Hi, I’m Kathryn! I lead Customer Success for the Apptimize team and have been working at Airship since the acquisition in August 2019. I grew up in Kansas City, and have since lived on either coast, first in Boston and then also in San Francisco for the past 5 years.

While weekends look a little different these days, I still am finding ways to spend time outside — whether it’s driving north of San Francisco to hike coastal trails (now that they’re open!) or meeting some friends in a park for social distance picnics. I also have a huge love for international travel and hit 6 of the 7 continents just in the last year. Will definitely be excited to get back to traveling post-COVID. 

What Is Your Favorite Thing About Working at Airship?

Hands down… the people. Even though when I started at Airship most of my team members were in a different office and now we all work remote, the team at Airship has been incredible and made me feel welcome and valued since day one. Although there has been a lot of changes as we integrate the Apptimize business, I feel supported by both leadership and my peers to continue to grow my career at Airship.

What Is Something You Are Proud of?

I am extremely proud of the work our team does to help companies launch their experimentation programs. Going from making product decisions based on gut feelings to A/B testing and taking a data-driven approach does not happen overnight. Our team created a process to drive an experimentation culture into an organization and enable teams to loop experimentation into their development process which allows for faster time to value and helping these teams’ reach their growth objectives faster.

What Has Been the Biggest Change Since the Apptimize Acquisition?

The biggest change has definitely been going from working at a 30 person company to working at a company of hundreds. Working at a larger company definitely comes with its advantages — access to more resources, people to learn from and a global team for more coverage across timezones. While it can be challenging to work through all of the business integrations, working with a large and experienced team on the strategy and execution has been great experience.

How Do You Define Customer Success?

While high-level Customer Success can be defined as having a customer fully adopt the tool, getting the true value of the services and then becoming an advocate, this can be different from customer to customer. Each customer comes to Apptimize and Airship to help solve a range of challenges — from driving conversion (of users from free to premium accounts) to increasing the value of a cart at checkout, to increasing time spent watching content. Our job is to ensure the teams using Apptimize are able to make a meaningful impact on their business objectives.

Fun Question! What Did You Want To Be When You Were A Kid?

Growing up I always wanted to be a teacher. While my life took me in a different direction, I still think some of my favorite aspects of my job are teacher-like: working with customers to train them about Apptimize and A/B testing and also working with team members to help them develop and grow in their role and career… so not too far off :).

Have questions for Kathryn? You can reach her on LinkedIn or email her here.

Learn more about Airship and what it’s like to work with our team.

Check out our career page!

The post Meet Kathryn Hjalmarson – Manager of Customer Success for Apptimize and Past & Future World Traveler appeared first on Airship.

Feature flags are a tool that separates deployment of code from the feature release process in an update, allowing you to gradually roll out new features and code to whom you want, when you want. Brands like Quizlet, Stash and Western Union are already using Feature Flags to maintain multiple branches of code within apps to gradually release new features to a small subset of users first — quickly rolling features back if needed, or fully deploying them as they are proven successful. 

With app installs growing across many industries, and businesses rolling out new services to meet changing needs, feature release management maximizes opportunities and mitigates risks. You can use feature flags to test new curbside pickup experiences, appointment booking processes, or implementing enhanced recommendations or social selling features, easily choosing when and to whom new features are accessible, and turning them on or off.

Whether you have a new app or an established one with a large audience, you can use Feature Flags by signing up for a free account, or take advantage of newly reduced pricing for unlimited Feature Flags from Apptimize.

To learn more about this offer, check out our press release. We also have this helpful whitepaper that explains what Feature Flags are and how you can use it for your mobile app. 

The post Innovate Faster and Mitigate Risk with Apptimize’s Free Feature Flags Solution appeared first on Airship.

And now, in this moment of uncertainty, the ability to run test — especially in your app — is even more important for identifying growth opportunities, understanding new customers, optimizing and accelerating conversions and much more. 

In our latest white paper, “5 Reasons COVID-19 Is Making App Experimentation Essential,” our team shares the reasons to get a testing solution anyone can use (from product owners and marketers to engineers and beyond — ) to build and grow a culture of experimentation. 

Even small tests can lead to big results like these:

• 16% increase in conversions to a premium membership for Instasize after they tested and optimized their app onboarding flow 
• 15% increase in bookings after Hotel Tonight experimented with their registration process
• 12% increase in adoption of a key feature for banking app Stash after testing design variations

Download your copy of the white paper today, and get in touch anytime with questions or to chat about the small experiments that can make a big difference for your brand. 

Let’s Talk

Let Us Know How We Can Help You Reach Your Experimentation Goals

The post 5 Reasons COVID-19 Is Making App Experimentation Essential appeared first on Airship.

So it’s no wonder that The Harvard Business Review chose the theme of product innovation and a culture of experimentation for its March/April issue. We couldn’t agree more about how important a culture of experimentation is for any company. Here are three highlights from two of their articles “Building a Culture of Experimentation” and “The Power of These Techniques Is Only Getting Stronger,” and you can access the issue here. 

You Need to Be A/B Testing

In short, A/B testing tells you what works and what doesn’t work. Testing can help your teams make strategic, data-driven decisions on how to offer the best digital experience for your customers. Those decisions can lead to results that brands can use to discover areas of opportunity and growth. The Harvard Business Review gave the example of Expedia and how they run thousands of tests a year. The reason for this, Expedia’s CEO, Mark Okerstrom, explains, is “Because of this [running thousands of tests], we don’t have to guess what customers want; we have the ability to run the most massive ‘customer surveys’ that exist, again and again, to have them tell us what they want.”

A Culture of Experimentation Is Essential for A/B Testing Success

The best way to maximize the benefits of A/B testing is having a culture of experimentation within the company. “Building a Culture of Experimentation” points out that many firms are testing, but they’re only running a couple dozen experiments per year, which yield very little, if not zero, impact on a company’s overall strategic goal. A culture of experimentation means creating an environment where “curiosity is nurtured, data trumps opinion, anyone (not just people in R&D) can conduct or commission a test.”

If you need help building a culture of experimentation at your company, my fellow Apptimize teammate, JP Lefebvre, wrote this great blog post on steps your team can take to build a culture of experimentation. Make sure to check it out!

A Culture of Experimentation Requires the Right Tools

When you have a culture of experimentation, you need a tool that will unify your teams and make testing a cross-functional initiative. To achieve scale, anyone at the company should be able to test anything. Testing should be available to anyone, whether they be on the product team, the marketing team or the engineering team. 

Apptimize is a comprehensive, easy-to-use tool that empowers technical and non-technical teams to run tests and release new features across all digital channels. Not only is our tool built to support cross-functional experimentation, but also our CSM team is focused on creating and maintaining a culture of experimentation with our clients’ organizations. Apptimize also works together with Airship to powerfully run coordinated experimentation: closing the gap between in-app user experiences and messaging in order to further increase collaboration between different departments like marketing and product.  

We would love to help you build a culture of experimentation with your team. If you want to know more about how you can use Apptimize + Airship to experiment and test, let us know. 

Let’s Talk Testing

We can help you build a culture of experimentation for your marketing team

Contact us today!

The post 3 Highlights from the Harvard Business Review Issue on Building a Culture of Experimentation appeared first on Airship.

Those stats come from a recent Gartner report, “Chief Marketing Officers: Lead and Champion a Test-and-Learn Culture to Reach Your Marketing Goals.” And we not only agree with these findings, but we’ve also seen in our own customer base that those who are running regular experiments are growing about four times faster than those who are running one-off or occasional experiments. 

Bottom line: experimentation accelerates growth. 

But what will really make testing the powerful secret weapon it should be for your brand is when it’s baked into your culture. So how can you bake experimentation into everything you do — and reap the growth rewards it brings? 

Here it is in three steps:

The chart above outlines the different stages of building a culture of experimentation so you can have a sense of where you want to go. Unless you’re already at Level 3 (if it makes you feel better, most organizations aren’t), you’ve got a lot of opportunity in front of you. 

Step 1: 

The first step is to get an experimentation solution that makes testing simple and easy integrated into your martech stack. We’ve got you covered there. (Not to toot our own horn, but Apptimize is the most-installed mobile SDK in the world for A/B testing, with over 300 Million MAUs and counting.) Whether you’re testing new features (and keeping messaging to different test groups perfectly synched) or UX flows, our solution is easy to install, easy to use and easy to manage. 

Step 2: 

Start getting buy-in from the stakeholders that will need to participate in making the shift to a culture of experimentation. That means setting up meetings or coffee breaks with folks to:

• Share the stats from the beginning of this post about the benefits of a test-and-learn culture. 
• Talk about how much time, money and effort it will save when you can get to the best and most effective solution more quickly by iterating and testing.
• Run some tests and share your wins — and the bottom-line results they can drive. 
• Quantify a few high-priority goals or opportunities for your organization that testing can help with. For example: “What if we could reduce abandoned carts in the app by 2% by optimizing our check-out process through testing?”

Step 3: 

Once you’ve got some key stakeholders bought in, and have shared some of the results testing can help you achieve, consider centralizing test results so more and more people in your organization can see and appreciate the significant rewards of testing — and get ideas of their own. 

That’s it! You’re on your way. Before you know it, you’ll be at Level 3 on the maturity scale, with A/B testing integrated into your development cycles, and running tests that build on each other and become more and more powerful over time. 

The ultimate goal, of course, is to make users experience with your brand better, faster and more delightful to increase your effectiveness in every stage of the customer journey from acquisition to retention.

Whether you’re still shooting from the hip or ironing out the kinks in your process, we’ve helped companies at every stage move towards the true growth culture.

LEt’s get You Started

Contact us for a personalized demo and let us show you how we can help you move toward 4x growth today. 

The post How a Culture of Experimentation Can Lead to 4X Growth appeared first on Airship.

Experimentation allows you to test and evolve the experience you deliver to your customers to stay well ahead of their expectations and optimize the entire customer journey — across all channels and touchpoints.  

To ease the complexity of multi-channel experimentation, we are excited to offer Coordinated Experimentation. This new feature allows our joint customers to synchronize Airship messaging campaigns with their Apptimize experiments and feature flags with complete consistency.

With Coordinated Experimentation you can:

• Create consistent messaging by sending messages that match up with the messaging they see in A/B experiments they’re part of.
• Test and promote new features by sending targeted messages to users who have been enrolled in a new feature test.
• Test nurture flows by matching in-app testing variants with consistently crafted nurture messaging campaigns across channels.
• Deliver personalized messages by creating audience segments of customers who have participated in a new in-app experience.

This new feature is one of the first steps in integrating the two platforms together, and customers of both Airship and Apptimize can automatically start using this today, no additional work needed. Learn more about Coordinated Experimentation on our website or schedule a demo. 

LEt’s Talk!

Let us know how we can help you create a culture of experimentation.

Learn More

The post Use Coordinated Experimentation Across Multiple Channels with Airship and Apptimize appeared first on Airship.

I recently hosted the webinar, “How to Optimize the Entire Customer Journey With Airship & Apptimize,” with Apptimize’s JP Lefebvre. In this webinar, we talked about building a culture of experimentation and driving innovation throughout the customer lifecycle with Airship and Apptimize. 

Check out five key takeaways below — and watch the full webinar here.

1. Experimentation and engagement are two sides of the same coin. Making every customer interaction better through experimentation means you’ll boost customer engagement as well. It’s a win-win that Airship & Apptimize solutions can help you achieve seamlessly.
   
2. Building a culture of experimentation is essential for creating customer experience innovations that deepen engagement, grow loyalty, and contribute to your bottom line — as well as getting more teams involved in creating incredible customer experiences.
    
3. Identify the brand-defining moments you’re driving through digital experiences, and categorize them into stages of the customer lifecycle (acquire, retain and grow). From there, get laser-focused on making those experiences the very best they can be.
   
4. Leverage your customer data by segmenting and really understand user behavior. On the Apptimize side, that means you can create unique cohorts to run tests on for the future and leverage the “groups” functionality for special subsets of users such as beta testers or even internal QA. On the Airship side, you can use those segments to drive personalized multi-channel messaging that gets higher engagement and results.
   
5. Make sure your experiments and engagement are connected and consistent. Working with Apptimize and Airship you can keep your efforts synched and synchronized across all of your channels.

For a more in-depth explanation of these points and more examples and best practices on using Airship and Apptimize together, make sure to watch the webinar! 

Airship + Apptimize

Learn more about Airship’s acquisition of Apptimize

The post How Airship and Apptimize Work Together to Optimize the Entire Customer Journey appeared first on Airship.

With so much at stake, experimentation is key to customer experience success. With experimentation, you can mitigate risk, reduce resource waste and improve revenue by optimizing the customer experience to drive conversions.

That’s why I’ll be hosting a webinar with Apptimize’s JP Lefebvre to show how Airship & Apptimize are bringing amazing CX — and incredible value —  to brands and their customers. We’ll go over how to build and grow a culture of experimentation that results in success and show simple but powerful ways to optimize each interaction you have with customers at each stage of the customer lifecycle. We’ll also be sharing some use cases from top brands who are creating customer experiences that drive exponential results for customer acquisition, retention and growth. 

So please join us on October 10 for the “How to Optimize the Entire Customer Journey With Airship & Apptimize.” You can find more information and register here. 

Learn more about Airship’s acquisition of Apptimize. 

The post [Upcoming Webinar] How to Optimize the Entire Customer Journey With Airship & Apptimize appeared first on Airship.

A culture of experimentation has many benefits — one of them is helping you meet your revenue goals. A/B testing is a great way to practically experiment with your data to determine what works – and what doesn’t. Whether it is finding the winning message copy, the most engaging images or best action-inciting rewards, you’ll be able to make smart, impactful decisions that will increase the ROI from your engagement channels. 

Here are three ways you can use A/B testing to boost customer engagement goals. 

Capture Omnichannel Sales 

As the customer journey grows increasingly omnichannel, brands need to optimize and personalize their digital experiences to capture sales. 

For example, If a customer is browsing products, you can split test the product images or descriptions both online and on mobile to see which leads to more conversions. 

Let’s say a customer has added items to their online cart and you want to nudge them to buy now. In that case, you might consider A/B testing the mobile checkout page with a free shipping offer — or experiment with a more streamlined process to ease the checkout process.

Through A/B testing, you’ll be able to drive sales through key channels and double down on the most effective incentives or offerings.

Crank Up Customer Engagement

Since high stakes are riding on a customer’s first impression, you can turn to A/B testing to nail that first interaction. 

For example, following an app download, you may want to run experiments on the first-run experience. Should you show the user a straight-forward registration page or provide a tutorial? Should you allow users to login with their social accounts or by email? If you ask the user to select some categories in the beginning to personalize their browsing experience, would this result in higher click-through rates? These are all questions that can be answered through A/B testing.

As you witness your conversions climb, you can use more A/B tests to optimize even further. For example, you can show different first-run experiences to users coming in from your Google Adwords campaigns and those referred from a partner site.

Fine Tune Your Loyalty Program

Keeping your loyal customer base happy means more profits. A/B testing can help you make the experience of earning and redeeming points as streamlined and delightful as possible.

Test where and how to display their points online or on the mobile app to encourage engagement. If you show the number of points they’re short of to reach a reward milestone, would that boost sales among members close to that milestone? How about testing different types of rewards to see which encourage more loyalty sign-ups? For loyalty members using their mobile app to collect points, what’s the best experience for higher levels of engagement?

Want to know how Apptimize, an Airship company, can help? Contact us to learn more.

The post Three Ways A/B Testing Can Help You Meet Your Goals appeared first on Airship.

Today I am thrilled to share that we’ve added Apptimize to the Airship family. We now have the industry’s most advanced solution for testing and optimizing user experiences across mobile apps, websites and OTT. (Read the full press release here.)

Today’s most impactful companies are constantly reinventing customer experience, and a culture of experimentation is a critical part of driving that innovation. 

By combining Apptimize mobile app and web testing with Airship’s deep insight into customer engagement across channels, marketers and developers can focus innovation on the most critical areas while creating the seamless end-to-end experiences customers really want.

Together, Airship and Apptimize will offer even more ways to impact and improve digital customer engagement. Our customers will quickly benefit from:

• Expanded ability to optimize CX with powerful testing and optimization capabilities — as well as feature management — for mobile apps and beyond
• Code-free options for deploying experiments  
• Improved outcomes from embracing a culture of experimentation,  A/B testing everything from mobile onboarding flows to web conversion funnels 
• Controlled rollouts of new features for more consistent, personalized experiences
• And, of course, more.   

Growth in today’s market continues to depend on a brand’s ability to create outstanding, engaging and effective customer experiences — especially on mobile. By adding the Apptimize team we’re better positioned than ever to support this business-critical capability.  

Get in touch anytime to learn more about the new possibilities this acquisition opens up for your brand — and how we can help you achieve your customer engagement goals.

The post Apptimize Acquisition Gives Airship Customer Engagement Platform Even More Depth & Power appeared first on Airship.