surveys, reviews and customer service interactions — it can be challenging to identify and organize all that data into a usable customer profile.  

Historically, brands have devised clever but unwieldy ways to house complex data sets in various tables or user properties with complex naming conventions. These practices often led to issues with updating and parsing multiple tables or challenging lookup processes to pull the correct information together. The result: frequently delayed outbound campaigns, forced limitations in the scope of marketing efforts, frustration with tools, and, ultimately, a less-than-ideal customer experience.

JSON Attributes Redefines Complex Data Storage and Access

JSON Attributes is the latest addition to the robust set of segmentation and personalization tools Airship provides today. With JSON Attributes, you can now store complex detailed information without having to use outdated and slow table lookup methods or be limited by the number of data points you can identify. JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a semi-structured data format, so it doesn’t have a rigid structure like tabular formats. It’s flexible in size and structure, which gives it advantages over tabular data like CSVs. However, it’s still easily readable and usable due to its use of key/value pairs, such as Name:Sam or Date:2024-03-26. 

To understand this better, let’s look at a simple table that tracks events.

This table works well as long as the data we’re storing is always in this format and has only one property. The moment we need to track additional properties, the number of columns will need to expand to store that data. Additionally, some events may not have some of the properties, so you’ll end up with blank or null values in the table. Also, if you need to track a new property, the entire table must be modified to incorporate it. 

With Airship’s JSON Attributes, you can store data using a flexible and easy-to-understand structure with as many or few properties as needed — for example, a user’s entire shopping cart with details for each item in the cart:

Or each of the products that they’ve subscribed to with current offers available:

Or all of the itinerary data for travel they’ve booked with details for each flight:

Using data stored within JSON Attributes, you can use Airship’s advanced segmentation tools to segment users and then easily use the same data to personalize your messaging to each user. JSON Attributes joins the already robust set of tools Airship provides and can be used in conjunction with Tags, Events, Preferences and others to create a complete, real-time user profile: 

Using JSON Attributes, you can deliver the experience your customers want when they want it — and do so with ease. Airship includes JSON Attributes as part of the AXP platform unlike other vendors that charge data points, including invisible-to-you array updates. More of the right data is key to delivering better customer experiences and accelerating your activation, engagement and monetization strategies. We’re thrilled to introduce JSON Attribute capabilities and look forward to seeing how you employ them to solve your most complex use cases. Check out our documentation: https://docs.airship.com/whats-new/2024-02-26-json-attributes/

For help with your personalization and zero-party data strategies, or to learn about Airship’s preference center capabilities, please reach out to your Airship Account Manager. We also have Strategic Services available to help guide you in developing better mobile app experiences for your customers and your brand.

Written on Apple Vision Pro

The post Your Users Are Complex. Engaging with Them Doesn’t Have to Be. appeared first on Airship.

In this week’s episode of Masters of Max, host Tom Butta welcomes Vernesa Ćutuk, a CRM specialist, to the podcast. Vernesa has a diverse career background, working with various industries such as telcos, pharmaceuticals, startups, and mobile apps. Most recently, Vernesa was the CRM Marketing manager for Sleep Cycle, the sleep tracking app with over 300,000 monthly downloads. Now, Vernesa consults independently, sharing her expertise in understanding the user journey and promoting a user-centric approach within companies.

During their conversation, Tom emphasizes that simply having a CRM platform doesn’t make your brand automatically customer focused and that you need to actively engage users effectively across different channels. Vernesa also highlights the need to understand user behavior and segmentation to personalize interactions and optimize engagement. 

You’ll also hear Vernesa talk about the concept of being a “T-shaped marketer,” the significance of balancing depth in specialization with breadth in decision-making to address varying customer needs, and how brands can foster seamless customer experiences across different touchpoints—physical stores, websites, and mobile apps.

Subscribe to “Masters of MAX: The Mobile App Experience Podcast” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, Audible or YouTube.

Make Connections:

• Connect with Vernesa Ćutuk on LinkedIn
• Check out Sleep Cycle for iOS and Android
• Connect with Tom Butta on LinkedIn

The post Why Your CRM Strategy Should Include Cozy Onboarding – Masters of MAX ep. #21 appeared first on Airship.

Having a high Engagement Score is always great, but the score itself doesn’t tell you enough about your performance. The Engagement Score’s value surfaces when you compare it to other brands’ scores in your app category or your own score over time.

What’s your Engagement Score? You can easily find it on Airship’s App Health Dashboard. 

Now that you know your Engagement Score, how it’s trending over time, and how well you’re performing relative to your category cohort, what then? If the data shows you can improve your score, it’s time to take action. To stimulate app visits, you should promote your app in your general advertising, content marketing, and physical locations if you have them; but the most direct and measurable way to increase app traffic is through outreach channels — push notifications, email and SMS.

Let’s start by determining how much of the audience is reachable via push notifications. The App Health Dashboard is a great source for this information. It provides an at-a-glance view of your opt-in rate and opted-in audience and how those trend over time. 

Once armed with this foundational information,  you can take action. Here are 3 strategies for driving continuous app engagement.

Always Be Communicating (ABC)
Your Engagement Score is your baseline of monthly active users returning on a daily basis. You’ll need to hold your customers’ attention to increase this score. Regularly communicating will build an engagement cadence. Creating compelling content, offers and calls to action will result in app visits.

• Tailor your communications to your app’s typical visitation sequence. Daily communication might make sense for a coffee or health and fitness app;  for a commerce app, daily communication might be too frequent unless you’re running a multi-day promotion or event.
• Align communications with customer value. If the message doesn’t show value, customers are unlikely to act on it, and they may become fatigued with future communications.
• Personalize the communication to the individual. Sure, using a first name can be helpful (sometimes it’s not), but customers expect you to know them. You can personalize by integrating contextual elements, such as recent interactions or shared preferences.

Meet Them Where They Are
The decision to use push notifications is natural when looking to drive app visits, but not all customers have opted into notifications. Also, some communications perform better when amplified through multiple channels. Integrating email and SMS messaging into your communication plan grants customers more options to determine how they’d like to communicate, and it expands the number of channels available.

• Integrate a preference center for collecting profile data. A preference center allows customers to define the types and frequency of messages they want to receive and their preferred channels. It’s an excellent tool for managing opt-ins and expanding your customer reach.
• Preference centers are also an excellent vehicle for collecting deeper customer profile information, which you can use to personalize and contextualize your communications further. Collecting information on interests, product or content categories, time horizons, and social or community interests will enable deeper segmentation and analysis.
• Make the preference center easy to find in your app so customers can continually update their profile as their interests evolve or as you add new options.

Adopt a Culture of Experimentation
Many variables go into crafting effective communications, including copy, content, timing, layout, imagery, subject line and, of course, the value proposition or offer. Improving your app engagement requires traffic-driving communications to resonate with your audience. Not all will be effective, but knowing how to improve them is essential. With an experimentation and testing plan, it will be easier to tell if a particular communication missed the mark entirely or if a minor tweak would have generated different results. The same is true for high-performing messages. Could minor adjustments make them even better?

• Set goals for your messages to establish performance levels.
• Test multiple message variants to measure performance and identify which variables influence your results.
• Consider establishing holdout groups to measure marketing’s entire impact.

Generating repeat traffic to your app is the first step to realizing maximum customer value. A regular, multi-channel, orchestrated messaging plan is the path to driving repeat traffic and improving your Engagement Score. 

Airship’s App Health Dashboard is a great starting point for identifying opportunities. Combined with our out-of-the-box Preference Center and Experimentation Hub, you have robust tools to drive multi-channel opt-ins, increase your addressable audience and refine your message performance. 

If you haven’t spoken with your account manager about these marketer-friendly tools or want to learn more about our integrated email and SMS capabilities, click here, and we’ll help coordinate a demonstration.

Navigator is Airship’s customer newsletter covering the latest mobile industry trends, product updates, use cases and best practices, and other learning resources. It’s yet another resource to help you deliver better mobile experiences and create greater value more quickly. If you’d like to receive our monthly Navigator newsletter, please sign up here. 

The post 3 Strategies for Increasing Customer Engagement appeared first on Airship.

In this half-day session, mobile leaders gathered to discuss trends, challenges and opportunities. Here, I highlight three topics: an essential new retail tool, investment drivers for app experience and some new Airship data on activation and engagement.

Store Mode Is The Tool Retailers Should Be Thinking About 
Patrons of The Home Depot are big fans of “store mode.” That we know coming out of Mobile Leaders Forum, Atlanta. Based on the open-forum conversations, that view is unanimous. 

Sarah Post discussed store mode in her spotlight session. When shopping in-store, navigating a massive inventory is more manageable with store mode, which allows customers to search and locate products using an interactive map. Since every store is different, store mode serves as a wayfinder for customers to find items down to the bay number and provides an up to date inventory of items available. 

In developing store mode, The Home Depot was looking to create a great experience for pros and DIY homeowners alike who connect with The Home Depot via its mobile app. The brand understood that a strong relationship depended on a mutual exchange of value. They began looking for ways to give customers more of what they needed to make their brand the clear option for home repair, improvement and building. 

By making the mobile app an essential part of the customer experience, the brand has moved from having 1 in 8 households to 1 in 3 households in North America using The Home Depot app. Store mode has been used more than 13 million times over the past year and been an integral part of driving over $1B in purchases. Store mode results in up to 5x more interactions than apps without this feature, according to the CFI Group. Sarah advised brands to set a bold, customer-focused strategy, including working hard to understand users’ pain points in moments that matter and looking for ways to let customer behavior fuel their personalization. 

Mobile Experience Investment Drivers
We asked panelists what consumer behavior has most influenced their investment in the mobile customer experience. 

There was broad agreement on the key drivers, including the vast increase in mobile usage over the last five years, as well as the demand for better personalization, speed and convenience. Panelists also noted that today’s consumers expect quick and seamless experiences, especially on mobile, so streamlining internal approvals and processes has been key. 

Panelists also agreed that testing mobile customer experiences is key in meeting customer expectations for brand interactions. A/B testing has become a key part of a successful engagement strategy for these brands, and AI-assisted experimentation is gaining steam as a hot topic of discussion.

Activation and Retention Trends
In this session, Jennie Lewis, who leads Airship’s Customer Insights team discussed three important steps brands need customers to take within the first thirty days to maximize their lifetime value. She showed attendees how top-performing apps authenticate users and encourage opt-ins by showcasing the value of doing so, and discussed the importance of enabling customers to set their preferences (topic, channel and frequency) and share their interests via surveys and other interactive experiences. 

With rising acquisition costs, brands are more focused than ever on retention. According to CommerceNext, most retailers claim acquisition costs have continued to increase since the release of iOS 14, making retention a critical element of mobile success. Brands that consistently drive traffic to the app and continue to progressively gather preference and zero-party data are among the top performers regarding engagement and retention. In her research, Jennie found that brands leveraging zero-party data saw up to a 59% lift in conversion rate when using audience targeting. 

To learn more about how to capture and keep customer attention and see how your brand’s performance compares to its category, download our Mobile Lifecycle Benchmark: Activation report. 

Airship’s Mobile Leaders Forums are the must-attend event for brands looking to gain industry insights, connect with their peers and discover the latest best practices to capture more value from digital customer experiences. A special thank you to our Atlanta sponsors: Radar and Twilio Segment. 

Want to find out when we’re coming to a city near you? Check out our Event Page, where we announce new Mobile Leaders Forum cities.

The post Mobile Is The Key To Unlocking Customer Value for Brands Across Retail, Media, and Finance appeared first on Airship.

Now+Next is an association of companies operating in the data, technology, and design space that aims to inspire young women and provide pathways into the industry. We aim to drive affirmative action and create an environment that better supports and encourages young women interested in pursuing a career in technology. Since the association’s launch in 2022, Now+Next has connected with 6,000 female students (and counting!) across the UK.

Why Now+Next?

Our mission at Now+Next is to inspire young women through understanding possibilities, providing connections and gaining experience in data, design and technology. We represent a proactive effort to build upon past achievements and propel further advancements in gender equality, particularly by fostering inclusivity and representation in areas where women have historically been underrepresented. 

Laura Schwarz, Airship’s Sr. Director, EMEA Sales and Now+Next co-founder, underscores the importance of looking ahead and identifying areas where women are still underrepresented or marginalized. She said:

“We called this initiative Now+Next because we, as women in different sectors, businesses and fields, have already come a long way — which led us to the now. But we also have a responsibility to continue creating more equality — that’s the next step. We always need to ask ourselves, ‘What’s next?’ That’s why it’s so important that we do this work of getting girls to imagine themselves in tech jobs.” 

“We always need to ask ourselves, ‘What’s next’?”

Voices from diverse backgrounds amplified the importance of the Now+Next endeavor. Daria Granstrom, Partner Manager at Mixpanel, said:

“It’s important we broaden girls’ perspective on what working in tech really means, inspire them to pursue STEM subjects and challenge gender stereotypes in these disciplines. This helps the whole tech ecosystem in the UK welcome more diverse talent and, therefore, deliver better solutions.”

Sahara Baig, Head of Delivery at Candyspace, noted that the industry is male-dominated, so it’s crucial to inspire young women to take up careers in tech. She said:

“Diversity drives innovation, and women bring different perspectives, ideas and approaches to problem-solving, which can lead to more innovative solutions for businesses. Careers in tech pay significantly higher salaries than non-digital roles. By encouraging young women to take up careers in tech, we empower them to access jobs that pay more and offer them financial freedom. This can have a ripple effect on our society: if more women take up tech, there will be more female role models for future generations.”

Airship’s Laura Schwarz commented: “It’s representation. It’s being an example. It’s opening their minds and showing them something they didn’t even know before that they may like or want.”

These voices and others in the technology space echo the urgent need for initiatives like Now+Next. They aim to dismantle barriers and pave the way for a more inclusive and innovative future across tech and industries that utilize it.

Girls Learn About Design, Engagement and Data 

Engaged in a consulting challenge for the day, the girls divided into breakout workshops to explore various aspects of technology solutions.

Design
Candyspace guided the students through User Experience Design (UX), emphasizing research methodologies and the fusion of art and science. They highlighted how thoughtful and empathetic design can help address real-world problems.

Data
Mixpanel provided an overview of data analysis, stressing the significance of customer understanding and utilizing data to drive action. They emphasized the role of analytics in guiding data-driven decision-making processes. 

Personalization
AB Tasty’s workshop centered on personalization within the user journey and digital experimentation strategies. They highlighted the importance of tailoring experiences to individual users and leveraging experimentation to optimize digital interactions.

Engagement 
Airship’s workshop focused on engagement, beginning with an exploration of the mobile app lifecycle. We prompted students to reflect on their own app usage behaviors, then provided insights from Airship’s research on consumer behavior, comparing the students’ generation to other age groups. Discussions followed about strategies for brands to engage their app users effectively. We highlighted the importance of prioritizing apps as premiere destinations rather than using them as just another promotional channel.

Diversity Across Disciplines: What’s Next For Tech

A panel featuring speakers from Accurx, LCH, Brompton Bikes and Monday.com discussed the broad range of roles available in tech — from marketing and sales to data and operations — and the challenges women face across the sector. They stressed that having more women in organizations is not only important within tech — it’s vital across all industries. With millions of girls without access to education worldwide, it’s our responsibility to support and inspire those with this educational opportunity. 

Panelists offered guidance to young women contemplating careers in the tech industry. They cited the significance of purposeful engagement, assertive communication and self-worth. They also discussed the key attributes crucial for women’s advancement into leadership roles within the tech field, highlighting qualities such as resilience, adaptability, empathy and agile decision-making skills.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Airship

As a founding member of the Now+Next association, Airship’s mission is to inspire young women by helping them understand possibilities, providing connections, and supporting experiences in data, design and technology. 

As part of our Women’s History Month celebration, our ERG for female-identifying individuals, Airship FIRE (Female Inclusion, Resilience, and Empowerment), will host a virtual coffee hour chat on self-advocacy and its importance in inspiring an inclusive and thriving work environment for women – both within and outside their profession. 

Airship continues to focus its DEI work on Talent, Workforce Culture, and Community Impact. The Now+Next initiative fits well into our Community Impact work by reinforcing Airship’s DEI commitments and year-round efforts to #uplift the industries and communities we serve across the globe. There’s plenty to do, but we know that creating an inclusive culture must top the agenda for all. It’s our mission to attract, retain, reward and develop top talent, says Airship’s Senior Director of DEI, Temidayo Afonja. 

How does your organization shape up in terms of gender equity and inclusion? Let us know if we can help share ideas or resources.

Interested in getting involved in one of our future events? Just get in touch.

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