Let’s look at how three brands are using Airship’s platform to meet those challenges with highly effective cross-channel campaigns.

Redhawk Casino Goes Omnichannel

Red Hawk Casino leverages Airship Orchestration to ensure they’re using the right channel and the best timing for each message. A cross-channel welcome series helps onboard customers and educate them about key features. Dynamic emails keep them informed of the week’s sales and promotions. SMS reminders go out right before an event, promotion, or last minute COVID-19-related schedule change. And Redhawk uses push messages for day-of communications and time-sensitive offers. 

Redhawk Digital Marketing Specialist Matthew Borja explains that “during COVID, having the ability to reach our customers through multiple channels allowed us to build up and grow our brand affinity, when so many brands are struggling to get customer attention. We were able to save over 30% by switching to Airship and using it for multiple channels, helping us reach more customers at lower cost.”

Betbull Keeps Customers Engaged with Airship Journeys

Sports betting brand Betbull uses Airship Journeys to automate and orchestrate messages across SMS and email to keep customers engaged in the Betbull mobile app and informed about promotions and bonus offers. Betbull credits Airship with making it easier to build customer journeys that reach customers on the right channels and generate some of their best engagement to-date.

“It’s taken a huge operational workload off of the team,” said John Ibanez, CRM manager with Betbull. “Airship has been a game changer for us through COVID-19 for our customer retention and engagement efforts. We’ve seen our biggest engagement numbers ever.”

Getplus Prevents Dropoff with Email + App Personalization

Indonesia’s GetPlus helps its members obtain discounts and offers from a variety of retailers when purchasing within the app. GetPlus’ strategy during COVID-19 is all about personalization. They use Airship to trigger seamless, personalized welcome journeys and voucher reminders via email, in-app messaging and push notifications that prevent drop-off after signup and keep customers active in the app.

Plus, Airship helped GetPlus rapidly integrate their existing engagement platforms and start handling all of their customer engagement from one place. According to Co-Founder Adrian Hoon, “With Airship’s support, we were able to quickly onboard and start executing campaigns. It gave us an ability to get going much faster.” 

As these brands have shown, email+app are a dynamic duo in your channel mix that can keep customers engaged and build a lifetime of loyalty and value. To learn more about how Airship can help elevate your customer engagement strategy, get in touch!

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The post How Three Brands Used Email + App to Increase Engagement During COVID-19 appeared first on Airship.

In our new Airship Journeys playbook and recent webinar, we outlined three customer journeys for the growth phase of the customer lifecycle. Read on to see how we built these journeys using our Airship Journeys platform, and download the playbook today!

Boost Customer Engagement

When a customer engages with your mobile app, your brand is top of mind. Leverage that pivotal moment with Airship Journey’s event-based triggers by setting app activity to launch a series of push messages that drive engagement. Use this journey to grow your relationship by promoting valuable offers or features they may not already be aware of. This journey also includes interactive buttons that provide data about customer interactions. And if the customer doesn’t respond to the first message, a follow-up message arrives three days later with additional incentives to get in touch.

Nurture Repeat Purchases

Focusing on repeat purchases is a winning proposition during the growth phase. That’s because existing customers are far more likely to purchase again and again. This journey targets established customers with a series of messages promoting exclusive discounts and complementary products. Here, we’re using Airship Journey’s powerful channel coordination to deliver the messages to the customer’s originating channel — so you know you’re reaching them where they prefer to engage. Plus, with customized offers based on purchase history and preferences, you can provide great CX and even more reasons to convert!

Personalize Your Upsell

What better way to show your customers you know them than with personalized offers just for them? This journey drives sales and loyalty among a specific segment of your audience. It starts on the customer’s originating channel and alerts them to an upcoming happy hour just for teachers. Interactive buttons give user-friendly options for engagement and provide data that help guide the next step in the journey. Depending on the customer’s response, they’ll receive a second message on the channel where they were last active. Plus, you can use one of our latest feature, Journey Maps, to map them across multiple journeys and continue guiding them through the customer lifecycle.

These are just a few of the ways you can use Airship Journeys to deepen engagement and lead your customers toward brand advocacy and a lifetime of value! For more insights on how you can acquire, grow and retain with Airship Journeys, download the full playbook today!

The post Show Them You Know Them: Three Customer Journeys for Growth appeared first on Airship.

In our new Airship Journeys playbook, we outlined three journeys to keep customers engaged during the retention phase of the customer lifecycle. Check out the examples below – based on real-world case studies from some of the leading brands already using Airship Journeys to acquire, retain and grow – and download the playbook today!

Step Up Your Cross-Selling

When it comes to push notifications, timing and context are everything. Customers are much more likely to respond to event-triggered marketing than mass-marketing campaigns. That’s why this journey uses event-based automation to deliver perfectly timed cross-selling messages for customers attending a sporting event.  

The first message lands the day after a ticket purchase, with an in-app notification alerting ticket-holders about the concessions in their specific seating area. Then, after they scan in at the event, they’ll receive an offer for discounted team merchandise – so they don’t miss out on wearing their team colors at the next game. It doesn’t get more contextual than that!

Show Your Value

To cultivate customer relationships, you need to show them how much value your brand has to offer. This journey leverages the power of Airship Journey’s channel orchestration to nurture customers on the channels they opted in on and highlight valuable features, like referral incentives and low balance alerts. Plus, by leveraging customer intelligence, you can take your personalization to the next level and show your customers you truly get them. For example, by offering a credit card co-branded with their favorite sports team!

Get Ahead and Prevent Churn

Churn may be a fact of life for marketers, but with a little proactivity and the right tools, you can get ahead of it. This cross-channel journey leverages Airship Journeys’ AI and predictive algorithm, which automatically triggers the journey based on a customer’s propensity to churn.

The journey starts on the customer’s priority channel with messages promoting features they may not be using. If they don’t re-engage after the first two messages, the follow-up fans out to all opted-in channels to ensure they don’t miss it. The result is a seamless series of cross-channel messages to keep customers engaged, before they become inactive.

These are just a few examples of how you can use Airship Journeys to build customer journeys that cultivate loyalty and keep them engaged for the long-term! Stay tuned for our next post, which will cover the growth phase. In the meantime, download the full Airship Journeys playbook today for more insights to help you acquire, grow and retain!

The post Keep Them Coming Back: Three Customer Journeys for Retention appeared first on Airship.

As part of our new Airship Journeys playbook, we outlined three customer journeys designed to make the first interactions with your brand the beginning of a long and valuable relationship. Check out the examples below and download the playbook today!

Convert New Customers into App Users

A first purchase is the perfect time to show new customers the benefits of your mobile app. Plus, driving opt-ins during acquisition makes it easier to reach them on their preferred channels during all of the pivotal moments throughout the customer lifecycle. 

In this case, a new customer’s room reservation triggers a welcome message that also promotes mobile app downloads. A few days later, if they haven’t downloaded the app they’ll receive a second message reminding them about their trip and the benefits of using the app. It’s a short and sweet example of how a relatively simple customer journey can start moving new customers toward growth and retention.

Deepen Engagement During Onboarding

Getting opt-ins on your app is a great first step. Now you need to keep them engaged, a challenge illustrated by the fact that 77 percent of daily active users drop off within the first three days after installing an app. 

When a new customer downloads your app, capture that momentum with a customer journey designed to deepen engagement. In this example from the gaming vertical, an app install triggers a series of in-app messages promoting bonus features and the benefits of engagement. The messages are spread out over three and then five days, which helps prevent over-messaging while also driving repeat sessions during those critical first few weeks. 

Draw Customers in with a Multi-Touch Campaign 

Delivering value to your customers on their preferred channels is an ideal way to build loyalty. In this journey, we’re meeting the customer wherever they choose to engage, with the goal of driving sign-ups for a loyalty program.

It starts on the customer’s original channel of engagement, either app or email, with a welcome message that drives them to your website. Two days later, a follow-up message uses Airship Journey’s prioritization feature to automatically select the channel, sending a special offer to their highest priority channel. Finally, for customers who haven’t joined the loyalty program, a third message lands five days later and fans out to all opted- in channels. This helps ensure customers see the message and don’t miss out on the benefits of loyalty. 

These are just a few examples of how Airship Journeys can help you build value for your brand and customers during the acquisition phase. Plus, the customer intelligence collected through these journeys allows you to create follow up journeys that are even more personalized and contextual! We’ll cover that in a future post. In the meantime, download the full Airship Journeys playbook today for more insights to help you acquire, grow and retain!

The post Hook ‘em at Hello: Three Customer Journeys for Acquisition appeared first on Airship.

In a recent Airship Webinar, 9 Cross-Channel Customer Journeys to Build Today, we described six critical steps before building your customer journeys. Check out the highlights below, and watch the webinar recording for more insights!

1. Identify the Critical Moments Throughout the Customer Lifecycle

Each stage of the customer lifecycle presents critical opportunities to deliver great CX, build loyalty and grow revenue. The first step is to identify those brand-defining moments. Taking the time to storyboard out your customers’ experience and key touchpoints is a great first step. Consider what engagement might look like during acquisition, retention and growth. And what types of messages make sense at each stage. 

2. Define the Actions You Want Customers to Take

Before building a journey, you need to identify a goal and the milestones along the way. Perhaps you want to convert new customers from a free trial to a paid subscription. Or guide a first-time shopper toward purchase. Maybe you want to deepen engagement with your loyalty program. Whatever your goals, defining the customer actions necessary to get there is essential to shaping effective engagement at each stage of their journey.

3. Select Triggers to Kick Off the Journey

Once you’ve set your destination, it’s time to determine which customer actions will kick off the journey. The possibilities are almost endless; a first purchase, app install, abandoned cart, a location trigger and more. Just make sure your trigger aligns with your goals. Plus, if churn is your concern, Airship Journeys users can let our machine learning algorithm automatically trigger a re-engagement journey to help win them back before it’s too late.

4. Determine Where the Journey Ends

Next, decide on the journey’s end. If you’re trying to convert customers who abandoned a shopping cart, the journey can end once they come back and convert. Similarly, if your goal is loyalty sign ups, then that journey will end when a customer joins the loyalty program. You may also want to set conditions around message frequency and channel orchestration, so you can avoid over messaging. 

5. Choose the Next Best Action

Let’s face it. Even the most engaging journey won’t convert every customer. The key is leveraging customer actions and preferences to deliver value and continue moving them through the lifecycle. So, if your acquisition phase goal is new customer account creation, engage those that don’t sign up with a journey focused on member benefits. When they do sign up, you can move toward retention-related goals such as a first deposit. The Journey Maps visualization below illustrates how these journeys fit within the overall lifecycle marketing effort.

6. Choose Your Personalization Strategies

To deliver truly personalized CX that wows your customers, you’ll need to leverage the power of customer intelligence and think about how those data points can help you craft a great experience. You might create a distinct journey for shoppers with a $500 item in their cart vs. those with a $50 item. Or, trigger a series of highly targeted offers based on country, state or zip code. It could even be something as simple as a personalized birthday message. Just be careful to avoid the common personalization fails that can turn your customers off.

With these steps, you’re well on your way to building journeys that will deliver a lifetime of value for your brand and customers. Be sure to check out the full webinar for more insights!

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The post 6 Critical Steps Before Building Your Next Customer Journey appeared first on Airship.

• 66% of consumers say instant, on-demand engagement is very important to winning their business 

• 78% say that they would be more loyal to a brand that understood them and what they are looking for

• 52% say they’d switch brands if they didn’t feel they were receiving a personalized experience 

That’s why we created Airship Journeys, a revolutionary new solution that simplifies how marketers create, measure and perfect customer journeys. We’ve published a playbook highlighting nine powerful strategies inspired by leading brands who are already using Airship Journeys to craft highly effective customer journeys at each stage of the customer lifecycle. 

Check out our key takeaways below, and download the full Airship Journeys Playbook: 9 Powerful Strategies to Acquire, Build and Grow Your Audience for more insights, tips and inspiration!

Customer Journeys: Acquire

Attracting new customers is expensive and time consuming. That’s why, during the acquisition phase, you need to give them a warm welcome and deliver an engaging customer experience that drives action and adoption. 

New customer activities, like an opt-in on your website, provide the perfect opportunity to launch a multi-touch campaign highlighting key features of your brand, and show them just how much value you have to offer. Use the series to encourage them to download your app, and demonstrate some of the ways it can make their lives easier. This is also a great time to engage them in your loyalty program, so they can start realizing the benefits of deeper engagement with your products or services. 

Customer Journeys: Retain

Most marketers know it’s far less expensive to retain existing customers than attract new ones. But customer expectations are high, and rising. That’s why, during the retain phase, it’s essential to deliver value in the moments that matter most to your customers. 

For example, you can trigger a series of messages around actions like a ticket purchase or reservation, and send SMS or emails with important information, upgrades or changes. Entice them with an incentive based on app or web activity. Plus, you can use Airship Journey’s orchestration features to focus on the channels that matter most to your customers, while carefully controlling frequency to avoid overmessaging.

Customer Journeys: Grow

Now that you’ve established rapport with your customers, it’s time to grow those relationships — and their lifetime value. To do that, you need to show them you know them by engaging on their preferred channels, in real-time with contextual content that predicts their needs.

When a customer opens your app, you can bet your brand is top of mind. Leverage this moment to trigger a multi-channel series of offers or incentives based on past purchases or activity. Use the series to remind customers to visit your store or website. And send follow-up notifications offering post-purchase surveys, encouraging social sharing or recommending other items they might like.

This is also your opportunity to re-engage customers who are likely to churn, and take action to keep them. Use Airship’s machine learning algorithm to identify users at high risk and send an email with an offer or incentive to win them back, before it’s too late. 

Every stage in the customer lifecycle presents opportunities to deliver great CX, build loyalty and grow revenue and lifetime value. Download the e-book today to learn more about how you can use Airship Journeys to deliver meaningful, personalized messages at every juncture.

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The post How to Create Seamless Customer Journeys for Each Stage of the Customer Lifecycle appeared first on Airship.

The Problem with Other Customer Journey Solutions

For our customer journey research, marketing teams from different brands shared their internal planning documents, including diagrams and spreadsheets for how they planned to run and orchestrate campaigns. These documents work as both an organizational tool for what needs to be deployed on what platform and how those different touch points can be orchestrated together.

We noticed a common theme with these planning documents: marketers were mapping out the progression of customers across milestones and organizing messaging around each milestone. Unfortunately, this method can lead to performance issues or poorly targeted messaging. It’s more difficult to determine important metrics like how many customers advance at each stage or know where customers fall out when mixing milestones and messages together.

How We Made Journeys Easier with Maps

We observed this workflow, and others like this, and saw an opportunity to make building, deploying and tracking messaging across milestones a whole lot easier. We developed a “branching” like system where marketing teams can quickly map the lifecycle as interconnecting journeys and view them together in a map. 

This map view shows the relationship between journeys as well as high level performance metrics, including user flow and conversion rates by milestone. You can also quickly access each underlying Journey for a deeper view of performance metrics by message. 

Journey Maps Examples

We’re confident that marketers will find Journeys easy and helpful to use with the new mapping functionality. We already had great adoption of Journeys from our customer base with over 150 Journeys deployed across 27 customers, so it was a quick start to find marketing teams willing to participate in product discovery. 

Here are some examples:

A health app wants a way to remind users to reschedule their appointment so that they continue to experience the value of the health service and app. This is easy to do with Maps by adding in a cancellation Journey, and leading the customer back into the appointment cycle.

A food and beverage company wants to onboard their users so that they become rewards members as quickly as possible. They need to capture users who were not completing registration steps so they can quickly re-engage them with deals and discounts to prevent them from churning. Maps makes it easy to identify and recapture the users who are falling out of onboarding.

Airship Journeys and Maps can help you create and connect Journeys, while giving you the data and tools you need to better engage with your customers. You can learn more about Airship Journeys here.

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The post How We Put Together Journey Maps appeared first on Airship.

Journey Maps makes it simple for marketers and products to:

• Link Journeys together to advance customers through lifecycle milestones, ensuring a cohesive experience with every touchpoint
• Visualize the end-to-end user experience and dive into any Journey to optimize performance and ROI with just a few clicks
• Drive ongoing growth by evaluating different paths customers take within a lifecycle — and add new Journeys to proactively reach customers who are likely to churn

In the example above, you can see how mapping works for re-engaging at-risk customers. Using Journey Maps, messaging for the original segment (users who were identified as having a high risk of churn) has been segmented into two groups based on what action users took — or didn’t take. 

Users who viewed a product detail page are routed into a new journey with a special offer motivating them to add the product they viewed to their cart and move forward with a purchase, while users who did not take any steps toward making purchase get a double rewards offer to motivate them to re-engage. 

This visual way of working with users at different stages of the lifecycle makes automated, scalable lifecycle marketing simpler and easier than it’s ever been. 

Ready to get started? Get in touch anytime  — we’d love to walk you through a personalized demo and show you how Journeys can make every customer journeys simple to create, measure and perfect. 

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The post Introducing Journey Maps appeared first on Airship.

In an Airship Webinar, guest speaker Forrester Research Principal Analyst Rusty Warner described how brands are responding to this sea change with a new approach: moments-based marketing. But what is moments-based marketing? We highlight four key features below.

Read on to learn more or watch our webinar, “Customer Journeys in the Mobile Era: Is Your Martech Stack Up to the Task?” for additional insights.

It’s All About the (Customer) Journey

Until recently, consumers had relatively few options for engaging with brands. Spoiler alert: The world has changed!

Today’s customer journeys are complex. We use our devices for research, price comparisons and to make purchases while in transit, in line and even in bed. We engage brands 24-7 on social media and mobile apps. We use live chat to get answers about products and services. 

The upside of winning with consumers in these intent-rich moments is clear. But brands need to fully understand the customer journey in order to deliver hyper-personalized experiences that build loyalty and revenue.

It’s Personalized and Contextual

As consumers, we expect a consistent, personalized customer experience (CX) — especially when we’re trying to answer a question or make a decision. In fact, 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience.

In the webinar, Rusty highlights Sephora’s best practices leveraging a variety of physical and digital retail touchpoints to deliver great CX. Their in-store kiosks deliver an engaging in-store experience while also capturing customer data. Sephora then uses those insights to deliver a personalized, contextual experience on their mobile app and website. 

When done well, this moments-based approach doesn’t look like marketing. It simply looks like a really great, seamless CX.

It Requires Unprecedented Customer Intelligence

In the mobile environment, predicting when, where and how to engage requires unprecedented data, real-time analytics and predictive capabilities. Moments-based marketers must glean insights across platforms to understand behavior at every point in the customer journey.

On the upside, our devices generate a lot of data. But harnessing it and applying customer insights in real-time is a new challenge. Brands that can pull data together in a way that enables understanding of the full customer experience are best positioned for success.

It’s Powered by Next Gen Marketing Technology

Moments-based marketing is impossible without modern marketing technology (martech). To orchestrate efforts across platforms, brands need solutions that simplify the way cross-channel customer journeys are created, measured and optimized.

In the webinar, Rusty describes the critical next-generation martech capabilities necessary to bring moments-based marketing to life. They span all aspects of the martech stack, including customer understanding, brand strategy and brand experience.

Get the scoop on those essential martech capabilities by watching the webinar. You can also learn about Airship’s next-generation customer journey solution, Airship Journeys, by signing up for a demo today.

Airship Journeys

Learn more about our revolutionary customer journey solution

The post What Is Moments-Based Marketing? appeared first on Airship.