Urban Airship Introduces AI Marketing Orchestration to Optimize Customer Engagement for Businesses Across the Martech Stack

New predictive machine learning and intelligent orchestration allow marketers to effortlessly coordinate communications across all digital channels and reduce costs

Urban Airship’s Digital Growth Platform extends its open data and channels support for existing martech solutions, while adding new native support for triggered email and SMS notifications

PORTLAND, Ore. — January 25, 2018 — Digital growth company Urban Airship today unveiled cloud-based AI marketing orchestration to take the guesswork out of delivering highly relevant cross-channel messages that customers will welcome. New predictive machine learning enables marketers to deliver notifications at the precise moment each individual is most likely to engage. Together with new intelligent orchestration rules and Urban Airship’s real-time automation and segmentation, marketers can coordinate sending rich, personalized notifications to any digital channel in their stack, providing the best customer experiences at the lowest marketing cost.

“Businesses want to create the most effective digital experiences for their customers, and consumers’ expectations of their favorite brands have rapidly evolved beyond personalization to real-time individualization. Marketing clouds have failed on their promise to target users across channels in an intelligent and orchestrated way,” said Brett Caine, president and CEO of Urban Airship. “With this newest offering, AI-based marketing orchestration, Urban Airship is fulfilling a promise the market has been waiting for.”

A recent survey of marketing executives found “Marketers' real-time vision falls short of their real-world execution. Nearly 40% say reaching audiences at the right moments using advanced techniques continues to be their top multichannel marketing challenge.” The report further states, “One-third of respondents say they struggle to balance channels that best serve audience needs and business objectives.” (Gartner, Multichannel Marketing Effectiveness Survey 2017: Marketers Are on a Mission to Advance Multichannel Marketing Results, Noah Elkin, Adam Sarner, Nov. 17, 2017).

Urban Airship’s AI marketing orchestration uses machine learning and data- and preference-based orchestration rules to make it easy and more automatic for marketers to drive higher engagement and better business outcomes. New core capabilities include:

• AI Machine Learning
  • New Predictive Send-Time Optimization delivers messages to individuals on the exact day and time they are most likely to engage, using ongoing machine-learning predictions
  • Daily send-time predictions (and predictive churn risk assessments from Urban Airship’s first machine-learning model) can stream in real-time to other solutions and are available for deeper analysis and cross-channel segmentation

 

• Intelligent Orchestration:
  • Priority Channel with Automated Fallback allows marketers to prioritize channels for the best user experience and lowest cost, with fallback ensuring users are reached on their highest priority opted-in channel
  • Preferred Channel directs message delivery using customers’ preferences and the flexibility of Urban Airship’s real-time automation and segmentation
  • Fan-Out makes it easy to send critical, time-sensitive messages to all of a customer’s available channels
  • Last Active eliminates concerns of over-messaging with delivery to a user’s last active channel

“Artificial intelligence takes the guesswork out of marketing orchestration and lets our customers’ data do some of the critical thinking for us. It’s quickly becoming one of our ‘easy buttons’ to better and more productive customer experiences across every digital engagement channel,” said Thomas Neumann, Principal Digital Products Manager, Vodafone Consumer Products and Services. “Since Urban Airship’s platform is open, we will be able to reach our customers on digital channels such as RCS or voice assistants and moving forward to IoT and chatbots, which we can expand at scale.”

Marketers can combine intelligent orchestration with Send-Time Optimization or real-time automation to coordinate individualized messaging across channels. For example:

• Send a promotional offer to MVP Gold members using a combination of send-time predictions and preferred or last active channel to optimize reaching these valuable customers on the right channel at the right time without over-messaging them and risking opt-outs or unsubscribes.
• Deliver critical, or time-sensitive service updates (e.g., hurricanes to delivery/service appointments) immediately with fan-out to all available channels, while less important messages like order confirmations, receipts, or loyalty balances could be sent with real-time automation and priority with fallback to ensure they are received while reducing messaging costs.
• Schedule a daily shopping cart abandonment message with send-time predictions and last active orchestration, tuning into shoppers’ implied preferences as well as cross-channel engagement data to maximize conversions.

In addition, Urban Airship also announced new native support for triggered and transactional email and SMS notifications, enabling even more marketers to rapidly adopt messaging that is highly responsive to individuals’ behaviors and interactions. Urban Airship also expanded on its commitment to support customers’ existing marketing solutions, with the industry’s deepest integration with Salesforce Journey Builder for real-time multichannel engagement and bi-directional cross-channel user-level data.

“From ordering ahead and paying at your table to engaging with our chatbots on social platforms and in connected cars and homes, TGI Fridays is committed to better serving our guests in every moment wherever they choose,” said James Washington, Product Manager, TGI Fridays. “All of these interactions create data that can fuel one-to-one engagement, and we’ve already seen how effective that can be with one mobile personalization experiment yielding a conversion rate of over 60 percent.”

“With a host of traditional and digital media platforms, and more ways to connect with our audiences, reaching them in real-time, or at the right time, across our channels is a key area of focus,” said Fisher, Senior Technical Product Manager, Cox Media Group. “Not only does Urban Airship help us deliver on the real-time nature of news in the digital era, it helps us deepen the engagement with our audiences.”

“Our new capabilities are revolutionary for marketers,” adds Caine. “We’re bringing the real-time nature of mobile to traditional digital channels with the only open platform that spans the entire martech stack, while also helping brands maximize their use of customer data, automation and machine learning across existing solution investments to boost results and lower costs.”

About Urban Airship

Urban Airship® (www.urbanairship.com) is trusted by thousands of businesses to drive growth with digital customer engagement. Every day, marketers and developers depend on Urban Airship to deliver billions of personalized, interactive notifications that inspire interest and drive action across all digital channels. Urban Airship is used by many of the world’s most admired companies, including Adidas, Alaska Airlines, The Home Depot, NBC Universal, Sky Plc and Zillow. For more information, visit www.urbanairship.com, read our blog and follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

 

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