Turbocharging Personalized Promotions: A Closer Look at Integrating Airship & Talon.One

When it comes to delivering incredible mobile app experiences and creating powerful promotional campaigns, there are two names that stand out: Airship and Talon.One.

Airship has been the leader in mobile app experience since the dawn of apps, powering the first commercial messages and then expanding to all engagement channels, no-code native app experience creation and App Store Optimization, providing the industry’s only set of solutions that help brands optimize every stage of the mobile app lifecycle.

Talon.One is a flexible, headless promotion and loyalty engine for enterprises, providing best-in-class technology to power rich, automated customer promotion experiences — online, offline, in-store, or on mobile.

Talon.One’s Campaign Manager lets business users build upon simple rules to offer fully customizable and engaging incentive marketing, without coding.

Together, Airship & Talon.One share the belief that interoperability and open architecture of modern software will propel current and future digital experiences.

Game Changer: Airship’s External Data Feeds

Personalizing and tailoring experiences at scale to differentiate and deliver value has always been the ultimate goal for brands. This can be challenging when multiple systems are responsible for various aspects of campaigns, creating data, operational and experience silos. This is where External Data Feeds from Airship comes in. External Data Feeds allows brands to query an external system using user-specific parameters to personalize messages at send time.

Integrating Airship & Talon.One

Leveraging Talon.One’s MACH Alliance (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless) certified architecture and Airship’s External Data Feeds, these two platforms can seamlessly integrate to power impactful promotions everywhere — inside and outside the app.

Airship provides a simple interface to add an External Data Feed endpoint and make it available in the Composer, simply define the URL, the parameters to use for personalization and how to behave on failure. 

Once an External Data Feed endpoint is set up in Airship, it can be used in any outbound message, regardless of the channel. The outbound message’s segment triggers the External Data Feed for each qualified recipient, merging the inbound data into your message before sending.

Implementing Coupon Codes With Airship & Talon.One

I’m especially excited about External Data Feeds since my team is responsible for integrations at Airship; they unlock some great out-of-the-box functionality that enable some extremely valuable use cases, like implementing coupon codes with Talon.One. Here’s how it works:

Creating a campaign in Talon.One is simple; go to the relevant Talon.One Application and add a campaign. I stuck with the defaults, but added a custom identifier in my Account Attributes called “channel_id”. I’ll use this for identifying every recipient to make sure they get a unique code. I needed a couple of values from Talon.One:

• Add Destination Hostname – this is unique per Talon.One account
• Authorization Key
• Customer Engagement Hostname

I carried these values over to the Airship External Data Feed interface:

For this proof-of-concept, I used Channel ID as the unique identifier for a user. This could be any value that’s available in Airship, though, including Named User or any Attribute. For example, perhaps you associate a Loyalty ID with your end users in both platforms – use that!

I created a basic message in the composer; in this case, a push notification to a development app, but it could be anything — an SMS, email, Message Center message. You could even build out some simple code to render it as a barcode and display it in-app.

The result of this, if it were a broader segment, would be that every recipient of the message would receive their very own unique coupon code.

The Sky’s the Limit with External Data Feeds

External Data Feeds open the door to a myriad of use cases by unlocking scalable, simple, secure and powerful integrations with any solution. Whether it’s leveraging CDP data and DAM/PIM content in your campaigns or sending targeted messages with predictive content or product recommendations from your commerce solution, the possibilities are endless. With this level of flexible integration and personalization, the sky is truly the limit!