Urban Airship Adds In-app Campaign Solution

Schneider:
Schneider: “The real opportunity is to turn your app into a personal assistant that knows what you’re looking for based on where you are on your journey with the brand.”

Urban Airship has unveiled major enhancements to its mobile app engagement platform, designed to enable businesses to easily deliver personally engaging experiences to their customers across in-app, outside apps, and on Apple Watch and Android Wear.

The first enhancement is an In-app Campaign solution that enables mobile marketers to create interactive messages that reach all app users. Campaign managers can create landing pages that feature interactivity; deep-links to app or mobile web pages; dynamic data tags for future segmentation; and conditional automation rules for triggered follow-on campaigns. In-app campaigns are shown immediately on app open and can be sent to the entire audience or targeted segments. Marketers can also send the same message as a push notification with controls to avoid message duplication, so users responding to notifications won’t also see the in-app campaign.

By managing and messaging users through their lifecycle with an app, the company says, mobile marketers can better affect their top challenge – the fact that 70 per cent of people no longer use apps 30 days after download.

Also new to the platform are a Mobile Data Bridge and Audience Uploader, designed to give businesses flexible methods to combine online and offline data within Urban Airship or any enterprise business system.

The Mobile Data Bridge enables businesses to listen for key customer events in their other customer databases like a CRM, melding the data with mobile behaviours within Urban Airship for more personal and automated messaging. For example, a retailer can create a loyalty member campaign that sends a welcome message when the customer enters the store, asking whether they’d like to use the loyalty points theyve accrued. Customers that want to define segments in an external system can use the Audience Uploader to import resulting lists into Urban Airship for mobile messaging campaigns, with response data returned to external systems to close the loop.

Urban Airship also plans to add support for WatchKit. Simple taps on the Apple Watch face will give consumers the ability to respond to messages, set preferences and execute actions within a brand’s app and other apps, such as setting calendar appointments or initiating phone calls. Urban Airship‘s platform already supports Android Wear.

The company has also deepened the integration of location and proximity data from Gimbal, enabling marketers to trigger automated campaigns based on real-time entry and exit data for geofences and beacons. From neighborhoods and stores, to consumers’ position within aisles, marketers can use mobile notifications, interactive in-app campaigns and in-app message centres to bring digital experiences to physical environments.

“The Mobile Data Bridge will enable brands to look for key customer events with their CRM or point-of-sale system to send to Urban Airship to fill out their user profile,” said Bill Schneider, director of product marketing at Urban Airship. “They might want to see all their new loyalty members or high value customers, or find all the people that have been customers for five years, then flag that event to send a message to them on their phone to say thanks and give thanks and give them a gift. We think the real opportunity is to turn your app into a personal assistant that knows what you’re looking for based on where you are on your journey with the brand and can then have a conversation with the customer around key events.”

All enhancements will be released over the next several weeks, supported by Urban Airship’s SDK (v6) available this month. Urban Airship customers can contact their account manager now to be considered for early access programs.