Brand Executives Talk Retention, Conversion, Data and More at Airship’s Mobile Leaders Forum London

In an era dominated by the continuous evolution of technology, mobile is an undisputed catalyst for change. Mobile shapes the way we connect, work and live — with mobile apps at the digital center. At Airship’s Mobile Leaders Forum, innovative leaders have a chance to showcase their accomplishments. Here are some highlights. 

DAZN emphasizes onboarding and personalized engagement at every stage of the lifecycle

DAZN’s Tom Burrell, SVP of Retention Marketing, took to the stage to talk all about lifecycle marketing through CRM. With a global fan base of over 3 million, DAZN – an international over-the-top sports streaming service focuses on building the future of live sports while navigating the complexities of multiple channels and ecosystems to meet fan needs through every stage of the lifecycle. DAZN is already at the forefront of the live sports evolution through live streaming capabilities, betting and on-demand content. Burrell has helped position his team to take on new technologies that make understanding customers and catering to them even easier. 

“When customers download a new app, they want to get the most out of the app,” said Burrell. It seems simple, but driving value is something a lot of brands struggle with. The team at DAZN has done extensive work on the onboarding and testing of new app customers. They’ve concluded that a customer who remains in the app moving into the second month is more valuable than a customer in their first month. So the logical conclusion is to help customers get the most out of the app right up front. Burrell explained how the onboarding journey is a critical part of showcasing the app and why DAZN focuses on connecting business goals and objectives to the customer lifecycle, analyzing customer data, and blending qualitative and quantitative research to understand the big picture of its audience. 

For more insight and depth into DAZN’s lifecycle marketing strategies please check out Burrell’s recent appearance on the Masters of MAX podcast.

The BBC automates journeys to create value for its audiences

Ian Wolfe, BBC’s Head of Digital Media, took the stage to discuss the impact of abandonment on brands and how BBC has maintained focus on the customer by creating a digital-first experience for everyone. 

The BBC is well known for its commitment to bringing local and global news into the lives of its viewers and creating “value for all.”  Wolfe, , discussed the four strategic pillars that are the foundation of that commitment — renewing impartiality, focusing on unique high-impact content, extracting more from online, and building commercial income. 

In Wolfe’s view, his job is to help customers cultivate a daily habit with BBC’s online services, including BBC iPlayer, Sounds, Sport, News and Kids. That requires understanding consumption behavior and using automation and reporting to make timely and informed decisions. 

To implement an automated journey, the BBC team focuses on message cadence and audience segments. In one example cited by Wolfe, the team used automation to address abandonment of the iPlayer. Through data analysis, it mapped audiences to find out when it should consider a TV series as abandoned so it could start building out messaging to intersect with customers at the most impactful moments. Then it leveraged Airship’s integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud to build out custom audience segments so the right message went to the right customers. Finally, the team sent targeted, relevant and timely content to listeners to bring them back to iPlayer for additional streaming time. 

Panel discussion: mobile leaders share how they are tackling data challenges

Moderated by Airship’s Steve Tan, panelists included Matthew Nash, Head of CRM & Retention at Immediate Media; Gareth Main, Chief Customer Officer at Olio; Polly Jones of Odeon; Pietro Lambert, VP of Product at OneFootball;  and Greg Turtle, Head of Growth at What3Words. In this session, panelists discussed how to address data challenges across the mobile ecosystem.

To start, brands were asked to talk about their big data challenge or personal data frustration. Odeon’s Polly Jones shared an experience of setting up a new washing machine and being asked her birthday. She said brands need to consider carefully how much data they ask for.

The central concern of the panelists was what data to collect and how to collect it. All agreed that it depended entirely on what the brand was offering. There was also consensus that data latency, data organization, resources and the ability to derive meaning from specific data points continue to be challenges.  Some panelists referenced their goal of building a “progressive” customer profile, an approach that emphasizes data collection over time and at appropriate moments. Onefootball’s Lambert explained the importance of getting critical data — such as customer preferences — upfront during the onboarding process in order to optimize the customer experience from the first interaction. 

They also discussed asking customers directly for information (zero-party data) versus observing customer behavior (first-party data) and making inferences. For panelists, the former approach was the most useful and impactful, offering the freshest insights into customers’ interests and needs. All of them use Airship tools to collect zero- and first-party data. 

Drawing on experience with Airship customers, Steve Tan stressed the importance of being user-friendly and transparent about data, leveraging it without intrusion or creepiness, measuring the impact consistently and iterating on how you collect it until it’s really working for you. 

Airship now helps brands experiment anywhere 

Airship’s Max Azoulay and Sandra Wroe led a discussion about new and exciting innovations coming from the team at Airship. 

For years brands have struggled with three distinct challenges: 

Challenge #1: Brands need actionable data 
In her role as a Customer Strategist at Airship, Sandra Wroe is often asked by brands what they should focus on. The answer is often, “Focus on customer data.” 

Airship continues to address that need. Our Reporting Hub provides real-time insights from all active experiments, as well as customer, channel and campaign data, all in one place. Our new App Health Reporting dashboard provides at-a-glance KPIs to help marketers and product owners understand app performance across the mobile app lifecycle.

Challenge #2: Brands want to test & learn fast 
The vast majority of marketers and mobile product owners agree that feature tutorials and opt-in flows significantly impact app customer behaviors, yet nearly 50% of enterprise brands only improve these critical first experiences quarterly or less. Why? Because they typically had to hard-code app experiences, but development resources were scarce and they didn’t have the data to back up their need for those resources, according to customers we spoke with. They also couldn’t analyze app performance to understand what changes in experiences would make the biggest impact. 

Airship has changed all that as part of our mission is to deliver everything you need to capture customer value —inside and outside the app™.

Our no-code native Experience Editor streamlines creating and adapting high-value app experiences, giving a brand’s entire team greater agility to achieve their business goals. Marketers and mobile product owners can now skip making enhancement requests to development, waiting for app updates, or settling for disjointed HTML web views, and instead create and optimize multi-screen onboarding, activation and adoption experiences themselves with full native performance, accessibility and measurement. 

Adding even greater focus to ongoing experimentation and optimization, Airship’s Experimentation Hub centralizes all experiments and allows anyone to create, launch and evaluate experiments across messages, channels, campaigns, journeys, app experiences and features themselves. You can now experiment anywhere with Airship, systematically fine-tuning everything and anything you share with your customers. 

Register for our December 5th webinar to learn more about Airship’s experimentation and reporting capabilities and hear from two leading brand experts on driving better results with continuous experimentation and optimization. 

Challenge #3: Brands want the ability to personalize and orchestrate app experiences and cross-channel customer journeys 
Providing tailored experiences to customers continues to be a challenge for 63% of digital marketing executives, said Azoulay, citing Gartner. With a heightened need for better personalization, the question isn’t “Do we need better data?” It’s “How do we get better data?” 

Better data depends on your brand’s ability and agility to collect zero- and first-party data. Airship’s Surveys and Scenes allow non-technical teams to easily create, automate and adapt no-code native app experiences to collect first- and zero-party data while onboarding and activating app customers. Orange France, for example, now gets as many customer responses in a day using Airship as they used to get in a month with their previous HTML webview surveys.

Until next time

Mobile Leaders Forum concluded with Airship’s Altitude Awards, recognizing mobile innovation across the globe. If you missed it, you can watch the awards ceremony or check out our blog celebrating the winners. 

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