In this episode of Masters of MAX, host Tom Butta welcomes Jonathan Azouri, the CEO of CatchCorner by Sports Illustrated, North America’s top destination for booking sports facilities and activities. Jonathan shares his entrepreneurial journey and passion for innovation, highlighting the importance of keeping a human perspective in business. He emphasizes the impact of every interaction on user experience and the value of hands-on leadership in building successful teams.

You’ll hear Jonathan talk about what inspired him to start CatchCorner by SI, and his focus on accessibility and seamless user experience. While booking apps for hotel and restaurant reservations are familiar, Jonathan addresses the technical complexities and unique requirements involved in sports facility rentals including e-signatures and customer safety.

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

Make Connections:

• Connect with Jonathan Azouri on LinkedIn
• Check out CatchCorner by SI for iOS and Android
• Connect with Tom Butta on LinkedIn

The post Essential Advice for Building a Successful App – Masters of MAX ep. #20 appeared first on Airship.

Responsible AI: The  Crucial Input-Output Equation
Speakers were in broad agreement that AI is not a job-replacer but a task-automator. Lilac Ilan, Head of Global Telco at NVIDIA, emphasized the importance of data accuracy over sheer volume, stressing that the effectiveness of AI hinges on the intended purpose. Don McGuire, CMO of Qualcomm, shared insights into their dual chatbot strategy, one for internal use, which has been trained on the company’s internal data only, and a second for external use, which has been trained on public data. Depending on the type of query, one may be more relevant than the other. 

Adding to the importance of data accuracy, organizations must avoid feeding sensitive data into AI models to ensure private information remains private. There needs to be a stringent, secure and controlled environment for handling AI input, according to Joachim Jonkers, Director of Product and AI at Sinch. Companies like Qualcomm are already putting AI vetting committees in place to help ensure the AI meets all company requirements before being deployed widely. Airship’s Chief Legal & Administrative Officer, Virginia Llewellyn, agrees with this approach: “Frameworks for responsible use of AI will be an imperative for businesses of all kinds, and cross-functional teams spanning legal, product and infosec will put marketers in the best position to harness the best of AI and avoid the pitfalls.” 

Embracing The Hybrid Human-Machine Future
Examples everywhere are emerging of teams embracing AI in workflows to free up human resources for more strategic and creative endeavors. From customer support and coding to atomizing content for broad-scale experimentation, human efficiency increases without diminishing the importance of face-to-face collaboration and human vetting of inputs and outputs.

According to Sir Martin Sorrell, the founder of WPP and S4 Capital, who talked through the key areas of AI impact on brands, there is a significant benefit associated with the knowledge transfer brought by AI: it enables a company’s information to be decentralized, leading to more internal collaboration and equality within the organization, as well as improved productivity and decision-making. 

Unleashing Hyper-Personalization with AI
AI, especially Gen AI, emerged as a powerhouse for hyper-personalization — the ability to scale content with precision based on first- and zero-party data. This is why companies like Netflix can create billions of versions of creative assets specific to their customers with a high level of accuracy. Tsvika Besor, Senior AI Product Manager at Monday.com, also addressed the importance of leveraging AI to personalize content throughout the customer lifecycle and across various channels. 

This need for AI and hyper-personalization is driven by the rising quality and efficiency expectations from customers, according to Deborah Battaglia, SVP Customer Experience at Assurant. She also addressed the rise in customer satisfaction due to better customer support provided by Assurant agents aided by AI. 

It’s Time to Thoughtfully Mobilize AI Initiatives
It’s only been 18 months since ChatGPT was launched, but the telco industry has overwhelmingly embraced it. However, according to GSMA’s Head of Data Acquisition Rhadika Gupta, the industry has the habit of swiftly moving between trends (metaverse, anyone?). There seems to be a big push towards using AI, but the quality of delivery is not there yet. She called for a more thoughtful and strategic approach to AI in the coming year, emphasizing the need for quality in AI delivery.

MWC 2024 underscored the pivotal role of AI, particularly GenAI, in shaping the future across various industries. It’s clear AI is here to stay. But the journey it will take is still one to be improved and shaped by all of us along the way. Having the right levels of internal corporate processes in place and teams broadly committed to driving continuous experimentation and optimization will help ensure AI adoption accelerates competitive advantage rather than facilitating mediocrity or exposing the business to undue risks.

The post Key Takeaways from Mobile World Congress 2024 appeared first on Airship.

The importance, pressures and value creation opportunities surrounding mobile app experience command marketing and technology leaders’ attention. We think about, research and advise brands around the world everyday on how to capture more customer value from mobile apps for themselves, and often share that knowledge more widely through our blog. Of everything published in 2023, the most-viewed blog posts focused on three overarching topics:

• Empowering a company’s entire team to create and optimize app experiences
• Better activating and engaging app customers
• Innovating native mobile experiences that improve customers’ lives 

Empowering Everyone to Create and Optimize Experiences

The ability of brands to engage with customers and optimize experiences depends on the tools they have at their disposal. Airship, a long-time innovator in the mobile app space, introduced a number of enhancements over the last year offering significant improvements in brands’ abilities to engage customers inside and outside the app: 

Airship’s no-code native Experience Editor allows marketers and product owners to create, deploy and adapt high-value app experiences like onboarding, feature adoption and opt-in flows, while developers are freed up to focus on new, market-differentiating features. 

Our recent experimentation enhancements allow brands to evaluate and continually improve all aspects of the mobile customer journey. From cross-channel messages and no-code native app experiences, to the app UX and features themselves, centralize all of your  experiments to more easily manage, analyze and optimize approaches prior to rolling out the best to a broader audience.

The integration of generative AI within the Airship platform enables marketers and product owners to easily create, atomize and test content variations across marketing campaigns and the app lifecycle. The goal — more quickly zero-in on winning combinations. 

Activating and Engaging Customers

To create sustained relationships with customers, brands have to convey their value, keep customers’ attention and create interactions that are meaningful enough to lead to loyalty. In four blogs, we zeroed in on these issues through the lenses of activation, personalization, Engagement Scores and gamification: 

From app store listings to first use, brands must clearly convey the value their apps offer and educate customers on how to best take advantage of those features for their own unique needs. Activation best practices help mitigate premature dropoff and expand respectful collection of customer preferences for tailored, personalized approaches. Data on customer location, ideal timing for messages, loyalty status, behaviors, content of interest and more are the building blocks of personalization. 

Following activation, you’ll want to influence customers’ habitual app use. Engagement Scores are a great way to monitor progress as they reflect how many monthly active users return on a daily basis. 

While it’s important to have a way of measuring success, it’s even more crucial to develop tactics to incentivize frequent app usage. By encouraging behavior that elicits excitement, offers a challenge and delivers rewards, apps can retain more users. Brands can embrace gamification across the mobile app lifecycle with quizzes for product selection, progress bars to encourage winning streaks, points-based reward programs and more. Using these techniques to help customers feel valued and understood will not only enhance mobile app experiences, but customer loyalty. 

Innovate to Improve Customers’ Lives

Apps that seamlessly integrate into users’ daily routines become indispensable. Taking inspiration from diverse use cases and tailoring your app’s features to be integrated into customers’ lifestyles can significantly enhance its value. 

For example, 81% of consumers plan to use apps on smartphones and wearable devices to improve their health and well-being in the U.S., UK and France. Where it makes sense, companies can incorporate wellness features into their apps, such as connecting users to their friends and family or limiting distracting interruptions. 

A great solution is Live Activities, which delivers real-time updates on lock screens without the repeated audible interruption and clutter of multiple notifications. Fans of March Madness saw Live Activities update more than 100 times per basketball game. From developing news stories to rideshares, restaurant reservations, deliveries, sporting events and more, Live Activities (or Airship’s support for Live Updates on Android), can improve the experience and digital well-being of users across all types of apps. 

Mobile wallet is another example of a native mobile experience with broad applications to deliver seamless customer experiences. While it’s often associated with retail coupons and loyalty cards, mobile wallet is becoming a mainstay benefit for airline travelers, concertgoers, diners, gym-goers and movie theater attendees because of the ease of storing credentials and receiving updates or reminders, as well as being easily embedded within digital channels or in-store signage for broad distribution. 

Follow the lead of your peers and check out the linked blogs if you haven’t had a chance already. And let us know if there are particular topics you would like us to explore. 

Top 10 Airship blog posts of 2023 based on page views:

1. Generative AI Will Reduce Mobile App Content Bottlenecks 
2. Activate Your Activation Processes 
3. What is Gamification? 
4. 3 Ways To Score High On App Engagement 
5. Live Activities Score Big for the NCAA Basketball Tournament 
6. 7 Building Blocks of Mobile Experience Personalization 
7. Life Gets Better with Mobile Apps, Literally 
8. It’s Time for Marketers to Advance Their Use of Mobile Wallets 
9. Introducing Experiment Anywhere from Airship 
10. 14 Years Later, Another First 

The post Top 10 Mobile App Experience Blog Posts of 2023 appeared first on Airship.

As you reimagine delightful experiences for your mobile customers, consider what our experts, partners and customers had to say about the year ahead.  We’ve compiled their insights and predictions in our new 2024 Predictions & Insights eBook. Here’s a brief look:

AI, Data Privacy & Ethical Implementation
Generative AI (GenAI) will be red-hot in 2024, including calls for frameworks for responsible and ethical use, and cross-functional collaboration to navigate data security and copyright/IP concerns. Responsible use of AI is essential, and frameworks that guide and govern implementations are needed. Cross-functional teams must strike a balance between harnessing AI’s potential and mitigating its risks.

As businesses adopt GenAI to scale customer interactions, the focus sharpens on aligning efforts with business goals, with an emphasis on strategic goal-setting, continuous experimentation and data-driven optimization across the customer lifecycle. Without a strategic approach and the right goals in place, AI can’t be trained toward the best result and could accelerate mediocrity instead of enhancing competitive advantage. 

Simultaneously, the industry anticipates a transition toward expanded first- and zero-party data usage, marking a significant shift as third-party cookies fade away. This will provide publishers with a strategic opportunity to engage audiences more contextually, enrich user experiences and enable more precise targeting options.

Experimentation Mindset, Moments-Based Marketing & Customer-Centricity
Even though AI will continue to grab headlines, 2024 will actually be a transitional year for customer experiences. Sophisticated methods for reaching customers in their moments that matter will distinguish leaders from laggards.

Brands have a mandate to pivot from third-party to zero- and first-party data, leverage actionable insights, move away from channel-based approaches and embrace moments-based marketing — all of which are redefining customer engagement. As data privacy expectations evolve, we’re observing a shift: consumers are more willing to share information with brands they love. A customer-centric, mobile-first approach is becoming paramount, with the key being an ongoing exchange where brands can thoughtfully and progressively grow customer understanding over time.

Communicating value clearly, creatively, and in a timely manner is essential for retaining customers and developing brand loyalists. The challenge is to capture customer attention in their moments of engagement, meaning while they are actually using the app. As most customers decide whether to keep or delete an app within the first two uses, the window to secure ongoing use and grow customer value is fleeting and critical. Further, brands need to adopt an experimentation mindset to continuously optimize interactions inside and outside the app. As more brands embrace a culture of experimentation, mobile app experiences will become more personalized, customer-centric and immersive especially with the adoption of AR, VR and NLP. 

Learn more by reading our 2024 Predictions & Insights eBook for a full run-down of the trends you can expect to see this year.

The post Insights & Trends to Inspire Your 2024 Customer Experience Strategies appeared first on Airship.

This year’s survey, fielded with Sapio Research, included 11,000 respondents from 10 countries, including the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, South Africa, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Brazil. Insights span the entire mobile app customer lifecycle and perennial areas of focus for marketers — from personalization and email marketing to how consumers meld physical and digital experiences and what data they are willing to share with brands. 

People Are More Willing to Share All Types of Information with Brands

All 15 types of information we tracked year-over-year saw increases in the percent of consumers who said they’d share them with brands for personalized interactions and special incentives. Email addresses are the most freely shared at 86% of respondents, but consumer behaviors suggest they don’t consider it a sensitive piece of information. The second most shared information is “interests relevant to a brand” (78%), which overtook “name” as the second most shared information.

Rounding out the top five most shared information are “their communication preferences” and “what they’ve browsed on a brand’s app or website,” highlighting the importance of a customer-centric approach to brand interactions. In fact, the information seeing the biggest year-over-year gains in consumer willingness to share is “what they value socially (environmental, moral, political or religious).”

People want a more customer-centric approach and are willing to share valuable information in exchange for mobile-enabled conveniences and personalized service — which in turn allows brands to serve them better and makes opt-out much less likely. 

Emails Increasingly Left Unread 

While email addresses are most commonly shared information, it’s worth noting that 79% of consumers ignore or delete marketing emails from brands they love half the time or more (up 1% year-over-year). Younger generations, led by Gen Z, are less likely than Gen X and boomers to pursue traditional methods of avoiding commercial email — by unsubscribing or deleting emails by scanning sender or subject lines. Instead, they are much more likely to say they don’t often check their email, use a secondary email account they rarely check and use both anonymous email addresses (e.g., via Sign In with Apple) or fake ones.

People Want Personalization That’s Useful, Not Creepy

Globally, the top three types of personalization consumers find to be most useful are “recommendations and offers based on past behavior or purchases” (41%), “interests and preferences supplied to the brand” (40%) and “content and offers targeted to their current location” (34%). 

With very few exceptions,“predictive suggestions based on everything the brand knows about you” was ranked the least useful personalization method across all countries, age groups and income levels. The outliers? Gen Z, consumers in Singapore and high-income households, who find this type of personalization to be slightly more useful than another low performer — “basic information (name, city, state/country).” 

Mobile Demands Immediacy and Customer Controls

For all of the message types where we had year over year data, the only frequency option that grew across all of them was “only as I’m using the specific app.” However, the percent of respondents that want messaging “immediately, and as often as it happens” was still nearly twice as large as those that only want it while they’re using the specific app. The upshot? You need both in-app messaging and push notifications.

Consumers have varied preferences for the frequencies of app-based messaging. These findings illustrate why it’s important for brands to give customers control over the types of messages they receive, as well as where and how often they get them.

Download “The Mobile Consumer 2023” report from Airship for regional and generational insights across topics such as:

You can also join Airship and poq on July 26th for a lively discussion of the research and best practices most important to retailers. Register for “The Mobile Consumer: Enhancing Shopper Value in 2023” here.

The post Mobile Consumer Trends for 2023 Every Brand Marketer Should Know appeared first on Airship.

We’re all experiencing the acceleration of interest, debate, excitement and fear surrounding AI. The origins of AI go back decades, but the heightened interest has certainly been driven by recent Generative AI (GAI) alternatives. These promise advancements in AI application through the availability of larger learning data sets.

On a personal level, you may have found lots of ways to leverage GAI to make your day-to-day tasks more efficient — whether it be creating slides for a presentation, writing or refining a paper or crafting a note to a friend. 

In our professional lives, we see potential applications for GAI in virtually every department, but these use cases also introduce concerns about when, where and how to apply AI and what implications can arise. 

GAI Concerns
Speaking with customers, we generally hear three primary concerns about applying GAI in production environments: 

• What regulatory decisions will be made governing the use of AI and how could that impact my use case?
• Who owns data inputs/commands that are feeding the AI-enabled use cases?
• Who owns the intellectual property rights for AI-generated output, and what are the legal ramifications?

Absent additional clarity on these topics, it will take time for brands to implement widespread use of AI in production environments, and perhaps longer before brands are comfortable allowing GAI to automate decisions. 

GAI at Airship
At Airship, we have a long history of being first. We take pride in providing innovative solutions to address the needs of the market and we see lots of potential in applying AI to mobile marketing.  We believe GAI can be an important tool for enhancing the efficiency of marketing departments.

We’re proud to announce that we added GAI to the Airship platform in April to enable mobile marketers to iterate on copy, offers, subject lines and other content.

For our purposes, GAI is all about generating and refining content according to your editorial needs. You control all the inputs, as well as the decision rights on use of the output. You can use GAI to create variations of messages for testing or to accelerate the development of creative options.

Of course, Airship’s GAI tool supports multiple languages and the ability to leverage emojis (which we know can drive engagement).

The hype, focus and evolution of GAI are sure to continue in the coming months, but there are real-world applications for the technology today. When used under the right conditions, GAI can drive efficiency and time to market, while ensuring that decision processes and governance remain unchanged.

To learn more about Airship’s Generative AI capabilities contact us today.

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

The post Practical GAI Applications While the Dust Settles appeared first on Airship.

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 year we analyzed more than 665 billion notifications sent to more than 2.5 billion users across 13 verticals — offering the most robust push notification performance benchmarks available anywhere. Findings suggest that:

Segmentation and personalization are driving more efficient and effective use of push notifications, resulting in higher open rates and fewer sends. Notification opt-in rates continue to grow as well.

You can’t evaluate the success of your mobile app campaigns unless you can measure and compare them to others in your industry. Our Mobile App Push Notification Benchmarks for 2023 aggregates last year’s push notification performance across nearly 5,000 apps to provide clear benchmarks and a starting point on your journey to optimize your own push messaging performance. 

Get answers to these and other questions:

Verticals with performance benchmarks include:

Take the first step and get depth and data on the following key takeaways: 

Push notification opt-in rates 

Many brands anticipated a decrease in opt-ins following the 2022 release of Android 13, and they still do. However, our benchmark study shows an increase in median push opt-in rates across both iOS and Android. As brands continue to focus on the customer experience across the mobile app lifecycle, consumers will continue to see the value of opting in. 

Push notification direct open rates 

The median push notification direct open rate increased over the previous year. As we continue to see brands using more robust segmentation and personalization, we anticipate further increases. Past Airship research has found that highly targeted and personalized messages produce nearly 7X greater open rates, compared to messages broadcast more widely.

Average monthly push notifications per user 

Brands often ask us if they are over- or under-messaging their audiences. The answer is usually “it depends.” Our benchmark data provides detail for each vertical about what, exactly, it may depend on. 

For example, media, sports, entertainment and social apps send a myriad of messages related to real-time updates and customers’ preferences. As we continue to see increased adoption of Live Activities, we anticipate companies in these and other industries will replace sending multiple push notifications with a Live Activity that dynamically updates directly on the customers’ lock screen — from match scores, major developing news and workout stats, to updates on deliveries, ride-share arrivals, reservations and order-ready alerts. 

Download Airship’s Mobile App Push Notification Benchmarks for 2023 now. 

Have questions? Get in touch.

The post Mobile App Push Notification Benchmarks for 2023 Have Arrived appeared first on Airship.

Consumer data is critical for a brand to improve customer experience. Simultaneously, brands need to take care of data privacy. But how can companies take a practical approach to data privacy and improve customer experience in a mobile-first world? Thomas Butta, chief strategy and marketing officer, Airship, explains it here.

Customer data privacy has a trajectory similar to environmental, social and governance (ESG). They are both becoming table stakes. 

When companies are transparent about ESG initiatives, they are sending a strong message to their employees as well as current and future customers. The same level of prioritization must be done for data privacy. If privacy is mishandled, the hit to brand reputation could be costlier than regulatory fines. It is time for data privacy, as part of a customer-centric strategy, to become a standard operating procedure for every business.

Customer data is the backbone of any marketing strategy and the linchpin of ecommerce. But today, we are seeing the clock run out on mining consumer information versus minding customer needs. As third-party data dwindles, first- and zero-party data are taking center stage.

Brands now have an imperative to focus on creating direct digital relationships to understand their customers better and provide the personalized experiences they expect. And thanks to changing behaviors of mobile consumers, the best way to sustain this reciprocal value exchange is through mobile apps. 

According to a Mobile Shopping Report, 68% of surveyed U.S. consumers say they are shopping more often now with their mobile phones than two years ago, with eight in 10 mobile shopping within the last 12 months. This is particularly true among Gen Z (79%) and millennial (77%) respondents.

No matter where you are on your mobile app journey, a practical approach to personal data privacy is essential for building the kind of profitable long-term relationships that brands and customers want.

Why Apps, Why Now?
Mobile apps have become the consumer’s preferred destination for contextual interactions, fast transactions, and streamlined experiences that blend their online and offline lives. Industry research finds that app-toting customers generate more than three times greater revenue and transaction frequency than other shoppers. Earnings reports from public companies underscore the tremendous economic value of mobile app experiences:

• For The Home Depot, “Sales leveraging our digital platforms increased 12% versus the second quarter last year. We also saw record downloads, traffic in sales via our mobile app. We continue to see improved conversion rates, as ongoing enhancements within our digital properties are resonating with our customers.” 
• For Chipotle, “Incredibly, our full year digital sales of $3.4 billion is nearly 3.5x what we did pre-COVID in 2019. Digital has proven to be sticky as it is a frictionless and convenient experience.”

Successes like these are not simply a matter of having an app and persevering. Brands know they compete primarily on customer experience. Many are making apps their most valuable brand assets by tightly linking loyalty programs, always-on utilities, digital exclusives and concierge services. At the core of all these relationships? Data. Data. And more data.

Chipotle has invested in digital kitchens and “Chipotlanes” (digital-only pickup lanes) and now cites an average of 10 minutes from a customer’s digital order until it is ready for pickup. Its digital sales are 3.5X pre-COVID. Early in the pandemic, American Eagle Outfitters solved unique curbside pickup challenges because many of its locations were inside malls. They added trip-tracking and order-ahead features that streamlined experiences for both customers and store associates. 

These impressive economic returns should not be surprising. “Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index) data shows that companies that deliver superior CX grow revenues five times faster on average than their competitors with inferior CX. Companies with superior CX have customers who are willing to pay a higher price for products and services,” (Forrester Research, Inc., Transform Customer Processes And Systems To Improve Experiences, February 22nd, 2021).

Simply put, apps are where the value exchange between customers and brands is most respected and rewarded. Ahead of more traditional information like postal address or demographics, customers are more likely to share “interests relevant to a brand,” “their communication preferences,” and “what they have browsed on a brand’s app or website,” to receive personalized offers and special incentives. On the flip side, consumers are least likely to share “information from their social profiles” and “their behaviors across unrelated websites and apps.” As I said earlier: mind, do not mine customers. 

This is actually great news all around. People (like us) want a much more customer-centric approach. They are willing to share valuable information in exchange for mobile-enabled conveniences and personalized services, which in turn, allows brands to serve them better and build valuable relationships over time. 

Then What’s the Hold-Up? 
Survey results show that mobile app experience (MAX), both as a concept and set of best practices, is still very much a frontier. Many companies struggle to marshal resources and apply agile methods to generate greater value from mobile apps.

To optimize customer experience, brands need to understand whom they are talking to and create moments across touchpoints, including platforms, devices and channels that customers engage with throughout their various journeys.

Fintech company Chipper Cash focuses on unlocking financial barriers in Africa through its app-only approach instead of brick-and-mortar branches. Personalization at scale helped the company serve 5M app customers in five markets and reach $1.5B in total processes per quarter.

Experience trumps promotion, which means brands should be providing valuable experiences in moments people are engaged with the app. Marketers must be empowered to go beyond messaging and near-total reliance on developers. They need both no-code capabilities and organizational agility to continually optimize onboarding, feature adoption, and opt-in flows and progressively learn about the interests and preferences of each customer. 

A no-code app experience platform empowers the entire team. Developers get to focus on the next set of innovative, market-differentiating app features. And the app’s marketing and product teams gain more ownership over the customer’s mobile app experiences. It is all about making life after download^TM more rewarding and productive.

Think of communications around your app as a series of personal invitations. Make sure customers know what is in it for them. Make sure they know exactly how you will and will not use their data. Meet them where they are. That is how you build trust.

The post Why Data Privacy and Customer Experience Are Not at Opposite Ends appeared first on Airship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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