For mobile apps, messaging is the most essential marketing tool at your disposal. Messaging is your direct contact point with your app users. Push notifications have always been the most effective way to be noticed by your app users and encourage them to open the app and complete your desired conversion.
Using push notifications allows you to target users when they aren’t actively using your app with personalized and relevant messages that bring them back. In-App Messaging drives active users to the exact promotions and content you want them to experience while they are already using your app.
There are many aspects of messaging that can be utilized to boost your chances of user engagement and make your messages more than 50% more likely to be opened than a standard push notification.
Giving your user a personalized experience will boost engagement and as a result drive your desired conversions, whether that’s to view new content or complete an action in-app.
Let’s list the reasons why apps should ensure that they catch the attention of as many users as possible by opting for personalization as an engagement strategy.
Know Your Users are in the Right Place
Location or geo-targeted campaigns are one of the most effective ways to reach your audience with a message that is relevant at the exact place and time it is received. Catch a user’s attention when they are in the vicinity of your store/ location to drive them to the premises with timely personal offers. Alternatively, geographically target your competitor’s location to drive footfall away from them and back to you.
If your business doesn’t have a physical location, try relevant information tied to a valuable offer only applicable to app users in a certain area – “It’s gonna be cold in Montreal this weekend – grab yourself something warm to wear from our Winter range, now 20% off!”
Automating messages based on user location allows you to know that message is relevant to the user in the location and time they receive it. This avoids users receiving notifications that they can’t make use of as they are hundreds of miles away, which only serves a purpose as an annoyance and deterrent for that user to use your app in future.
Know They Receive It Exactly When They Want to
With the right push notifications strategy, you can engage your audience in meaningful non-intrusive ways that are of value, boost loyalty, and help to retain more users. Creating a super-engaged base of repeat users for your app.
Using Intelligent delivery allows push notifications to be intelligently sent by your mobile marketing platform at the exact moment your user is most likely to engage with the message, and this works on an individual basis to suit each app user.
Intelligent Delivery is really all about personalizing push campaigns using customer data. Using predictive technology and algorithms that work with a user’s historical and real-time app activity, platforms that offer intelligent delivery are a marketing team’s dream, enabling the automated scheduling of messages to push at the time that a particular user is most likely to engage with it.
The reason intelligent delivery is such a big hit with mobile marketers is that it really works – taking the guesswork out of campaign planning and leaving it to technology to look for the best ways to optimize engagement, retention – and results. Onboarding new customers? Re-engaging lost ones? Advising on a flight cancellation? Promoting new products? They’ll all need a different timing strategy – and intelligent delivery can figure it out for you.
Know the Message is Relevant to Each User
Personalized messaging can lead to a 4x increase in open rates. However, before you go asking your development team to prompt every user for their favourite colour or genre of music… we’re talking about behaviour-based audience segmentation and targeting. Behaviour-based messaging can deliver a 9x increase in open rates.
A single intelligently targeted push notification or in-app message, based on real-time customer intel is always going to provide your audience with way more value than the hit and hope approach – one that’s certain to do more harm to your brand than good. If you’re finding your engagement or retention rates are dropping, or worse, they never were where you needed them to be, there’s a good chance that the messages you’re sending to your audience simply aren’t relevant – and you could end up struggling to re-engage their attention.
Bring Disengaged Users Back to Your App
A mobile marketing tool known as ‘Deferred Deep Linking’ allows you to re-engage existing users that have stopped using or deleted your app.
Using data of an existing user you can use external sources and send an SMS or Email message containing a link that is personalized to that specific user and when clicked, launches the app and takes the user directly to an offer or piece of content that you know (from user data) is relevant to them and they are likely to engage with.
What if the user has already deleted the app? The link guides them to the device app store, where they re-download the app and when launched for the first time are taken to the page of the offer directly. Offering a smooth, seamless UX that brings a user back to you.55% of consumers say that a poor mobile experience makes them less likely to engage with a company, so it’s critical to provide the optimum customer experience, and that’s where deferred deep linking comes in.
Send a personalized offer to your user via a deferred deep link through SMS or Email and increase your chances of re-engaging long-gone or disengaged users. A second chance at a previously missed opportunity, all through using personalization at the heart of your engagement strategy.