Mobile Success Means Meeting the Customer Where They Are

As mobile product owners and marketers we invest our time creating engaging mobile experiences. Apps are a critical part of the mobile strategy because they allow us to design the experience around the needs and behaviors of the customer. Research from Bryj has found that mobile app customers spend 3.5X more than non-app customers over time. Additionally, app customers have a 23% higher retention rate than non-app customers over the first 3 months.

However, it isn’t reasonable to expect every current and prospective customer to download your app. Today there are 8.9M mobile apps worldwide and 250k mobile apps downloaded every day. In contrast, just over 1 billion websites worldwide and more than 250k new sites are launched daily. This highlights the importance of having a clear strategy for engaging customers across both of these critical digital destinations. Given that roughly 3 out of every 4 website visits happen on a mobile device, the brand strategy for engaging customers through the mobile device becomes an imperative for engaging customers and prospects.

Creating compelling, targeted and personalized experiences across both of these digital destinations requires a combination of insights, data, content, tools and of course the resources to deploy them. Most brands have well-developed skills for sending outbound messages to opted-in users designed to drive traffic to either their app or their website, but the costs associated with engaging or re-engaging anonymous users continue to rise. Currently 1 in every 3 website visits comes from a paid source, increasing the pressure on already thin budgets. And because mobile apps and websites are typically managed by different teams within a brand there are often inconsistencies with the customer’s experience in these digital destinations.

At Airship, mobile is in our DNA. Since inception, our focus has been on enabling brands to create impactful mobile experiences. Our recent innovation for creating compelling in-app experiences, whether they be interstitials or embedded inline within the app, leverages an innovative design editor that allows non-technical users to create in-app experiences deployed in native app code. These in-app experiences have been shown to increase in purchase frequency 38% while allowing brands to quickly and easily create, deploy, test and modify them.

We are excited to announce that this same functionality is now available for creating web experiences.

Leveraging this new functionality will allow brands to create unified experiences across the key digital destinations of apps and websites. The use of Airship’s Experience Editor to create content for both channels reduces design and deployment time, and the ability to create content in one place and deploy it across destinations allows brands to synchronize the customer’s experience.

The extension of the Airship Experience Platform (AXP) to support in-session experiences on the web takes advantage of the robust, foundational capabilities of AXP for audience targeting, preference management, testing and reporting.

The options for creating and synchronizing in-session experiences across app and web are endless, but some easy and obvious applications are:

• Collecting email and SMS opt-ins to increase your owned audience
• Detecting when a mobile web visitor doesn’t have your app installed and prompting them to download it
• Collecting preference and interest data to expand your customer profiles and enable deeper personalization
• Presenting known users with tailored experiences or offers
• Implementing synchronized gamification experiences across digital destinations

If increasing engagement and conversions across your app and web destinations is a priority, you’ll definitely want to learn more about Airship’s new in-session web experiences. Click here to talk to your Account Manager to get more information, or schedule a demo.