Lead-Gen Blog

What Digital Transformation Means for Telecommunications Providers

Clint Miller — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 20:35:44 GMT

Digitally native companies are fiercely disrupting traditional companies, forcing industry giants to undergo a digital transformation in order to compete and, for some, survive. It’s become critical to develop a digital customer experience that creates a personalized, seamless experience with a brand across every touchpoint consumers have with it.

Telecommunications providers find themselves in a unique situation where they serve as the very platform that so many digitally native companies depend upon—powering the phones that make their mobile apps possible. And yet telcos find that they, too, must digitally transform in order to remain relevant.

Everyone and their mother has a smartphone these days and adding account or phone lines is no longer the path for revenue growth in the telco industry. To grow is to retain for telcos—the only viable path forward is to keep your customers happy and upselling their accounts . And this means increasing your brand’s relevancy in your consumers’ lives. But how do you do that?

Become Customer Obsessed

To retain subscribers in today’s market requires a major shift in brand purpose. Telcos must shift from being telecommunication providers to become telecommunication experience facilitators.

Today’s customers value experiences more than products and their loyalty isn’t limited to the signal from your tower. How do you make them feel from initial plan subscription, to renewals, updates, billing, and promotional offers? App messaging now plays a factor in their experience with your brand. Are you helpful or bothersome? Consumers will have no problem muting your messaging—or worse...

Additionally, the customer experience goes beyond their journey from initiation to renewal, and past personalized messaging. Is there consistency across your products—or does this need improvement? The messaging, branding, and account management across your cell, cable, internet, and security products must be seamless.

Many consumers do not have a history of having positive experiences with telcos that have traditionally been difficult and cumbersome to interact with. As a telco, you really do have to reinvent your internal purpose and overcome the reputation.

To digitally transform in the face of this means to become customer obsessed at the very core of your business. Customer focus must guide every aspect of what the experience of your brand feels like to your consumers and design your digital transformation around that.

Digitally native companies have the advantage of having surprised consumers with new ways of engaging and often delighting them from the start. To compete with this, telcos must reimagine the customer journey and surprise consumers with unexpected experiences, as well.

Increase Your Relevancy through Personalization

But how do you do this and become more relevant in your subscribers’ lives?

Beyond providing exceptional network performance, telcos need to interact with their customer base across all customer touchpoints, and provide a consistent experience no matter what channel a consumer chooses to use.

To do this well, it requires brands to create truly personalized digital experiences and two-way engagement opportunities. Powerful cloud marketing solutions, like Localytics, give marketers the ability to glean deep insight into how consumers use their apps, and then create unique offers that are helpful, timely, and personalized to the customer’s daily life.

Many of our customers are engaging with their customers via their mobile app. For example, the mobile app could track when a consumer is nearing their data limit and offer an upgrade or additional data. You could also use geo-location services to determine where a consumer is shopping and, in partnership with retailers, offer promotional discounts if they enter the store. But it also means giving consumers opportunities to communicate with you on the channel of their choice and to do so in ways that make it effortless and easy.

The key is to personalize the experience so that consumers find your communication and app helpful and not annoying. To digitally transform will require a new mindset and redesigning what you can do to be of service in your consumers’ lives.

Now is the time to digitally transform.

The Benefits of an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

Brian Johnson — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 16:59:26 GMT

One thing that holds back modern marketing strategy is, well, time and resources. There’s seemingly a million different ideas you could pursue and every day there’s a new long-form on Medium or Forbes saying how marketers 10x’ed their ROI with their email strategy or built a 1M-person list in 18 days through social channels.

Ultimately, there are only so many hours in a week, and a certain amount of people and resources that you have. Many marketers face the challenge of dividing their time and resources among their marketing channels.

The big buckets

For most organizations—with some variance, of course—the big buckets of marketing efforts go towards:

Social Media
Display and retargeting
Direct Marketing/Mail
Email Marketing
App/Mobile Marketing
Event/Trade Show Marketing

Some marketers look at these channels as almost competing with each other. And there is some truth to this—each requires time to build out and time dedicated to one is effectively time away from another.

Broadly, however, they do not. That’s what “omnichannel” is all about—maximizing your efforts on each channel to draw the most people into your brand. It’s not about one singular channel, but instead about how they can best interact and encourage each other.

Everything should complement each other.

App / Social / Email

Because these three are inherently tied to a person’s phone, they are often grouped together. Some brands will over-focus on Instagram, for example, because it’s “hot” right now among millennials and Gen Z. Having such focus on a brand’s social channel may take away from the time and resources from app strategy.

Or many brands have spent years building a strong email list and devote all of their energy into their email strategy. But without social and app channels, these brands miss out on entire audiences within their market.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. These channels can all work together and encourage the others. Here’s how it could look, for example:

Big event: A wireless provider launches a new product.

The Social Strategy: Build a community around what you can offer. Let’s say it’s a notification system for wireless customers regarding their data usage. On Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, post videos and solicit stories of data fails—data running out before an important deadline, family arguments about who uses the most data, hitting your max just before the Super Bowl winning touchdown—we all have our worst case scenario. Build a discussion around “This is a pain point and here’s how we can solve it.” Social is less about the overt sell and more about building traction with a community to establish trust so that the eventual sell is more natural.

The In-App Strategy: Redesign the app so that the new feature is front and center when customers enter. Have a quick referral button so they can tell their friends how cool this new notification system is. Send push notifications to users when the feature drops, and send again when they clear 2 GB of usage, to remind them that the feature is on-going. Consider using web push, too, in order to reach those not explicitly in-app.
Email Strategy: Send one big email announcing the new service. For those that engaged with that email, set up a flow explaining the service and up-selling other services. Plan a two-week email campaign based on whether people are still clicking into later emails. For the people who didn’t engage with the initial email, resend it 7-10 days later and put them into a drip campaign based on their subsequent actions. Make it easier for people to share and forward any interesting services or tidbits.

In this way, social is designed to build community, the app is designed to be a hub for user action, and email is a way to drive current and potential users into both the social community and the app.

All three complement each other and none step on the toes of the other two.

The end result of an omnichannel strategy will be far greater than any singularly utilized channel, for both the end user and your brand.

To learn more about the channel we specialize in, read our blog post: How I Became A Mobile Marketer in 30 Days

For Telco Providers, Digital Transformation is a Continuous Journey for Lifetime Success

cdragoon@localytics.com (Chris Dragoon) — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 19:11:00 GMT

In life, there are fads and there are trends. Fads are things that become popular one day and gone the next. In the 70’s, people were crazy for waterbeds. More recently, people would lay face down in bizarre places and called it “planking.” These are fads. Trends, on the other hand, have a bit more staying power.

Digital transformation is not just the latest IT fad, but instead is a major part of the internet trend. This recent trend includes cloud computing, mobile, artificial intelligence, SDN/NFV, big data, and IoT. Digital transformation is the implementation of all of these components, to rethink business models, improve competitiveness, and create new products. It revolves around innovation and the use of technology to fundamentally transform businesses.

Digital transformation is a multidisciplinary initiative that involves the entire enterprise—from sales and marketing to ops, from finance to HR. It requires special attention to soft-skills, focusing energy beyond the engineering aspects of a digital transformation and organizational change as the business is re-tooled. And finally it requires constant communication. It’s not surprising that digital transformations take time.

Digital transformation not only impacts the businesses who implement it, but the customers they cater to. When a brand goes through their digital transformation journey, the customers will receive a better customer experience through personalized messaging, enhanced customer support, and more.

Frankly, digital transformation is hard. So where does the telecommunications industry fall as it relates to its digital transformation maturity?

A recent study Deloitte Digital Transformation Executive Survey 2018, ranks various industries by their digital maturity. According to the study, digital maturity is measured by added business benefit. The study identified the TMT or Technology, Media and Telecommunications industry with the highest percent of maturity when compared to other industries like Consumer Packaged Goods or Financial Services.

It’s no surprise that TMT was ranked highest among industries. In the tech sector, you have digitally native companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook. In media, there is Netflix, Hulu, and other digitally native companies that distribute content and media. But then there is telecommunications, not quite at the level of digitally maturity as the digitally native leaders.

From rigid to flexible

Consider the large cost that goes into supporting and expanding networks—industry average for CAPEX is approximately 15% to 18% of revenue. This is where most service providers have focused their digital transformation investments. From a business transformation perspective the value proposition is strong, as it affords:

Lower cost over time as service providers migrate from closely coupled hardware/software to standardized hardware/software
Siloed OSS/BSS systems to horizontal platforms that are open and API-enabled
Migration from physical to virtual

Digital transformation programs are slow by nature. For context, AT&T announced their network transformation program in December 2014 and early this year announced the program would reach 75% completion in 2020. Digital transformation is a continuous process but the end result will be a network infrastructure that is highly adaptive, service-aware, and enables the service provider to innovate and deliver new services faster.

Industry experts estimate virtualization of the network will provide billions in savings. If the study defines industries as “digitally mature” by its added business benefit, savings of billions on the bottom line certainly hits that mark.

So as the network transformation progresses and produces tangible results, service providers must focus their attention and investments on re-tooling the customer facing side of the business—getting new contracts, adding lines and devices, upselling additional data, and using customer data to improve the customer journey. All these customer facing processes need to be simplified, unified, and automated for the best possible customer experience.

Digital intelligence for a better digital experience

Historically, customer experience systems and initiatives have not been particularly successful. And progress in this area has been modest at best because typically these initiatives were isolated projects with objectives focused only on quality of service, such as network traffic, data speeds, and other service-related issues. But what providers didn’t focus on was actual customer service—call center experience, account management, etc. The focus was too narrow and a bit too technical.

It is not often that industries get “redos.” With the introduction of each new generation of mobile networking, 1G to 2G to 3G to 4G, service providers squandered the opportunity to redefine the customer experience.

With 5G, opportunity is knocking yet again. With more and more emerging technologies within the digital transformation space, service providers have the tools to transform the customer journey and create digital experiences that surpass digitally native companies like Facebook, Netflix or Google.

Recently, a large Canadian mobile operator used AI to determine the likelihood that a customer will promote or detract a specific service to others . The results were positive. With the data collected, the brand was able to build customized chatbots resulting in 53% less customer complaints.

Deloitte’s study provides a snapshot of where industries are on the digital maturity scale, based on business value created. But where the study falls short is on measuring digital maturity based on the “digital intelligence” of industries. True digital maturity is a company’s ability to leverage data to create intelligence about their customers: what do they like and dislike? Their favorite cuisines...film genres...sports? Where and when customers use the most data for their favorite app? Just think of the possibilities.

At Localytics we believe there are three core tenets that can significantly enhance a service providers’ “digital intelligence”:

360 view of the customer
Seamless interaction across multiple customer channels
Contextual, personalized, and prescriptive engagements.

Executed correctly, these core tenets can contribute to greater lifetime customer value through increased revenue and reduced churn.

It’s imperative for service providers to get this right. If you don’t, you risk being left behind, chasing your competitors who take on an all-encompassing digital transformation.

Digital is here to stay and should not be disregarded.. There have been plenty of companies who ignored trends—how did it work for Blockbuster to ignore the streaming trend? Or how big box retailers have fared against Amazon? Shopping to content, transportation to banking—everything that can be digitized likely will.

Service providers have the opportunity to be industry leaders to digitize and revolutionize the customer experience. Brands’ digital transformation will do wonders by putting their customers first. Transitioning from product-level service to a comprehensive customer service experience will set apart the leaders from the stragglers. It won’t be easy and it won’t be a quick journey. But keeping up with the trend and growing your business around where you’re going instead of where you’ve been. By constantly evolving and innovating on your brand’s digital transformation journey, you’ll be set up to make your customers happier than ever and grow your revenue faster.

Localytics Teams Up With Movable Ink

Dorothy Murach — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 14:09:36 GMT

At Localytics we’re all about helping brands deliver engaging customer experiences driven by optimized personalization, that lead to deeper, long-lasting relationships. And like any savvy brand knows, nurturing a customer relationship takes more than a few broadcast push messages or a daily email blast. Customers expect brands to understand them and create interactions that are tailored to their preferences, interests and actions.

Crafting these customized experiences requires a lot of data and the right engagement tools to make this data actionable. At Localytics we provide you with the data, analytics, and the engagement tools, but we also partner with top companies to help you get even more out of your Localytics solution so you can further optimize and personalize your user interactions and do so across additional channels and platforms.

And to keep this going we’re launching a new partnership with Movable Ink, a leader in enabling brands to create personalized visual marketing experiences. This partnership means you can now use Localytics’ powerful data capabilities to generate intelligent and rich email content (visuals and copy) based on a user’s behavior in your mobile app, so you can provide seamless and customized communications to your customers.

We make this possible by enabling Movable Ink customers to tap into the Localytics Profile API from the Movable Ink platform, allowing clients to generate creative and dynamic email content through Movable Ink based on real-time app behaviors and preferences provided through Localytics.

The Localytics Profile API allows you to pull in data from your app users such as last product or category browsed, last app open, duration of their last app engagement, if they have push notifications enabled, and even custom attributes of your choice. Being able to tap into this data and utilize it for email means you can run intelligent, personal email campaigns that give your customers the unified brand experience they expect.

Through this partnership you can craft campaigns that hit a variety of marketing goals, from growing customer engagement and retention, to increasing revenue. To make a direct impact on your bottom line, you can create emails promoting products or categories that your user browsed in the app to help nail the purchase. And to promote customer engagement and retention you can create cross-channel campaigns that encourage users to take certain actions within your app, like enabling push notifications, or you can run re-engagement campaigns for app users who haven’t logged in for a while.

Our partnership with Movable Ink will change the way you approach cross-channel communications, and there is even more to come. Stay tuned for our next announcement that will bring the integration with Movable Ink and Localytics to the next level.

Ready to learn more? You can check out some more details on our Movable Ink & Localytics integration here. And if you’re attending Movable Ink’s Think Summit this October, stop by our booth to chat with the Localytics team. If you can’t meet us in person, get in touch with us here.

5 Ways Personalized Marketing and Mobile Data are a Match Made in Heaven

Brian Johnson — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 19:31:28 GMT

Marketing these days is a lot like dating. In dating, it’s important to get to know each other but it
can be easy to scare quickly. There’s a fine line between the two. Consumers feel similarly
about how they want to be marketed towards.

Think of your fairytale date—it includes a list of things exactly catered to your interests and
hobbies. It was planned through getting to know you, not by obvious surveillance. There were
no needy text messages nor any faint resemblance to Netflix’s dating thriller You...

Brands need to understand their customers to provide a catered experience but too many
messages, irrelevant content, or over personalization will scare them off. Brands need to act as
the perfect date by offering perfectly relevant marketing that’s specifically curated to the
consumer’s preference without going over the top.

Think of it as a corporate version of The Bachelor—brands are dating all their consumers and to
win their rose, you need to get to know them.

According to Gartner’s recent The Essential Guide to Marketing Personalization, “78 percent of
consumers want personalized marketing communications.” And almost half of consumers will
unsubscribe from a company’s content due to irrelevant or annoying messages. Your date
brings you to a bagel shop because they know you like bagels, sounds like a good date, right?

On the other end of the spectrum, personalization sees a four percent decline in commercial
benefits when companies showcase their knowledge of customers without offering any sort of
catered help as a result. Imagine you’re with your date and they say “so I know you like bagels”
without much follow up, you won’t be so flattered this time around.

Now there’s a way to perfect your personalized marketing: mobile data. Mobile data offers the
best way to get to know your customers and how they interact with you, without going
overboard.

1. Uncover and aggregate profile data through your mobile app

Profile data includes any quantitative data accessible through your mobile app. Think
data that is initially provided through account set up. Age, gender, location, and other
typically user provided data is made accessible and analyzable. The first step to
personalization is getting to know the basic defining characteristics of your audience.

2. Qualitative behavioral data made quantifiable

Profile data can only go so far—not all 30-year-old women in Boston are the same. We
aren’t defined by our demographics; we find our identity with our hobbies and interests.
These characteristics can be quantified through behavioral data. It’s much easier to
personalize marketing toward a group of athletes than it is target young women.

Let’s say Adidas utilizes both profile and behavioral data, they can group together the
young women who consistently interact with their app or notifications relevant to running.
Now they can craft personalized messaging. Don’t waste time with basketball gear,
focus on women’s running shoes.

3. Consistent data

Consumers are on their mobile devices far more frequently than other gadgets at their
disposal. Take a look at what prompts your users to open your app and how they are
interacting within it. Mobile insights provide some of the most consistent venues for a
consumer given that mobile devices make up 70 percent of average screen time. These
days, consumers are engaging with brands through their phone and it’s imperative for
brands to know how they do so.

4. Tracking your own data

One of the strongest components of mobile data is that all the data is your own and now
you’re just processing it. It’s just like dating: you ask questions and they answer. It’s not
surveilling their Google search history or recent tweets to get to know them—you get to
know them through their interactions with you. Mobile insights are one of the best ways
to not come off as “creepy” to your consumers.

5. Mobile A/B testing and dynamic content

Dynamic content is live-changing content that caters to your consumers’
personalizations. It can input their names and behaviors into the messaging to provide
catered content based on their past interactions.

Dynamic content, used alongside A/B testing, can individualize the type and frequency
of the content. Together, it clarifies the perfect balance between too personalized and
under personalized, and too frequent and neglect.

Mobile marketing can be made easy with the correct data streams. Mobile app data is the easy,
efficient way to avoid being remembered as the creepy date who stalked your Twitter, and
instead woo your consumers from your first date and onward.

Telco Trends: AT&T and Verizon bet on different strategies, but who will win customer’s loyalty?

Brian Johnson — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 17:48:58 GMT

Recently, there have been a number of high profile mergers and acquisitions among the largest companies in the telecom and media industry.

AT&T purchased Time Warner for $85.4 billion to form a colossal media empire with approximately 198 million subscribers across wireless, fixed and cable assets. Thus begins a massive transformation from a telephone company to what AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson refers to as a “modern media company”.
The Department of Justice has approved T-Mobile’s $26 billion merger with Sprint. Combining the third and fourth largest mobile operators in the US market, now serving approximately 141 million customers.
Vodafone now has EU approval to close on the $21.5 billion acquisition of Liberty Global’s assets in Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania. This allows Vodafone to continue its Next Generation Converged Network strategy with 54 million customers and access to up to 110 million users.

Strategies to create competitive advantages

The telecom industry has undergone enormous transformation in the last decade, technological advances and birth of web-scale companies have significantly altered the composition of the market. The competitive landscape is therefore quite different as well.

Telco companies are betting on different strategies with the goal of creating their version of a sustainable future. T-Mobile/Sprint are looking to scale. Vodafone is entering adjacent markets. AT&T goes bold and banks on becoming a major producer, provider, and distributor of content across their networks. And Verizon has their sights set on delivering the best network experience.

AT&T: Content is King

AT&T is attempting to integrate and leverage core media assets such as Time Warner’s film and TV production studios with cable news like CNN. Its aim is to directly distribute content to the 170 million customers across their wireless, wireline, and satellite systems. The content will allow AT&T to compete with non-telco players such as Netflix or Hulu, presenting them with greater advertising opportunities. Additionally, AT&T plans to offer its own streaming service which will carry content produced by WarnerMedia.

AT&T is expanding horizontally across the content industry, being the creator and the distributor. Concurrently, the carrier plans to deploy and launch a new 5G network nationwide. AT&T is sailing into uncharted waters and entering a whole new world.

AT&T is implementing an untried strategy, and so far there are no copycats. If it works, it’ll be only a matter of time.

Verizon: Best-in-Class Network

Verizon made a substantial acquisition almost five years ago spending $130 billion dollars to buy out 45% of its partner Vodafone. The move has further enabled Verizon’s plans to become the industry standout by means of network quality, leading the charge in 5G, network virtualization, and the Internet of Things.

Verizon’s “intelligent Edge Network” (iEN) and Network as a Service (NaaS) strategies are the complete antonym of AT&T’s approach; the focus is on building the most intelligent, adaptive, service-aware network which will carry Verizon content as well others’, like Netflix and Hulu. While Verizon leverages their acquisition of Yahoo, their differentiator focus remains building the absolute best network.

What Is Needed To Succeed

It is impossible to predict which of the two differing strategies will prevail. Some things, however are clear. The mobile industry is saturated and wireline and cable customer growth is flat or declining. The reality is there’s little to none net-new customer growth in the telecom industry and companies look elsewhere for growth.

Both companies must earn their customer’s loyalty by focusing on providing greater personalization and intelligently interacting with them. Regardless of which business strategy will prove itself, customers will gravitate toward and stay with the company that delivers the most relevant services and meaningful experiences.

To do this, they will need digital intelligence capabilities that provide insights into customers to build better marketing campaigns, messaging, and app experiences. Without a focus on customer experiences that delight, enable upsell/cross sell, and increase retention, neither strategy will work.

Proof That Web Push Is What You're Looking For

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 19:08:37 GMT

Brands are constantly looking for new ways to reach and engage their users across platforms and through new channels. Web push is a new engagement channel that can help you optimize your omni-channel strategies. How can you know that web push is what you are looking for? To help you envision what web push can do for your organization we’ve outlined the 2 biggest benefits and 3 main use cases.

The benefits include:

Expanding your brand’s reachable audience
Personalizing your omni-channel communications

Use cases include:

Abandoned cart campaigns - re-engaging users
Upselling opportunities - growing ARPU (average revenue per user)
Promotions- combining web and physical stores for improved engagement and retention

Main benefits of web push

Let’s look at the main benefits that web push offers to brands in terms of reaching new audiences and engaging uses with omni-channel campaigns.

Expand your reach and target users across devices

Why is this important? Every brand wants to expand its reach and stay top of mind for its customers in a crowded marketplace.

What’s the current challenge? Customers use a combination of channels for communications including email, chat, and social media, and access them from different devices such as mobile, tablet or desktop. Brands need to be able to reach users across devices and engage them with a consistent communications strategy across channels.

How can web push help? Web push is a new channel that enables you to send push notifications to web users and reach them through a laptop, desktop, tablet or mobile phone*. This allows you to greatly increase your reachable audience, and also re-engage app users who previously opted-out of app push notifications or email.

A good example here is financial services or personal banking brands. Financial services companies tend to use web push for notifications of monthly statements, announcements of new tools and products, promotions for new credit cards, and investment advice. By using web push financial services companies can reach more customers than through app push alone. According to the research on the value of online banking channels in a mobile-centric world, 73% of users globally use online banking once a month, compared to 59% who use mobile banking, which indicated that brands should amplify their reach beyond the mobile app. Additionally, web push experiences higher opt-ins, lower unsubscribe rates and more click-throughs. This means your personalized marketing and engagement efforts can see success across a wider range of channels and devices.

*iOS mobile devices do not currently support web push

Omni-channel personalized communication

Why is this important? Today brands need to engage with customers on a multitude of channels with highly personalized communications, while providing a unified and cohesive experience, regardless of how and when a user interacts with the brand.

What’s the current challenge? According to recent stats, about 85% of online shoppers start a purchase on one device and finish on another. This trend indicates that brands need to engage customers with personalized outreach and include consistent messaging and payment methods to be able to provide an integrated omnichannel experience. To achieve this with highly personalized brand engagement has historically been challenging.

How can web push help? Telecommunications (“telco”) is increasingly entering the digital engagement space as well, and web push is being used to notify customers of billing cycles, update them on where their usage stands that month and to up-sell on more data, promote new streaming content, and to announce new products and offers, i.e. cable bundles or phone upgrades. With 5G poised to soon change the entire telco world, and using web push and app push together to inform customers and subsequently drive loyalty is a stable, strategic approach that has huge growth opportunities. Integrating web push into their multichannel sales strategy enables telco companies to engage current customers with highly targeted communications that improve brand loyalty and decrease churn.

Main use cases of web push

Let’s see how these benefits of web push can be translated into use cases including re-engaging users through abandoned cart campaigns, increasing ARPU (average revenue per user) through upselling, and improving retention with omni-channel promotional activities.

Abandoned cart campaigns

Why is this important? Combating abandoned cart is a huge focus of e-commerce; 28.3% of all e-com revenue comes from effective abandoned cart campaigns that re-convert.

What’s the current challenge? Cart abandonment impacts numerous industries -- the average cart abandonment rate is 68%, with over $4.6 trillion globally left in carts each year.

How can web push help? Web push notifications have a higher conversion rate than email as a channel, and notifications sent to fewer than 5,000 subscribers can have an average CTR of 11% or above. With web push, you have more ways to reach abandoned cart users and convert them back to buyers. A user would get a browser notification regarding what they left in their cart, directing the user straight to the checkout page. We suggest adding a special promotion to sweeten the deal.

Upselling opportunities

Why is this important? Upsells are crucial elements to increase ARPU and revenue. Web push allows your upselling campaigns to reach a wider audience. While mobile app usage continues to grow, web browsers comprise 43% of the digital minutes spent across all devices. Combining both app and web push approaches gives you more digital touchpoints, and high-value web pushes increases app retention 3-10x.

What’s the current challenge? Again, you’re competing for time and attention with other brands -- both in your industry and outside of it. And when your customer experience is subpar even once or twice, you lose customers, and decreased retention is lost long-term revenue.

How can web push help? Travel app users are traditionally among the most loyal of all users -- which makes sense, because “travel” represents getting away to the free time of your own, and people want to be engaged with how their trip unfolds. You can boost that loyalty even further with web push by promoting travel deals, day trips, reminders for add-ons such as rental cars, and sharing blog posts with travel ideas.

Promotions driving online traffic to offline stores

Why is this important? Customers are more likely to complete their purchases if the brand provides them with all the info they need and guides them with personalized, omni-channel communications throughout the buying process.

What’s the current challenge? Many retail buyers research products online before they make a purchase. Many industries with strong brick-and-mortar store networks need to look for creative ways to nourish existing relationships and enhance customer loyalty by merging the online and offline brand experience.

How can web push help? Web push can help retailers amplify their communications through online channels that allow them to communicate with customers using customized notifications, prompting customers to visit their brick-and-mortar stores with exclusive offers, promotions or discount codes. Retailers can also benefit from web push in personalized communications. Consider offering tailored messages to each user with codes, coupons, sales, and special offers. Using our basket rules methodology, you can also use web push to intelligently recommend new products based on their preferences and previous buying history.

The highlights of web push

Whether you want to amplify your reach, optimize your omni-channel strategies with personalized communications, or re-engage your customers, web push is the solution that will enable you to:

Build and maintain engagement outside of your mobile app
Expand your reach across devices
Personalize your omnichannel communications
Combat cart abandonment
Increase upsell opportunities

Any questions about web push?

Feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to walk you through exactly how web push can help cement your omnichannel strategy both in terms of acquisition and retention.

2019 Top Apps: Retail, QSR, Telecommunications, Entertainment

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 09:08:04 GMT

Mobile app engagement is increasingly important for brands. But which brands are actually doing this really well, personalizing their user’s experiences, and seeing tangible results in the process?

Two weeks ago, we reviewed the 20 top 2019 apps in banking, personal finance, and hotels/lodging. This week we’re reviewing the top 20 apps in retail, quick serve restaurants, telecommunications, and entertainment.

As a quick refresher: we’re using our “Stages of Personalization” model to rate each app. The Stages of Personalization model takes into account:

Audience
Message
Timing

When we analyze these apps, it’s through a combination of how effectively they personalize their in-app and overall mobile experience for users. We will often link to their app review page when linking the name of the brand, in case you want to read a slate of reviews before adding it to your phone.

These 20 apps are from retail, quick-service food (think Chipotle), entertainment, and wireless/telecommunications.

Retail Apps

American Eagle: AE has been on the personalization train for a few years, launching a connected loyalty program in ‘18. At the time, they said -- as many brands will -- “staying connected to customers is the core of everything we do.” They go above and beyond, though, including having customized local events such as making your own jeans in NYC. Back in 2016, AE realized more than 50% of their customers were shopping on mobile, so they doubled down on mobile to make the process both easier and more personalized. The results have been characterized as “on fire.”

Bed Bath and Beyond: Mobile has been performing great as a channel, which began when they overhauled their in-app and broader mobile strategy to focus more on personalization. This involved individual recommendations, easier storage and combining of coupons, and a deeper investment in data that included a mobile integration to in-store point of sale systems.

Best Buy: Best Buy was one of the earlier big box retailers to incorporate check-ins as a way to drive loyalty, and they started viewing mobile and digital as personalized advice channels. Barrons recently called their stock “the most undervalued in retail,” and much of their sales and revenue growth has come not from brick and mortar strategies, but better integration between a personalized mobile experience and either (a) mobile checkout or (b) customers then coming into the store and having exactly what they want available and in front of them.

Macy’s: Macy’s increasingly turned to mobile as brick and mortar costs rose. Merchandise selections in-app are now based on past shopping and spending patterns, and they added virtual reality for checking out certain outfit combinations. Their chief digital revenue officer, Jill Ramsey, told Fortune that “smartphones really are the new front window.” That’s a big statement.

Home Depot: Home Depot has long been good at geolocation and ideas like augmented reality, to allow customers to visualize faucets and other household needs before coming in to buy. As for the geographic personalization:

First, the brand’s app looks at a shopper’s region to tie in localized design trends and products.Consumers in California would receive a different set of recommendations than someone living in Maine. Stores are geofenced, so when a consumer enters the app, which has been downloaded 20 million times, with Home Depot Pro customers making up one-third of monthly visits, it shifts into “store mode” and displays products’ locations. Some select stores even will have Waze-like guided directions to aisles.

Quick Service Retail Apps

Chipotle: Chipotle has been surging this year financially, and in 2017 they added more personalized in-app features, including:

Quick reorder
Easier ability to redeem offers
Apple and Android Pay
Immediate store location
Enhanced design
Streamlined UX

Basically, when you want a tasty burrito, you go into the app and the app knows exactly what you want (because of your history) and where to go grab it (because of where you’re at) and everything moves quickly to your goal of sweet burrito bliss. That’s the essence of personalization.

Dairy Queen: Dairy Queen, which may seem a bit like a throwback for Gen Z despite the Stranger Things 3 inclusion in the mall, actually has a great loyalty/rewards program in-app, with their senior manager of digital even noting it wasn’t a direct sales play: “While we believe there is significant opportunity to use mobile to drive sales, we believe that mobile makes an impact if it drives our customers to visit us just one more time each month.” Loyalty! While DQ has all the common features of a QSR app, i.e. order ahead, the cornerstone of their mobile approach is to drive loyalty, believing that loyalty over time will drive revenue. Right now, that’s working out well for their franchises, who are becoming more affluent.

Domino’s: Domino’s is a popular mobile case study of the last five years. Who doesn’t adore the Order Tracker? Domino’s has driven revenue, and beaten back Pizza Hut, using its mobile strategy, which is based on in-app personalization (they know what pizza and sides you want), seamless mobile ordering, and realizing that when 60% of your orders are mobile, you need to really be focusing there. Domino’s points to an important element of all these successful apps: when the app is becoming the core of the business, the business needs to pivot to focus on the app. The app can’t be a “nice to have” when it’s 60% of orders. You need to change your internal culture, often, to embrace mobile as the most relevant channel you have.

Jack in the Box: You know them from their funny/weird TV spots, but the app experience is highly personalized, including special mobile exclusives, easy reorder from the past five orders, saving your favorite order for one-tap ordering, push notifications tied to both geo and previous order history (i.e. that 1am run), and “read your mind” features that prompt you to the food you want right then (again, think of 1am).

Taco Bell: In addition to easier customized orders, Taco Bell did an interesting thing a few years ago. They had a “social blackout,” so you couldn’t follow them on Facebook, Instagram, etc. That would seem like a death knell for some brands, but it forced all the interaction for customers to move in-app, which was super effective for app launch. Everyone who wanted Taco Bell (who doesn’t?) had to move in-app. In 2017, three years later, Mobile Marketer awarded them “Mobile Marketer of the Year.” They’re creative in-app, which is fun, but they also personalize the food contemplation and food ordering experience for their users, and that’s why the users keep coming back.

Telecommunications

Bell Canada: MyBell is Bell Canada’s primary app. We’ve been doing an increasing amount of work with telecommunications recently, and MyBell has everything a telco needs to be set up for success with app/mobile strategy: view, download, pay bill; view mobility and data usage; easily manage travel usage; personalized channel lineups; personalized advice on Internet/data usage, etc. Digital transformations are escalating in telecommunications, and Bell and others are poised to be at the forefront, including:

Charter Communications: We talked recently about multi-app vs. single-app strategy, and Charter is one of the more effective multi-app strategies out there. They have a suite of apps related to Spectrum and Charter, with a broad anchor app (Spectrum TV) and lots of niche apps allowing users to personalize content offerings from their phone.

Orange: Orange is also a multi-app strategy, with the primary app offering users the ability to customize the application following his entity subscribe to the entities they wish to follow and their favorite themes, access to exclusive content, video articles, computer graphics, podcasts, and the ability to like articles, save them for later reading even without connection, and be prompted to new articles because of their history.

Rogers: MyRogers is their main app. The company has understood the value of its role in the mobile marketing ecosystem for years, partnering with brands to provide better location services for targeting. Deloitte actually did a full profile recently of how Rogers shifted to a more customer-centric organization through a comprehensive use of apps, self-service opportunities for customers (checking bills and usage), Facebook Messenger bot responses for FAQs, and more.

Cricket Wireless: In keeping with the theme, this app is called “myCricket.” You can log in using biometrics -- the heart of personalization! -- and you can easily add features like high-speed data, mobile hotspots, Cricket International, and more right from in-app.

Entertainment Apps

Before we begin: TechCrunch noted this spring that a revolution is coming in personalized entertainment, including -- this one might blow your mind -- different episode orders for Love, Death, and Robots based on previous user preferences. The “Baldersnatch” episode of Black Mirror had interactive, personalized content as well. As a result of all this, we really need to say Netflix is one of the better personalization entertainment apps in the game. (And it just reported its first user drop in a decade.)

Other apps slaying the personalization game:

Bleacher Report: You select the teams, leagues, players, and news stories you’re interested in, so your content is always highly-personalized. Plus: the app has exclusive features (i.e. reporting) and offers related to your interests, and breaking news push notifications, which are highly-relevant to only your interests, happen instantly. You’ll know something about your team way before your buddy will.
TED: This is how machine learning and algorithms should work, ideally. As you discover talks, which can happen in an easy-to-navigate “Discover” area, the app will personalize content and notifications for you based on what you engaged with for the longest amount of time. Then, it will send you updates on related talks, or new talks from the same types of speakers. You get smarter by just having your phone in your pocket. Win-win.

Pocket: This is a content curation app with the slogan “Save, Read, Grow.” One of the best features for users here is a seamless integration and sync between web and mobile. We talk about mobile a lot, but increasingly people want to see similar features on web -- it’s why we at Localytics are doing more with web push this quarter -- because they spend so much of their day at work, and having web notifications or web sync with mobile makes a lot of sense. Pocket also has a strong “recommended” feed to personalize content ideas.
Songkick: We won’t belabor this one. Just look at how they personalize their shot at getting you to opt-in to push:

You interested yet? We are.

And now, you.

What’s your favorite app on your phone? What has the best approach to personalized content? Which app do you think “knows” you the best? Holler at us and let us know.

Mid-2019 Retail and Ecommerce Benchmarks and Trends

trodde@localytics.com (Thomas Rodde) — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 14:09:24 GMT

Our last retail and ecommerce mobile benchmark blog post was right in the beginning of 2019; at that time, data showed that both app retention and average session lengths were on the rise. That makes sense because of the retail slowdown of 2017 and 2018, which meant more mobile engagement and less brick-and-mortar engagement. This is continuing in the first half of 2019: e-commerce has been a big part of the disruptive shift in retail, but massive rent increases are factoring in, too. With retail and other legacy industries at a crossroads, what does our benchmark data for retail and ecommerce tell us after the first half of 2019

Let’s dive in.

Retention and churn

Retention continues to grow at healthy rates of about 4-5% year-over-year. Simultaneously, churn is shrinking at a rate of 3%.

Big takeaway: In general we can attribute this to improved awareness among marketers around personalized messaging and user retention. Based on our Stages of Personalization model, this means moving away from broadcast messaging(Stage 1 of personalization) to segmented messaging based on profile and behavioral data (Stage 2 of personalization). For more on moving from Stage 1 to Stage 2, consult this quick guide.

Push is increasing engagement

Average push engagement (sessions per user within seven days of message receipt) is also maintaining an impressive pace with increases of 64% on Android and 84% on iOS since the first half of 2018.

Big takeaway: This indicates that users are becoming increasingly engaged with apps due to push messaging. We'd expect app launches per user to trend upwards along with sessions per user, however the data seems to suggest that pushes are solely responsible for driving additional sessions in app. App launches per user have increased since the second half of 2018, but decreased year over year.

What about push opt-in rates?

Android push opt-in rates increased by 14% since the first half of 2018, but seem to have stalled since the second half of 2018 at 93%. iOS's push opt-in rates have steadied at around 35% (Android apps automatically opt users in to push, so the rate is much higher than iOS.)

In-app open rates rising in tandem on Android and iOS

This is largely the result of improved in-app technology. In-App has been a tool that marketers have adopted more because the medium allows more creative and engaging solutions. It's a popular channel among marketers that can make or break an app experience.

Here at Localytics, we’ve been investing a good deal in in-app tech over the past year. We believe that, and better approaches to personalization, are the cornerstone of successful mobile marketing for the next three years.

What to expect for the second half of 2019

The second half of any year has the holiday season, which starts earlier than ever each year. Last year, Thanksgiving weekend went up 40% year-over-year, and another massive jump is likely this November. It’s crucial that marketers nail campaigns in those holiday windows because the revenue can be massive, and connected campaigns start with highly-personalized offers. A personalized app strategy with app/web push is the key to H2 for marketers. We’ll have more on all this as autumn begins.

If you have any questions or want to look at the fuller data sets…

… feel free to connect. We’d love to show you the landscape in different industries.

What Is Web Push?

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 15:11:31 GMT

What is “web push” and how is that different from “app push?”

App push notifications have been an enormously-important part of mobile marketing strategies for years, and while we talk about mobile apps and their massive growth year-over-year, the fact remains that web is still huge, and both are vital to digitally transforming your marketing and customer engagement efforts.

Imagine having a way to potentially reach 48 million more users through your personalized marketing efforts. This is the reality for one of our clients, who has over 50 million users, but only about 2 million of those use their mobile app. This is a huge audience that could be reached via web push since they aren’t currently accessible through their app push campaigns.

The goal is to reach users with personalized, tailored content no matter where they are, and to continue developing strong omni-channel marketing strategies that keep your users engaged, informed and coming back. That’s why you need both “app push” and “web push.”

Web push targets your web users without requiring them to be currently on your website, whereas app push targets mobile app users when they’re not currently in-app. (You’ve likely gotten these from many brands.) Both web and app push do require opt-in, and the opt-ins are independent of each other -- i.e. a user would have to opt-in to both to receive both.

App Push can push to a mobile phone or tablet where the app is installed; web push can push to a laptop, desktop, tablet, or mobile phone that you use to visit the company’s website-- although iOS mobile devices are not currently supporting web push. (They may be there soon, however.)

How would a brand most effectively use web push?

Some of the bigger umbrella categories for web push include:

Breaking news
Abandoned cart campaigns
New content (i.e. blogs, landing pages, gated)
Sales and promotions
Flight or event notifications
Real-time score updates or conference/event/trade show updates

Obviously, the use of web push will look different in different industries and verticals. (We’ll have an article that goes into more detail on different verticals after this one, too.)

A media company primarily would use it for new content and breaking news. Retail tends to use web push for promotional codes, other sale offers (Black Friday Deals), and abandoned cart campaigns. Travel companies can send reminders to users about upcoming trips, or use web push for upsells and add-ons like rental cars, hotel rooms, and events at destination.

Increasingly, we’ve seen new verticals enter the web push space, such as financial services. Financial services companies tend to use web push for notifications of monthly statements, announcements of new tools and products, promotions for new credit cards, and investment advice.

Telecommunications (“telco”) is also entering the web and mobile world, often using web push to notify customers of billing cycles, where their data stands that month, up-selling them on more data for the month, and announcing new products and offers, i.e. cable bundles or phone upgrades.

Ready to Learn More?

Our web push feature is now available, getting started is easy and our dedicated Client Success Team will help you get up and running with the new feature quickly. If you’re an existing Client, contact your Customer Success Manager to learn more and to get started integrating the feature into your Localytics solution.

If you’re new to Localytics and want to learn more, feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to walk you through exactly how web push can help cement your omnichannel strategy and expand your reach with personalized engagement campaigns.

New Feature from Localytics: Web Push Notifications

Dorothy Murach — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 15:34:27 GMT

As marketers, we’re always looking for new channels and methods to reach our customers and users, and we’re always striving to “cut through the clutter”, even though it's becoming increasingly more difficult to catch their attention.

To catch and keep a user’s attention marketers have been focusing on Personalization strategies made possible by digitally transforming their marketing capabilities, which bring better results and higher user engagement over traditional broadcast marketing strategies.

The average user spends 7.8 hours a day on their digital devices, and that jumps to 9.6 hours a day for Millennials and 11.1 hours for teens¹, so it’s not surprising that so many of us are focusing on digitally transforming and personalizing our approach to marketing.

At Localytics our users are already well-versed when it comes to personalizing their mobile messaging and app engagement campaigns, and they firmly understand the power and importance of incorporating digital, data-focused solutions to make their strategies attainable and impactful. But you can always do more, so we’re adding Web Push- a new messaging channel within Push Notifications.

Web Push provides a new channel for those personalized campaigns that will help you expand your reach and grow your digital and omni-channel marketing efforts. Now you can send personalized push notifications to your web users, whether they are using a laptop, desktop PC, tablet or mobile phone.

Many organizations have a large group of web visitors, and Web Push enables you to reach a whole new user group with personalized campaigns. And you can also continue transitioning your marketing strategy towards omni-channel to create a more seamless and personalized brand experience across your digital footprint.

With our digital engagement solution we make it easy for you to create and send personalized marketing campaigns, so you can continue to expand your reach and grow your omni-channel marketing strategies by providing unique experiences that build engagement, loyalty, and conversions.

Ready to learn more about Web Push? Schedule a quick call with a member of the Localytics team to see what our platform can do to advance your personalized, digital marketing strategies.

1 Comscore: The State of Global Digital 2018

2019 Top Apps: Personal Finance, Banking, Hotels, and Lodging

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Tue, 23 Jul 2019 16:24:05 GMT

Mobile and in-app engagement is increasingly important for brands. But which brands are actually doing this really well, personalizing their user’s experiences, and seeing tangible results in the process?

Others have attempted to draw your attention to the best apps out there, including PCMag (helpfully broken down by category) and Digital Trends (helpfully broken down by device, i.e. Android vs. iOS, and by month).

We’ve ranked the top 40 apps using our “Stages of Personalization” model, which takes into account:

Audience
Message
Timing

We’ve previously outlined how you can move from Stage 1, which requires you to move away from broadcast messaging, to Stage 2.

When we analyze these apps, it’s through a prism of how effectively they personalize their in-app and overall mobile experience for users. We will often link to their app review page when linking the name of the brand, in case you want to read a slate of reviews before adding it to your phone.

We know looking at all 40 apps and the background/reasoning at once might have been a lot, so we broke this into two posts of 20 apps each. The first 20 apps come from personal finance/banking and hotels/lodging. The next 20 apps (later this week) will be from retail, quick-service food (think Chipotle), entertainment, and wireless/telecommunications.

Finance, Banking, Personal Finance Apps

Coinbase: This is basically the app for people who have heard of crypto currency, are not exactly sure what that is, but know they might need to understand it as they get further into adulthood. You can view prices and charts for different cryptocurrencies and broadly understand the market. The push notifications are targeted to news and information about what’s happening and what you should consider doing with your own money.

Bank of America: Mobile banking is increasingly a huge area for long-standing financial institutions, and following a few app redesigns, BofA has seen huge jumps in mobile users. (Their AI application, Erica, already has 6M+ users.) During the fourth quarter of 2018, mobile users logged in 1.5 billion times. The 2017 redesign was largely focused on personalization, allowing users to choose the up-front functionalities and notifications most important to their stage in life.

Mint: Long a favorite of the millennial world, Mint is also inherently personalized: You’re looking at your budget, your spending categories, your areas of potential improvement, your credit score, and your bills. Every message you’re receiving from them is about ways to spend money better. In most of America, real wages haven’t budged since 1978, but the cost of goods and services continues to increase. You need to stay on top of your money in order to make those bigger life purchases and decisions, and Mint is a beautifully-personalized way to do that.

Scotiabank: They actually partnered with Sensibill a few years ago to personalize the financial experience, including having access to customer purchase history at the item level. That allowed them to offer targeted banking products based on what their customers were already spending money on. Easiest example: lots of money on things you need before a baby? They will personalize triggers to College Savings Plans. They know their audience, the right message, and the right timing. That’s how the formula works best.

Qapital: This app is about bringing gamification to budgeting. Members can invest with personalized portfolios, and set rules and triggers for their spending. We all sometimes need that Thursday happy hour because it’s Baby Friday, but can we actually afford it? This is a way to know -- and you’re quickly able to learn in-app via your existing information and rules.

Capital One: They have cool ads with mascots, for sure. And they sponsor a lot of college football games. But how’s the app itself? It’s actually great. It’s been No. 1 in customer satisfaction among mobile banking apps for the last two years via JD Power and Associates, and here’s a cool little feature: You can customize credit cards with family pictures and the like right in-app. Capital One also sends personalized notifications for way more than fraud; for example, they’ll tell you when your Netflix bill goes up.

Venmo: Not much we need to say here. Popular app and it brings the “friend graph” (people you actually know in your day-to-day life) into your finances, complete with emojis and the like. Sharing money feels easy and it feels like a big game, which is an awesome user experience and highly-personalized psychologically because the “What’s it for?” (the expense) is often based on jokes between you and your friends, strengthening those bonds and making you feel good about the app.

Wells Fargo: Wells Fargo also added AI recently (early 2018), which provides increasingly-personalized banking insights. They’ll push message you on recurring bills that have changed, and also (somewhat shamefully) encourage the transfer of money from savings to checking to avoid any potential overdraft. The app also offers personalized financial guidance in-app.

HSBC: HSBC has also tested smartwatches as a way to cut customer wait times in-branch, and their Connected Money app, which is currently available mostly in the UK, has gained 300,000 new users since the start of 2019. Connected Money is a money management app that simplifies expense tracking and personalizes reports and suggestions for users.

Chase Mobile: In 2018, Chase’s CMO actually said “you can kiss traditional marketing goodbye,” noting that digital and mobile channels brought about a hyper-targeting, hyper-personalized rise. Chase has been near the forefront of mobile financial personalization for 3-4 years, including push notifications for any number of situations ranging from overdraft to bill changes to bill pay prompts to easier sharing of money with friends.

Hotels and Lodging

AirBNB: This is the grand-daddy of mobile disruption market threat apps. In fact, we just wrote about this recently: “By March 2019, consumers spent more on AirBNB lodging than on Hilton, meaning AirBNB -- founded in August 2008 -- owns about 20% of the world's lodging market in 11 years.”

Caesars Rewards: This is a great app for exclusive mobile offers at their resorts in Vegas, Atlantic City, New Orleans, and worldwide. The essence of modern marketing is “turn data into loyalty,” and that’s what Caesars aims to do with this app. If they see a specific customer always playing certain tables, or visiting certain in-casino bars, or requesting similar rooms, they can customize their next experience and even trigger the purchase of the experience with mobile offers. In-app, you can keep track of your points, rewards, and offers. Caesars themselves have noted that “tens of millions of people” constitute the middle of the gaming and lodging market -- so not the high-rollers -- and those people need to be taken care of well and keep coming back. The app and its personalization is a core tenet of that strategy.

Kayak: We put this under lodging because while many consider it a flight-purchase app primarily, it has great hotel selection as well. They even partnered with Amazon Echo for voice-powered hotel booking! Talk about making what can be a painful process into one that’s fun for the family.

Hyatt Hotels: This one has all the normal features you’d expect from a hotel chain around booking, viewing bills, upgrading, etc. But you can also request items to your room, book Uber to/from hotel, and communicate with on-site staff via Facebook Messenger and Twitter in-app. As they get increasing data on your travel preferences, Hyatt subsequently will personalize offers around your next lodging needs.

Marriott: Little bit freaky, maybe, but Siri can unlock your door in this app. Marriott’s got an ambitious growth plan of 1,700 new hotels in the next three years, and to consistently fill those hotels, they need uber-personalized experiences for their guests. They realize that power comes from mobile. And in fact, in mid-2018, one publication noted they were “changing the hotel game with personalization,” noting:

“When someone checks into one of our hotels, we want to be able to wow them,” said Linnartz. “We want to be able to say, ‘Hello, Henry — welcome! We know you just flew in from Dubai, where you stayed at our property last night. We’ve put a lovely amenity in your room to help you get over your jet lag. We also know you love running, so we’ve mapped out a great route that you might want to explore.’ Our digital platform is the tool that allows us to have all that information in the hands of our front-desk staff, so we can pull off that kind of experience.”

Hilton Worldwide: The Hilton Honors app is at the center of Hilton’s new focus on “connected rooms,” which can bring in personalized streaming (think Netflix), room opening in-app, and even preferred temperature setting. As we’ve said before, intelligent digital and mobile engagement begins with four pillars, and strategy and data are the first two legs. Hilton is leveraging both to create personalized, “I-want-to-come-back” experiences for their guests.

Choice Hotels: We worked on a mobile marketing playbook with them a bit ago, so check that out.

MGM Resorts: Like competitors, they’ve launched mobile check-in at 13 Las Vegas locations, and The Drum recently described them as going “Vegas-style big on personalization,” including boosting the M-Life Rewards program to include more customer data. That data becomes the backbone of offers, entertainment, room options, transportation, and more that guests can be pinged about in-app or via push.

LateRooms: This is a way to find hotel deals. They offer exclusive mobile app rates, for one. Many of their users are inherently thinking this will be “one and done,” i.e. “Oh, I need a quick hotel room in Boston,” but LateRooms engages and personalizes based on a limited amount of data from the initial hotel selection and a user experience to keep the user returning with additional hotel needs.

Expedia: Expedia is an apex predator in the bundled-travel world, and for much of 2019, they’ve been discussing the importance of personalization for hotels. Voice bookings, cancellations, and rewards are now tied to Google Assistant and in-app, and their Scratchpad concept allows users to build a perfect trip (across all Expedia’s offerings) without having to jump between 40+ travel sites, as can be common. Everything you’ve saved and researched will be there when you return. All your personal info is there, and Expedia can make recommendations based on what you’re thinking so far.

Stay tuned for the next round up of great apps! We’ll cover quick service restaurants, retail, wireless companies, and entertainment.

Two On-boarding Tips for Service Providers to Get App Users to Engage

brittareque@gmail.com (Britta Reque) — Mon, 22 Jul 2019 19:44:45 GMT

An average user has more than 80 apps on their phone, but uses less than 35 per month, and less than 20 per day . That’s a lot of competition to get your customers to download your app and then to entice them to use it! First impressions count, and although it’s a cliche, it is appropriate in this case. How many of us have downloaded an app and then after a few “tries” abandoned it or just deleted it from our phones?

On-boarding - that critical time when a user first starts engaging with an app - is a crucial moment for you as a service provider, as it will pave the way for future digital interactions with your customers. Precisely what you both are looking for - the customer wants to have a convenient mechanism to engage with their provider and the provider wants the ability to engage their customers for account status, new offers, data consumption alerts, etc.

How can you make on-boarding more successful? Here are two cardinal rules to get it right:

1. Set expectations

The customer needs to know what he/she is getting - what will they be able to do with the app, will it make their life easier, is it user friendly, etc. Ideally, they will know how the provider will communicate with them, what their options are to how this is done, and how their privacy is protected, etc.

Give users a preview or a peek behind the curtain of the app before they give their registration/log-in details. Show them where and how they’ll see usage/data details and any other fun “easter egg” elements of the app, like Rogers’ “device tips and tricks” section. Present those with good UI, quickly, and move them back to a registration/information screen. They should see enough to be interested in inputting their data to the app.

Most customers are open to receiving offers from their service providers, but they expect to be asked permission before hand. It is recommended that you apprise customers of the various methods of engagement they can expect to receive and use language that is soft, approachable, and friendly. You want them to think of your app as a trusted source of info for them.

Once the expectations have been laid out, and customers know what they get from the app, they will be more willing to use the app.

2. Motivate usage via personalized engagement

Personalization engages users. Once a user has signed into the app and greenlit push notifications, send them a personalized message a few hours later. For example, welcome them to your service, tell them something about their usage, billing, or how they can maximize their plan during this period.

Another tactic we’ve seen work is to send a push or in-app message roughly 10 days into a billing cycle about their current data usage and expected usage over the next 20 days. Incentivize users to purchase additional data at a discount before the end of this billing cycle. That’s a relatively simple up-sell that can motivate app usage and net you incremental revenue through mobile strategy.

It’s all about being a trusted ally

When you take steps to thoughtfully design a great app on-boarding experience for users, you’ll become that trusted partner they turn to time and again to help them in their journey with you. Set expectations and use personalized engagement to begin the relationship. Get it right and you’ll have app users for years.

The sheer market threat of mobile is massive. Are you all-in?

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 18:10:18 GMT

In 2018 in the U.S., e-commerce was about 40% of overall retail sales; some reports actually have it significantly lower than that. It’s unquestionably a growth space, however: in the U.S. market, e-commerce and mobile sales -- both in-app and purchases made from cell phones -- went up 15% from ‘17 to ‘18, and 18% globally.

So, if you’re a time-pressed executive, or an every day practitioner, who has various demands, it can be hard to find the time to invest deeply in a mobile strategy, especially if more of your legacy options (i.e. your brick and mortar stores) are performing well and need time and attention.

Sure, sure -- inherently you know everyone seems to have their cell phone at all times, and maybe your kids do every single thing under the sun on it. But your revenue seems to primarily and consistently emerge from other channels. Business is, for better or worse, very short-term in nature. Shouldn’t you continue to cultivate those tried-and-true channels and get the most from them?

Well, yes -- but yes with a heaping side of “no” on the plate as well.

Mobile is increasingly an important channel. McKinsey recently called the shift to mobile for organizations “the next great enterprise IT shakeup,” noting that 90% of the top 50 technology companies globally have announced significant mobile initiatives in just the past 24 months, including 138 announcements of mergers, joint ventures, and product launches. Mobile is a big deal. It’s getting bigger. And it’s changing how companies operate. It’s threatening the very baselines of some business models, even.

Let’s talk about market threats to existing businesses

We can start with some of the bigger, more obvious examples:

AirBNB was a digital/mobile-first play; by March 2019, consumers spent more on AirBNB lodging than on Hilton, meaning AirBNB -- founded in August 2008 -- owns about 20% of the world lodging market in 11 years.
Uber and Lyft, now both public companies, did not quite destroy the rental car market -- you can find IG-and-Twitter-friendly charts that seem like they did, but the data is often misleading -- but both major ride-sharing options, as well as some localized ones, have put a major dent in car rentals both U.S. and globally. (Personal reflection: I was in Pittsburgh last weekend for a wedding, easily could have rented a car, and did not. Uber’ed everywhere. It probably ended up cheaper, all-in.)
Venmo was such a threat to the big banking establishment that, by early 2017, banks were trying to develop their own insta-pay options. One of the main developments by the big banks was Zelle, but as The Wall Street Journal has noted, “no one says ‘Zelle me’ to their friends.”

There are industries you might think cannot be disrupted. Maybe air travel? Sure, there’s no real mobile alternative to building planes -- but in terms of mobile solutions to common travel hassles? Disruption is happening there. You’re increasingly seeing real-time flight information in-app, as well as automated rebooking (sometimes with the aid of a bot), and the easy bundling of hotel, insurance, car rental (or rideshare options!), and more with flight purchase.

What about the historically old-school financial services world? Mobile is upending things there too. Ever heard of “fintech?” Venmo is one example, but increasingly big financial institutions are going “mobile-first” with their products, realizing that it’s the best way to reach different generations now.

Oh, and another historically old school industry upended by mobile: telecommunications. It’s being completely reshaped by 5G, mobile tech, and new data plan options. Potentially a game changer for global service providers, 5G will allow them to implement a whole set of new value-based services, such as virtual reality, autonomous cars, streaming to high-definition devices, Internet of Things and Machine to Machine infrastructure. All of these are promising developments which will drive additional revenue. These services could be revolutionary for an industry that has traditionally struggled with low revenue growth and ever-increasing data traffic consumption, per Cisco VNI 2018. The latter has led service providers to invest capital into the network to sustain and meet that traffic growth, but without receiving the revenue associated with said growth. 5G could be the exciting next frontier for better revenue models.

What’s happening in all these cases is that the most effective brands with mobile are meeting their customers where they are and giving them personalized experiences on their most-used device. That’s the crux of a successful mobile approach. Even if you’ve never done a single thing with mobile experience, you can rise quickly if you know who your customers are and what they expect from you.

Why businesses need to think about this mobile shift more

Because it’s becoming a reality. Those under 30, soon to be your biggest consumers, are spending more and more time on mobile. That’s the undercurrent of these disruptive business models. The market threat of mobile is powered by the sheer usage of mobile. If you’re not on-board with that strategically by now, you are behind.

Mobile apps are also a place that you, as a brand, can have intimate, personalized conversations without distraction with your consumers. That’s not necessarily possible on Facebook, Instagram, or via email. In today’s world of constant competition for the mindshare of your customers, mobile apps can be your most direct and personalized approach.

The first steps you should take

But if you don’t have the building blocks of a mobile strategy, and you’re only recently realizing the potential threat to your market/vertical from mobile, it’s better to start small, with effective, repeatable building blocks, before you branch into the “bigger” strategic plays.

Mobile market disruption is incredibly tangible; at the end of 2018, Entrepreneur even claimed it’s coming for “virtually every industry.” You see a few examples above, and that will only continue to be the reality.

Are your marketing campaigns "cringe-worthy," or connecting?

mkatz@localytics.com (Matt Katz) — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 12:40:48 GMT

Are you speaking to me? Woah, for a second there I thought you were looking over my shoulder.

Not sure if you are reaching “the” customer, a “group” of customers, or “all” customers with your current messaging? It’s high time you figured that out.

As marketers, we want customers’ attention, but also know that we need to respect their time. If your messaging is more cringe-worthy than relevant, you risk losing that customer through annoyance, app uninstall, or lost sales opportunity. None of which will help your growth goals.

We know from Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer that 57% of mobile users are okay with sharing their personal data, and 77% will “choose, recommend and pay more” for personalized experiences … but, only 22% of users are satisfied with the personalization they receive. This is a giant business opportunity for brands, because time on mobile continues to increase for every generation. How can you grab a user’s attention on their most omnipresent device?

Accenture has done similar work on the value of great, personalized experiences. Core findings are that 75% of customers are more likely to buy from an organization that:

Recognizes them by their name
Knows their purchase history
Recommends products based on past purchases

Now, it’s not really surprising that customer satisfaction around personalization is low, because it’s actually hard to do well, and at scale. There are many components to Personalization, and to execute a highly personalized campaign, you’ll need to consider:

Who you are reaching: A list or segment
What you are saying: Your offer or creative
When to deliver it: The best time to engage
Where to deliver it: The channels
How often: … i.e. frequency, to balance persistence and annoyance

Those decisions touch a lot of individuals and departments, and coordination can be a challenge. But the rewards can be tremendous.

In this blog post, and also in a recent webinar, we highlight how marketers can quickly identify the “what” of the personalization formula. That begins with predictive product recommendations -- which was the third bullet of Accenture’s great customer experience research above.

Predictive Product Recommendations

You’re likely familiar with this as a consumer. You buy or look at one item, and you get a recommendation for similar items you may need or enjoy. This is the digital backbone of Amazon’s growth in some ways.

In fact, many of our customers who use predictive product recommendations, typically see results 2-4x greater than standard campaigns. And at the heart of all this is personalization.

For example, using Localytics, you can come to these conclusions about the relationship between a series of products:

In your dashboard, it would look like this:

And your end user? They’d get this:

You know they’re 54% more likely to buy this product, so the push they receive is truly tailored to them and based on data.

It’s beyond just push, though. With the Localytics platform, you can also engage with users in-app, in-Inbox, geo-based (“check out the store near you for this deal,” etc.), and via web push.

What you’re doing here is using a personalization strategy, backed by data, to drive intelligent product recommendations and operate at scale. And it works: as we noted in our recent webinar on predictive product recommendations, one client of ours saw a 111% uptick in Annual Revenue Per User (ARPU), with a corresponding 68.8% lift in transactions per user.

Is it hard to get started with these strategies?

No, not at all. It only takes about 21 days to go-live, following this timeline:

Beginning with data, you define the rules by Day 3, then approve the rules within four days of that. Once the rules are approved, you can create campaigns within a week, and launch those campaigns within another week. While there are always competing priorities in a business, we’ve seen this timeline work with multiple clients. That means that from “data investigation” to “go live” is only about 3-4 work weeks; manage multiple predictive campaigns at once as you get better at defining rules, and you’ll see growth across multiple products within months.

If you’d be interested in talking more about setting up some basic predictive campaigns for your product suite, let’s start a conversation. I would be happy to help you learn more about delivering Personalization that delivers these same results for your organization.

Reimagining the Customer Journey in the Telecommunications Industry

zaghion@localytics.com (Zac Aghion) — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 13:37:00 GMT

Why telecom operators must reimagine the customer journey

I’ve recently started working closely with several multinational mobile network operators (MNOs) in different regions across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific that are all facing similar threats to their business.

Fierce pricing competition from new entrants and business models are eroding margins. These margin pressures have a dual effect of increasing the relative cost of traditional customer service and support channels (e.g. call centers and stores), and decreasing the lifetime value of fickle consumers ready to switch to aggressively priced new service options.

Ironically, network operators remain the largest revenue generators at the center of the tech industry’s value chain. The nature of their business also means that they have retained direct relationships with broad customer bases, and extensive proprietary data sets on customer behavior, location, and purchase history. These incumbent advantages imply that MNOs have an enormous opportunity to ‘fight back’ against industry trends, and most notably through building digitally-native customer journeys and experiences.

Telecom operators are not capturing the value of society’s digital transformation, despite their central role in the value chain that is creating it.

A 2017 study from the World Economic Forum and Accenture indicates that operators’ share of telecom industry profits have decreased from 58% in 2010 to an expected 40% this year.

The big winners have been content aggregators and distributors. This explains network-content consolidation plays like Comcast’s takeover of NBC Universal, Verizon’s acquisitive spree of AOL and Yahoo!, and AT&T’s recently approved bid for Time Warner. It also explains the surging profits and market value of content aggregation businesses like Facebook (Newsfeed), Amazon (Prime Video), Apple (iTunes), Netflix, and Google (YouTube).

New competition and business models are emerging from digitally-native tech companies.

At the same time, as industry profit share has flowed away from operators and towards content aggregation and distribution businesses, the most dominant of those same content players (i.e. the ones that managed to avoid being swallowed up by their network partners) have moved to aggressively integrate backwards up the value chain.

It may already be too late to fight back. Research from 2016 indicated that the majority of consumers were ready to switch their mobile network to one of their favorite tech companies if available, and that the proportion skews higher as you increase customer segment value. Whether it be Facebook’s Whatsapp, Google’s Hangouts, Microsoft’s Skype, or Apple’s Facetime, tech giants that have come to be trusted by consumers with delivering innovative, convenient digital experiences are eating up OTT voice and data services and commoditizing the networks which power them from below.

Reimagining the customer experience along a digital paradigm is the largest opportunity for operators to re-capture profit growth.

The convenience and cost of digital experiences has translated into a tight correlation between the prevalence and usage of digital channels, and higher levels of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and lifetime value. This relationship has been observed across industries from financial services (e.g. PayPal vs. wire transfer) to travel (e.g. Priceline vs. travel agent).

Telecom is no exception. 2016 studies by Cap Gemini and McKinsey & Co. both showed strong correlations between the proportion of customers that use digital channels for service and support and customer NPS. In an era increasingly defined by digital accessibility, it is simply cheaper, faster, and more convenient for consumers to transact and interact over digital.

The mobile experience is central to a cheaper, faster, and more convenient customer journey, and will play a critical role in redefining what it takes to open a new account, upgrade your data plan, or pay your phone bill.

In the U.S. market, Verizon can leverage real-time account balance and usage data from CRM and billing systems to trigger mobile notifications which offer up personalized recommendations based on historical consumption. In one example, a push notification can be used to alert subscribers who have exceeded their monthly data plan allowances and offer them alternatives that may better suit their historical usage patterns.

Rogers Communications, the largest telecommunications firm in Canada, has gone a step further. By using similar data on current and historical consumption patterns to forecast individual users’ likelihood to exceed their plan, Rogers can preemptively warn their customers that they are approaching their plan’s limit. By delivering a utility first with customer value in mind, Rogers can create a welcome touchpoint in their mobile customer journey which ultimately drives to higher rates of subscriber retention and sales.

Back in the U.S. market, Comcast, has been recognized by Accenture and the World Economic Forum for the innovative work they’ve done to capture customer data to deliver better services across their Xfinity X1 platform. Customer-level data captured across mobile, desktop, tablet, and OTT devices percolate throughout Xfinity customer communications to personalize and improve it’s offering. This drives higher levels of customer engagement, which ultimately increases the average subscriber’s lifetime value and volume of ad inventory that Comcast can monetize across its portfolio of media properties.

In Asia, mobile network operators like Telenor’s Malaysian subsidiary Digi can create new lifestyle brands by investing in their loyalty rewards programs. By providing unique location-based services and rewards as in the below example, Digi can make a strategic move to own the customer relationship on mobile, and build their position as an intermediary between the customer and loyalty program partners.

As a predominantly pre-paid mobile business, Digi can also leverage their mobile app to game-ify the new customer onboarding experience, and incentivize account credit top-ups and self-service discovery while promoting their loyalty rewards program. The commercial impact of such efforts are to reduce the cost of customer service while simultaneously increasing retention and customer satisfaction

These examples are representative of the ways in which the world’s largest operators are just beginning to reimagine the customer journey in digital terms. Looking forward, it’s becoming clear that we are moving towards a world where the services delivered by branches and call centers today are predominantly digital, and the integration of customer data across every touchpoint unlocks higher levels of relevancy and convenience.

The single-app strategy: Yes or no?

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 15:24:33 GMT

A question we often get at Localytics: Does it make sense to have a single-app strategy, i.e. one main app where your customers engage with your brand/product at a single destination? Or is it better to have 5-10 apps that are incredibly specific to a product or offering? We’ve worked with companies that do both.

Mobile app(s) should be a large piece of your and how customers interact with, and perceive, your brand. It speaks to all four buckets of intelligent digital engagement.

Let’s use some big retailers here. Target, for example, at one point had these notable apps:

The main Target app
Healthful (pharmacy)
Registry (bridal and baby)
Cartwheel (discount offers)
Target Connected (lights system)

This was the full roster as of about early 2017. Since then, Healthful has been shut down and Cartwheel was folded into the main app. Much of the broader Target shopping experience is now in the main app, although Registry and Connected also still exist.

One of Target’s biggest competitors, Wal-Mart, made a similar play: the brand has two apps, one for general shopping and one for e-commerce grocery.

So if the big brands of retail are consolidating towards one app, should you? A look at the pros and cons:

Internal capacity: Maintaining 5-10 specific apps requires a lot of marketing and development muscle. There’s a lot of resourcing, budgeting, and general time management that needs to be done. Working on 5-10 apps is time-consuming and takes time away from other business priorities.

Loyalty: Merging makes sense to drive loyalty towards the brand to 1-2 central places; that’s believed to be the reason Target folded Cartwheel into the main app, for example. Increased loyalty typically leads to increased sales, and that’s the underlying goal of these decisions.

How specific are your offerings? If you offer very distant products/services under the same brand, well, then it can be valuable to differentiate. In Target’s case above, people looking for deals (Cartwheel) are not the same audience as people looking for baby registries, necessarily. But as most brands have products and services that are closely related, consolidation can make sense.

User experience: If user experience is very important to you (it should be), and you have the internal capacity to manage multiple apps, a multi-app strategy might be more beneficial. The experience will be better for that specific product/service, as opposed to jamming lots of products/services into a main app, which can make things harder to find and reduce the user’s experience with the app. (See also: load/launch times are usually faster for each app in a multi-app strategy than “one app to rule them all.”)

Downloads can suffer: Look at some download data for Carousel, which was a separate app under Dropbox that they eventually discontinued:

When you have multiple apps, in terms of capacity you now need multiple marketing strategies to make sure users see a need to have 2, 3, 4, etc. apps on their phone from the same brand. It’s easy for 1 or 2 of these apps to have terrible, or quickly-declining, download numbers.

How logical is the separation? Google Drive and GMail, as one example, almost must be separate apps. But did Facebook and Facebook Messenger need to be? While you can argue having Messenger as a standalone app made it faster and made messaging a more central component of how you interact with Facebook, when those apps were initially decoupled, people did not see the value. If you’re going to have multiple apps, make sure it’s easy to explain/brand/message to users why they need to download each of the apps in your world.

Once you decide which way you want to go, get all-in from Day 1. The biggest challenge will be internal capacity; this is true for almost every client we’ve worked with on single-app vs. multi-app. If you have the budget and marketing and development resources to maintain multiple apps and can deliver a strong customer experience , great! Proceed with a multi-app strategy if your products and offers differ enough. If you lack internal capacity or all services within your brand are similar, a single-app strategy is typically a better choice.

The current state of telecommunications (and how to maximize it)

jude.mccolgan@localytics.com (Jude McColgan) — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 21:07:04 GMT

Telecommunications (wireless, operators, OTT and others) has been an intense, news-dominating topic recently: China entered the 5G space, which triggered political reactions in the U.S., which in turn created rural area cell phone usage concerns, all of which existed under the possibility of a “new cold war.”

That’s the geopolitical side of what’s been happening in the space. And while important, it’s only become such a hot topic because of the potential that 5G holds in telecommunications.

Potentially a game changer for global service providers, 5G will allow them to implement a whole set of new value-based services, such as virtual reality, autonomous cars, streaming to high-definition devices, Internet of Things and Machine to Machine infrastructure. All of these are promising developments which will drive additional revenue.

These services could be revolutionary for an industry that has traditionally struggled with low revenue growth and ever-increasing data traffic consumption, per Cisco VNI 2018. The latter has led service providers to invest capital into the network to sustain and meet that traffic growth, but without receiving the revenue associated with said growth.

5G is exciting.

But…

5G and corresponding revenue growth are absolutely reliant on the carriers’ ability to accelerate the digital transformation programs that they currently have underway.

It will require intense capillarity in the network, as well as the deployment of mobile edge computing (MEC) all of which depend directly on the use cloud technologies, Software Defined Networking (SDN), Open Source software, within a global service providers’ architecture.

So we find ourselves again at the “digital transformation” of the telecommunications industry. It’s crucially important, but it can feel like a bit like a buzzword lately. (It’s not.)

What does digital transformation look like in telecommunications?

Digital transformations have three guiding principles:

Simplification
Automation
Innovation

These, in turn, can be fulfilled through three specific action items:

The evolution of the network
A redesign of OSS/BSS
Embracing a customer-centric strategy

Helping to advance the dialogue

Localytics has the privilege of working with three of the largest service providers in the Americas. We’ve guided them to new relationships with customers, including 50%+ reductions in churn and 25%+ reductions in contact center staffing via better integration of digital touchpoints. We are a trusted partner in the journey to a fully-digital, customer-centric brand.

In an effort to share our insights through helping some of our telco clients, we put together a white paper on the digital transformation of the industry: Where it’s been, where it’s going, how network service providers can hasten digital transformations, and more. You can access it right here:

A guide for mobile marketers at Salesforce Connections 2019

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 12:27:55 GMT

We will be at Salesforce Connections June 17-19 in Chicago. If you’re going, awesome! We’d love to see you at Booth 35.

First: if you're new to this conference, take a look at our 2018 tips from the conference. We are a Salesforce ISV partner, and many of these ideas resonate if you're attending this year.

Second: We’re at Booth 35 for the whole duration of the show.

And finally: schedule a meeting with us in Chicago! It’s easier that way.

But beyond simply talking about what Localytics can do for you, there are a couple of great sessions for mobile marketers to check out:

All The Marketing Trends You Need To Know (6/18, 3pm, McCormick Place / Lake Michigan Theater)

This is by Chris Jacob from Salesforce’s Product Marketing team. A description: “Today, there’s a fundamental challenge that exists for marketers. On one side, consumers are demanding personalized experiences – 76% have reported that they expect it when interacting with brands. And on the flip side, 57% of consumers report being uncomfortable with how companies are using their data. Given the importance of customer experience, it's no surprise that 51% of marketers say their organization is more mindful about balancing personalization and privacy than two years ago. In this session, we’ll unpack the nuances behind these challenges, give you first look at the 3rd Edition State of Connected Customer report, and share all the marketing trends you need to know to set yourself up for success.”

3 Expert Tips for Architecting Personalized Customer Experiences (6/17, 2:30, McCormick Place / Lake Erie Theater)

This is by two Salesforce Program Architects, and the value is in learning how to deliver real-time, multi-channel personalized experiences. (We also help companies a great deal with personalization here at Localytics.)

Become a Rockstar Mobile Marketer (6/17, 2pm, McCormick Place / Lake Erie Theater)

This one is led a Senior Product Manager at Aetna and Nick Holdren from ListEngage. Here’s the abstract for the session: “As brands strive to meet and exceed rising customer expectations in our digital world, mobile marketing is critical to connect with customers where they are, in the moments that matter. How can you increase your mobile subscriber base? When is the right time to add a mobile channel to your customer journey? Join us as Salesforce MVP Guilda Hilaire shares key wins to becoming a successful mobile marketer so you can exceed cusomer expectations at every stage of your brand's customer lifecycle.”

Grow your Business with a Killer Mobile Marketing Strategy (6/17, 3:30pm, McCormick Place / Lake Shangri-La Theater)

This one will be led by two Salesforce employees, one from Product Marketing and one from the Lead Solutions engineering team, and is largely about connecting offline moments with online moments for amazing customer end experiences. “Any channel” optimization for best experience is the end goal of this session.

Looking forward to seeing you and talking shop in The Windy City.

The importance of -- and how to calculate -- lifetime customer value

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Fri, 31 May 2019 11:50:41 GMT

Lifetime customer value, also called customer lifetime value (CLV), is one of the most important metrics out there. The logic is self-explanatory, so we won’t belabor it because you’re all smart people, but the bouncing ball goes like this:

You spend money to acquire new customers.
You also spend money to retain existing ones.
The acquisition of new customers typically costs 4-5x more than retention.
CLV gives you a baseline for how much revenue you can expect from a customer over time.
Understanding CLV helps you increase both revenue and profitability.

Forbes has even called it “the only metric that matters.” And while it’s a few years old by now, we actually did a “Whiteboard Wednesday” on the CLV topic back in the day.

How do you calculate CLV for mobile?

This can vary by organization and app monetization models, but here’s a general formula to consider:

Here’s what everything represents:

CLTV: Customer lifetime value

ARPU: Average revenue per user (a representation of monetization)

1/Churn: The inverse of your churn rate (a representation of retention)

Referral value: The sum value of new users that a customer refers to your app

To get each of the inputs, you’d do this:

ARPU: Take the total app revenue generated in a given period and divide it by the number of users in that same period.

Churn: Take the number of customers lost in a given period and divide that by the number of customers at the start of the period.

1/Churn: Let’s say the churn rate is 25%, or .25. 1 divided by .25 is 4, meaning the predicted lifespan for users on a 25% churn rate is 4 months.

Referrals: This is harder to track because it involves insanely specific math, but you can look for the average amount of referrals that an app user has brought in, then multiply that by the individual revenue contribution, which is ARPU x {1/Churn}. This math can get tricky for most mobile marketers, so you can also plug “zero” into the formula above and work the system that way.

OK, so now we know how to calculate it … how do we improve it?

At the most basic level, you’d improve customer lifetime value by having an app user stick around longer and do more with the app. In order to get a customer to that point and not on a four-month churn, you would need:

Personalization
A moderate to high degree of relevant content
Intuitive onboarding so they don’t just immediately abandon the app
Relevant push content

Of these, personalization is the most important. While many brands still operate on broadcast messaging or broadcast with some degree of A/B work, customers are increasingly frustrated by that. If you’ve already bought a pair of jeans or a hotel in Cincinnati, who wants to get a push notification about that? It shows the app doesn’t know you and that can lead to disengagement, which kills customer lifetime value.

Also to consider: an omnichannel strategy. We talk about this with clients all the time, and one of the easiest ways to conceptualize it is this: Let's say you buy a pair of jeans on the web, then you get a push notification to buy those jeans on mobile. Are you frustrated right now? Yes. You just bought those jeans! Each functional silo of your business needs to be speaking to the other ones.

There’s another mathematical rub here, and we need to bring in more acronyms:

CAC: Customer Acquisition Cost

CPI: Cost Per Install, or Ad Spend divided by the number of new users tied to ad spend

As a general rule of thumb, this is how you want CLV and CAC to interact:

If CLV is higher, invest more in marketing, including app install ads.
If CLV is lower, do not invest in marketing right now and work to better your CLV first.

Makes sense. If the lifetime value of a customer is below that of the cost to acquire the customer, your app will lose money -- and maybe even by the boatload. But if lifetime value is higher, it’s totally logical to spend on campaigns to drive install awareness.

What else have you seen done successfully around mobile CLV?

21 million seconds in the life of your customer

mkatz@localytics.com (Matt Katz) — Tue, 28 May 2019 14:31:13 GMT

How fast does 21 million seconds pass before your waking eyes, or -- more importantly -- your customers’ eyes? With the accelerating cycles of new technology introductions, news and content releases, and your busy calendar of mobile app release cycles, it is easy to lose track of the incredible digital journey your customers are making with your brand each year.

How many opportunities/touchpoints will you use to reach out to your customer in the coming year? How will you know if it is the best time to reach that customer? Many of our customers have 2, 5, or even 10 or more mobile apps, web sites, and social channels (in addition to a real-life experience, such as a brick & mortar location) across which they hope to reach the right customer, at the right time, with the right offer to inspire purchases, loyalty, or engagement. That’s where business happens.

To keep the marketing team’s collective heads from exploding with all of this potential and opportunity, we recommend a Digital Customer Journey Map.

Here's a visual example of what end-result Digital Customer Journey Maps look like:

This simple yet beautifully-rich diagram can help your team visualize the path customers might experience through each of the digital touchpoints. Once built, this map will highlight the handoffs, coordination, and overall journey through apps, channels, and milestones which can be personalized to increase customer engagement.

How do I create a Digital Customer Journey Map?

Do you have 4 hours to spare? Localytics can facilitate a discussion and interactive session where your team generates a list of digital touchpoints through the entire end customer journey:

Discovery
Research
Transaction
Fulfillment
Advocacy
Departure

In each of these journey steps, participants are asked to define the Tasks, Questions, and Interaction Type (physical, digital, or both). Depending on your industry, this path can be mapped to a calendar, a subscription framework, or a retail season.

Our team has a wealth of experience to align participants on the digital touch points and data collected at each step of the customer journey. We will ask questions that expose the Emotions, Weaknesses, and Influences that impact your end customer’s success at each stage.

From this initial map, the design of Personalized Interactions (Push, In-App, Inbox, Email) delivered in a full calendar year become the trail maps to your customer’s digital journey.

What offers or content will be of most interest to them based on the path they have taken through your digital landscape?
What communication can your company provide in guiding customers to paths of increasing value, deeper engagement, or friction-less customer service?
Should that communication reach them when they reach a certain day of use, or triggered by an in-app behavior, or in response to an external event in your stores or geographic locations?

The timing and content of your mapped activities will be more impactful if you can increasingly personalize them. Read our eBook for a more complete explanation of Localytics’ Stages of Personalization and how it is applied to each of the steps in your customer’s digital journey.

Regardless of your organization’s readiness to meet every opportunity with the right message or offer, this digital engagement journey map creates prototyping and validation opportunities with your marketing team. If you’re ever lacking clarity on ultimate customer value proposition, this is a great way to get back in alignment.

And remember above when we referenced how fast everything is moving? Well, that’s not going to stop anytime soon. As digital engagement changes in 2019, 2020, and beyond, having this type of map allows for shared decision-making around any potential strategic adjustments needed, i.e. “pivots.”

Want to learn more?

If you’d be interested in learning more about how we help and what we offer, reach out when ready. We’d love to spend the time with you.

The four components of intelligent digital engagement

mkatz@localytics.com (Matt Katz) — Thu, 23 May 2019 12:30:51 GMT

The path to success in modern business is about getting ahead of digital customer engagement. Your customers are increasingly moving to mobile and expecting engagement there, as well as an integration of different touchpoints across the entire experience you are providing them.

How does an organization achieve this digital customer engagement, though?

It comes when you personalize the user experience. People respond to offers and ideas unique to them; that’s where the engagement lies. They want to know that you understand their content needs--what types of jeans they want--or can message them with a relevant nearby offer, i.e. those shoes you wanted are available here.

We all want to believe we are being spoken to as the one, as opposed to one of the many.

As a business, you arrive at personalization by focusing on four essential ingredients:

Strategy: How can you design intelligent personalization?

Data: What information do you need to enhance personalization efforts?

Technology: Where are you going to deploy intelligence, machine learning, or otherwise enhance your tech stack?

Support and Services: What staffing, training, and support do you need?

This all begins with strategy, and one equation

When we work with clients, we begin with the broader strategy piece, with personalization and personalized experiences as the end goal. Working across millions of touchpoints with clients in dozens of industries, we’ve arrived at this formula to most effectively personalize:

Audience + Message + Timing = Personalized Experience

You can translate this equation to your business and execute business goals by thinking through answers to these simple questions:

Who you target (audiences, segments)
What you deliver (offer, creative)
When you deliver (time of day, triggered event)
Where you reach that consumer (channel)
How often you reach that consumer (frequency, persistence)

How does Localytics help?

Each of the answers to these questions evolves with your experience, but there is no reason to start from scratch. We have use cases from many industries, client experience examples and deliverables for each of the questions above that will inspire your team.

This can range from Implementing Intelligent Personalization (a 3-4 week arc where projects are initiated in-market) to Custom Visualization Dashboards for data (3 days to 2 weeks to implement) to Integration Audits to Managed Services Packages.

As we’ve rolled these out to clients, we’ve seen some tremendous results with major brands:

Strategy: We worked with a global IoT/Home Automation manufacturer on overall mobile strategy and messaging best practices (timing, cadence, audience) to drive user satisfaction scores up in a matter of weeks.
Data: In our work with a national retailer with both broadcast TV and online channels, we took an already-advanced mobile organization and moved them towards personalization. Based on their pre-existing audience data, we were able to design campaigns for them that increased open rates 4x.
Technology: One of our long-standing partners is a nationally-recognized sports television network, and we were recently able to drive 1M+ new users in under four months at the intersection of strategy work (an in-app program) and their existing technology. We’re now working with them more on push.
Staffing: Recently we did work with a powerhouse in television network content production as they were undergoing a massive team reorganization with a variety of stakeholders and different, complex needs. Initially they needed help making sure the “messaging trains” kept running, but also some consultative work on best people practices.

Getting in touch

You know your core business better than anyone. That’s how you built it to this level. What you need now is a world-class partner to accelerate the digital journey and intelligent personalization to the next level.

If you’d be interested in learning more about how we help and what we offer, reach out when ready. We’d love to become a trusted partner.

Who is doing personalization well?

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Thu, 16 May 2019 15:38:58 GMT

The great promise of the mobile age

… would be this: If you give up your data, we’ll give you better experiences. That’s the inherent contract between an end user and a brand on mobile. One side gets data, the other side gets messages and content they especially want.

Obviously we’re talking here about personalization, which is a topic near and dear to our hearts, souls, and minds at Localytics. We’ve identified four stages of personalization, and most brands aren’t yet approaching the third and fourth. The good news is that many have moved beyond simple broadcast -- essentially blasting the same thing to everyone, regardless of context for who the end user is -- but there’s room to grow here. Per Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer, 57% of customers are willing to provide their data in exchange for a more personalized experience. The problem is that only 22% of customers are satisfied with the level of personalization that brands are delivering, per Segment’s 2017 State of Personalization Report.

This all begs a simple question: Who is doing personalization well?

Marie Curie

Marie Curie provides care and support for more than 40,000 terminally-ill people and their families in the United Kingdom annually. One of its biggest campaigns of recent years was The Great Daffodil Appeal, which invited participants to collect money (and receive a daffodil associated with them in the process) for the charity. The campaign commenced by getting a user’s geolocation data, matched in real-time with a database of collection sites. Now emails and push notifications going forward had a real-time personalized map of where people could donate. Marie Curie even used modeling from initial responses to drive a target population and create persona-driven messaging around collection history and previous interactions with the brand. Ultimately registrations and donations went up year-over-year, with most of them coming from mobile.

Starbucks

Starbucks is an OG of the personalization game, with its rewards program being a cornerstone of $2.56B in revenue. The program integrates with the ability to customize drinks within the app, order from the app (logically), and brings in purchase history, preferred store location, and more to completely personalize the experience for the user. I actually had a string of Saturdays where I got bacon and egg Sous Vide bites and a grande Pike Place coffee around 8:15am, and lo and behold if I didn’t start getting push notifications about the availability of that order around 7:50am on Weeks 4-7 of the process. Of course I was into it! That’s how personalization needs to work. I gave up my info around my penchant for Sous Vide bites and dark roast, and they gave me access to a chance to swipe and get those things. We all won.

Gilt

Years ago, we asked mobile users what types of push notifications were most relevant to them, and most said offers based on previous history or present location. (Both key examples of personalization.) Gilt slays in this area. Their mobile push notifications are short and sweet, delivering timely information to improve customer experiences. The messaging speaks directly to users, inviting them with brand-name specifics to pursue their desired purchase. Let’s say you wait-listed something. You’ll get a push as soon as it’s available off the waitlist. Gilt uses information based on past purchases to inform notifications as well as send recommended updates. Another feature of the e-commerce experience is never having to input your size again, which is a super-tedious process for many e-commerce shoppers.

Sacramento Kings

You wouldn’t expect a pro sports team itself to be that good at personalization -- although they should be, honestly -- and you’d probably reckon a third-party app, like a SeatGeek or ticket exchange, would be doing that lifting for them. Not so with the Kings. They’re not a great team wins-wise of late, but their personalized experiences are MVP-caliber, sending messages about parking, game promotions, ordering food to your seat, and more. About 20% of attendees at a given game actively use the app features, and there’s a 41% indirect open rate. Both stats are growing.

Sainsbury’s

The British grocery chain has received a lot of positive attention for its digital transformation and mobile initiatives, including some accolades for mobile personalization:

The same year, Sainsbury’s picked up the gong for Mobile and Messaging at the Marketing Week Masters Awards. The honor was for their ‘This time it’s ultra personalized!’ campaign, which used smartphone location data to deliver personalized offers to customers in and around the shop on their mobiles. It also helped the company gain insights about the way people navigated their stores, thereby influencing merchandising decisions.

The important aspect of what Sainsbury’s did -- and what we’ve seen dozens of organizations do, notably Home Depot, Sephora, and some others -- is that one of the easiest personalization approaches is simply to geofence your physical locations. You can start there, provided you have physical locations, and push to people within them. That’s inherently personalized because they’re receiving an offer based on their physical location, which is data they provided you. If you’ve never tried anything tied to personalization, geofenced offers are a great place to commence the process.

Our early 2019 product launches

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Thu, 09 May 2019 10:58:06 GMT

It’s been almost a year since we launched Workflows. Since then, we’ve gotten lots of feedback from our customers on what they like and where there’s room for us to make improvements. Over the last few months, we’ve released our first set of Workflows enhancements, delivering on the most popular requests we heard. Today we’d like to give you a quick summary of what we’ve done so far.

Workflow Metrics

When it comes to Workflows, one of the most common requests we’ve gotten from customers is to give them a better way to understand how users are moving through a Workflow. Our new metrics view shows you everything from the percent of users that have gone down a specific campaign branch to the open rate of each message in your Workflow. You will see the Metrics screen when looking at any active or deactivated Workflows campaigns.

Dynamic Content

Push notifications that include dynamic content (Liquid Templating) average a 5.7% open rate, while notifications that don’t only average a 3.7% open rate. That’s why we’ve made it a priority to add support for Liquid in Workflows. We’ve updated the Workflows message builder so you can create pushes that include dynamic content like your customers’ names, their favorite topics, and much more. We’ve also created a whole new user experience for Liquid in Workflows, making it much easier to do things like specify a default value that gets shown when data isn’t available for a recipient.

Localization

More and more brands are going global and we wanted to make it easier for our customers to send a message in multiple languages. Now when you open the Workflows message builder, you have the option to add multiple languages for your message. Once your campaign is live, when your message gets sent to a user, Localytics will look at their device’s language settings to determine which version to use. If the user’s device is set to a language that you haven’t provided copy for, we’ll send them the message in whichever language you designated as the default language.

Multiple Workflows Entry Criteria

A lot of customers have said they have situations where they want to specify more than one way to trigger a Workflows campaign. Now you can! To add more than one entry event to a Workflow, start by creating your campaign as you always have, selecting one entry event. Once you get to the Workflows editing view, simply click on the “Entry Event” tile towards the top of the page, then in the Entry Event editor, click on Add Another Set of Conditions.

Workflows Profile Filters

We’ve also added the ability to only allow users with certain Profile values to enter a Workflow. If you want to add Profile filters to your entry criteria, once you get to the Workflows editing view, click on the Add Profile Filter tile towards the top right of the page.

Enhanced Events API

We’ve completely rebuilt our Events API to connect non-digital sources like point-of-sale and call center insights with iOS, Android, and Web data to create relevant omni-channel campaigns in Workflows. This unlocks a lot of new use cases. For example, you can now use data from Point of Sales and Order Management Systems to trigger or progress a user through a Workflow. Another potential use case is using call center software to trigger a Workflow when someone calls customer support. You could even use the Events API to send event data from your website to Localytics, without integrating our entire Web SDK into your site. There are far too many use cases to list here, but with the new Events API, your Workflows can now pull in user behavior from all your brand’s touchpoints unifying customer experiences and giving Workflows some powerful new omnichannel capabilities.

As you can see, Workflows continues to grow and we’ve got a lot more enhancements coming up in the next few months! If you haven’t given Workflows a try yet, there’s never been a better time to check it out. To get started, take a look at the Workflows docs or schedule a training session by talking to your Account Manager.

25% of Users Abandon Apps After One Use

trodde@localytics.com (Thomas Rodde) — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 12:47:12 GMT

Times are changing. Apps have become a mainstay for consumers and an effective way for brands to engage with them. That being said, the fight rages on to keep users coming back. Long-term retention has improved quite significantly over the past few years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that apps are succeeding in the short-term.

Today, we’re providing an update to our app user retention study, which measures loyalty and abandonment across our user base of 12,000 apps. But, first, our key definitions:

User Retention: The percentage of users who return to an app more than 10 times.
User Abandonment: The percentage of users who abandon an app after one session.

App abandonment rose to its 2015 level

In fact, we found that app abandonment actually increased this year, reaching the same height as it did in 2015.

Increased abandonment is normally an unfortunate side effect of not leading users to value quickly enough after they open an app. Much of what keeps them coming back for more is their initial interest, which relies on onboarding, in-app messaging, and encouraging push opt-in. Try some of these strategies out next time you consider ways to increase retention.

Similarly, user retention after 10 sessions has fallen somewhat, dipping to a low of 32%.

This result is somewhat surprising, since we have recently seen increased retention in the form of industry benchmarks. However, the data that we sample for benchmarks relies on apps that have been designated to fall under certain common app categories, whereas for our retention studies we look at all apps in our database. In addition, users who continue to launch an app for three months after their initial visit likely spend many more than eleven sessions in that app. That is, 3-month retention is very long-term, while 11+ session retention is somewhere between short-term and medium-term. The two metrics are therefore not apples to apples, but something like bananas to cucumbers.

While not a huge decrease, we know that app marketers can improve their performance. Ways to increase long-term retention include ensuring your messaging is personalized, gently nudging app users with notifications showing offers and activities in your app, and diversifying channels so that the context of your messaging varies. It all comes down to making your users feel like unique individuals in an individualized world.

Apps in personalization stage 3A see abandonment drop to 19%

Based on our Stages of Personalization methodology, we defined apps in the first part of the third stage as apps that use a great deal of dynamic messaging and target the majority of campaigns on a profile attribute instead of broadcasting messages to their entire user base. We find that apps that fall into stage 3A retain users at higher rates than average.

App abandonment after one use drops to 19% from 25%, while the number of users who stick around for 11 or more sessions leaps up to 40% from 32%. Although this is not a drastic difference, it’s worth noting for marketers looking to obtain superior results from their messaging. App users who feel listened to based on their data are much more likely to continue launching an app. In fact, apps that send messages that are targeted based on simply profile or profile and behavioral data and built on dynamic content see user retention within 28 days of receiving the message range from 61% to 74%. Compare this to apps that send mostly broadcast campaigns with no specific message-building strategies: They see 28 day retention cap out at 49%. See our Stages of Personalization calculator in action in order to calculate these numbers here: https://www.localytics.com/personalization/.

Diversified messaging comes out on top

Similarly, diversifying messaging channels provides an experience that is highly relevant and timely. Take, for instance, a push message sent to a user who enters a specific location. Apps that send messages based on this data see even lower abandonment rates and higher medium-term retention.

This time abandonment drops to a new low of 16% compared to the average of 25%, while loyalty reaches 40% compared to an average of 32%. This represents a 36% decrease in abandonment and a 25% increase in loyalty. Location-based messaging has proven to be effective in many other ways too - namely increased conversion and open rates. It’s definitely to marketers’ advantage to utilize location data to appeal to their consumers.

A small upfront effort for a huge payoff

While we hope to see improvement over time, the news is not all bad. App marketers can improve their app’s retention using some of our recommended, tried-and-true methods. The situation is less than ideal at the moment, but it’s entirely within marketers' control to put in a small amount of upfront effort for a huge payoff in the form of customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Methodology

Localytics is the leading mobile engagement platform across more than 2 billion devices and 12,000 mobile and web apps. Localytics processes 3 billion data points daily. For this analysis, Localytics measured the percentage of users who only used an app once as well as the users who returned multiple times. For the Stages of Personalization analysis, we compared the percentage of users who did or did not return to apps that currently fall into stage 3A of our proprietary methodology, which uses K-Means algorithmic clustering to bucket customers into different stages of personalized marketing. For the geo push analysis, we examined the percentage of users who did or did not return to apps that sent a location-based push in the timeframe. The timeframe for this study was October 1st 2018 - March 31st 2019.

Generating Revenue With Apps

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 13:00:00 GMT

Melinda Gates recently spilled a little tea on the idea of the importance of apps:

The quote is intense, for sure -- but the fact is, many apps do help you “do good” or change the world, and to be fair, the point of apps is often to drive revenue. Dog-centric apps such as the one in this example tend to generate a strong amount of revenue. Makes sense, as lots of people have dogs, and those same people can’t always be home to walk said dogs, so… a company like Wag, which is app-only, can still be valued at $650 million or more. (And it’s not the only pet-care/dog-walking app on the block, either.)

Apps can make a ton of money for a core business. You probably are familiar with some of the core revenue models for apps, to boot: advertising, subscriptions, sponsorships, in-app purchases, etc. You’ve also potentially heard of some notable revenue-boosting, competition-slaying apps like Domino’s, which used its app ecosystem as a major boost over rivals like Pizza Hut.

But in a world where “the App Store feels like the lottery” and over 50% of the most popular apps are created by behemoths Google and Facebook, how do you get bread for your core business through an app?

Data, data, data, and data again

Here is the great promise of mobile technology, in a nutshell: users allow you to have their information, up to and including their current physical location, because they want better, more personalized experiences. Unfortunately, brands don’t consistently deliver on that -- and when you factor in high-profile news stories about privacy issues, to the point that The New York Times launched a privacy project in early 2019, potential consumers are increasingly weary of how their data might be used.

If you can rise above that noise, then, it’s a path to moolah.

Consider the power of data in this example:

Riga-based Ask.fm, billed as the biggest Q&A discussion platform in the world with more than 215 million registered members across 168 countries, knows the value of its app data and the importance of compliance. “Data is an industry trend and if you don’t monetize your data in a responsible way for relevant advertising then you are out of step with the market,” Artem Pavlov, Product Manager at AskFM, tells me. But it’s not just about the cash. It’s about the boost when quality data comes together to add value and ensure advertising is aligned with audiences. “Showing an 18-year old an ad for Marshall headphones is a much better experience than serving him ads for real estate, for example,” Pavlov explains. “Here is where we get additional revenue from advertisers because our ads get higher CPMs.”

Better data --- > better profiles of users --- > better CPMs --- > better relationships with advertisers.

It’s an ecosystem. No one wants to get push notifications about irrelevant stuff. We’re all getting pinged left and right all day. But when we get that targeted ping about that John Mayer concert we’ve been eyeing, well, that’s powerful. Powerful means revenue.

Free apps often monetize around the power of data, and the highest-grossing apps by revenue in the world in 2018 are all largely data-driven, with Netflix -- at almost $800M -- being No. 1.

Worry less about advertisements and more about selling the service

Advertising is a great, and standard, way to monetize an app. An increasingly popular revenue approach is “service-based monetization,” whereby you attempt to become a “Super App” by cultivating relationships for the benefit of the audience. Again, most of their success also comes from data, notably having the volume of it to predict what their users will want to see or be informed about next. Service-based monetization eventually leads down a path of data-driven advertising and pushes, but it’s a bit of a “relationships before revenue” play. At a time when younger generations increasingly look at brand story and perspective, this does matter.

Getting bread is about…

… ultimately, people pay you value. You can have philosophical discussions all day about whether iPhones need to be as expensive as they are, but the fact is, iPhones sell well. What does that mean? It means millions of people in the world saw some value of that combination of features. Now, that specific market might be drying up, but the core of any business is providing value in exchange for a form of compensation back from the end users. Value is the fulcrum point on which everything rests.

So, can you make an eye-popping amount of money with an app? Of course. The app has to provide value, though, and that value is going to come from using data to cultivate relationships.

The Future Of Digital Marketing

asawitsky@localytics.com (Aaron Sawitsky) — Mon, 08 Apr 2019 12:30:00 GMT

Editorial Note: This is the first of 3 blog posts in a mini-series documenting the future of digital marketing.

According to Forbes, there are over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day. It’s impossible to wrap our head around the present-day figure, and it’s only getting larger by the month.

For product owners and marketers, data can be a good thing. It has helped them better understand their customers and create more engaging experiences that fuel retention and revenue. But as they’ve also learned, too much of a good thing can be bad. We’ve reached a tipping point where we’re drowning in data. These days, we are inundated with so much data it’s become impossible to identify what data is helpful and make good use of it.

At the same time, customers are demanding a more and more personalized experience. This presents a catch-22, where marketers need to use data to deliver the type of personalized experience our customers demand, yet they get bombarded with so much data it can be paralyzing. As a result, the customer experience is suffering at a time when their expectations have never been higher.

The solution to this conundrum is digital intelligence. Over the next few years, marketing platforms have to develop new tools and techniques that will make it easier for marketers and product owners to use data and deliver a personalized experience to every customer. Below, we’ll talk about some ways platforms will tackle making sense of our ever-expanding data challenge:

Automated Optimization Coming to a Campaign Near You

Let’s face it; the modern day user demands a personalized experience. And in order for your business to survive, you must be pretty damn good at delivering on it. This notion of personalization is not a new topic, we’ve been covering it on the blog for years.

Most marketers have figured out how to weave some level of personalization into their campaigns. But the reality is that it’s still fairly complex to move beyond superficial personalization (e.g. including profile information like a customer’s name or last item purchased in a message) to truly understanding the user and predicting their next move. That’s where digital intelligence comes in. We’re already seeing marketing platforms introduce some forms of automated optimization, but over the next few years we’ll see these algorithms get more accurate and comprehensive. In the near future, your marketing platform will be able to look at your users and your campaign objectives, then determine:

Optimal audience
Optimal content
Optimal channel
Optimal send time

What Automating The Campaign Optimization Process Looks Like

Not quite sure how some of this might work? Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Today, if a retailer wants to drive increased sales of a specific item, they have to make some educated guesses while building out a campaign to increase sales. They have to guess:

Which customers will be interested in purchasing the product and should therefore be included in the Audience for this campaign
What will be the most compelling message to send the target Audience
What channel should be used to send the message
What time they should send the message to maximize the likelihood that the Audience will see and respond to the campaign.

Although a savvy marketer can make some fairly educated guesses and even some data-driven decisions on these items if they do a bit of A/B testing, it’s a lot of work and nothing is tailored to each individual recipient. What’s more, this is just to promote one product! The retailer then has to repeat the process for each additional product they want to promote.

Contrast our retailer’s current experience with the one they’ll have in a few years. In that world, the retailer will simply tell their marketing platform which products they want to promote and they’re done. The platform will create an Audience for the campaign by examining users’ recent behavior combined with data from lookalike users to identify users who are highly likely to purchase the products being promoted.

The platform will then use data gathered from past campaigns along with automated A/B testing to determine the type of message(s) that should be sent. Of course, each message will be further tailored to the individual recipient based on their past behavior and personal preferences.

Finally, the platform will determine what message channel and send time will result in the highest likelihood that each recipient will open the message.

The end result for customers who receive this message is they get a far more personalized experience. For the retailer, they not only get a substantially more effective campaign, but they spend far less time building messages and instead can focus on the larger marketing strategy. It’s a win-win. Pretty cool, huh?

Final Thoughts

We have been told for years about how important it is to be data-driven and deliver a personalized experience to each customer. However, this is easier said than done. As marketers get bombarded with more data from more sources, it becomes harder and harder to follow these best practices. We’ve reached an inflection point and it’s now up to marketing platforms to develop new technology that will allow marketers to follow best practices, do their job as efficiently as possible and deliver an exceptional customer experience.

In Part 2 of this 3 part mini-series, we'll be discussing how the world of analytics will change in the coming years and how these changes will help you make better decisions.

3 Huge Stats Every Restaurant Marketer Needs To Know

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 12:30:00 GMT

Let’s start here: as much as we sometimes don’t want to admit it, people are lazy. Weeks are hard. Work gets busy. Look at the success of Amazon and you can name dozens of reasons for it, including them being ahead on cloud. At base, you know what the reason is? They helped monetize laziness, whether that was ordering dog food, ordering a movie, or whatever else. Meet your customer where they’re at, and acknowledge they’re probably a little bit lazy.

The food service world is the apex of this. Look at these three stats, if you will:

Now think about your own life. We know the big names: Favor, PostMates, Uber Eats, etc. (Uber Eats is actually killing the profit line of McDonald’s franchise owners, which is a great “new business” vs. “traditional business” case study opportunity for the business school-minded among you.)

Having mobile/digital ordering is a baseline now. It was a “nice to have” for restaurant owners and their marketing teams. Now it’s a “need to have.”

What should marketers know about slaying it in this space, though?

Who does it well?

Domino's

Domino’s comes to mind. By some measure, they reinvented their entire business model around mobile/digital ordering. And the whole “startup methodology” concept extends to the idea that they constantly experiment with what they’re doing around mobile. For example, in February 2019 they announced a new loyalty program, which summarizes as follows:

Order pizza from Domino's? You can get Domino's points.
Order pizza from Papa John's? You can get Domino's points.
Order pizza from Pizza Hut? You can get Domino's points.
Order pizza from your local pizzeria that's way better than Domino's? You can get Domino's points.
Spend a romantic date night at home in the kitchen making a homemade pizza with your sweetie and pairing it with a nice bottle of red? You can get Domino's points.
Make your own pathetic excuse for a pizza by spreading marinara sauce from a jar on an English muffin and adding a little shredded cheese? You can get Domino's points.

In essence, you get points for eating from rivals. Burger King did something similar in late 2018, and that campaign was lauded. The math on the idea actually works out, especially because 60 percent of Dominos orders are now digital (remember about laziness, above). The campaign drives downloads, and downloads means more people ordering. It’s a brand awareness campaign that leads into a lead generation campaign. Those are the best kind.

Chipotle, Taco Bell, & Red Robin

Chipotle has used mobile to try and reinvent the drive-through lane, and -- partnership alert! -- Taco Bell got in bed with GrubHub on a national “Recipe for Success” campaign.

That latter one is interesting, because Taco Bell has the resources and the scale to launch their own marketing efforts in-app, but they went with a partnership because it made sense for both sides. It exposes more people to GrubHub and reduces the burden on Taco Bell as the delivery provider. What’s more: T-Bell (a nickname, perhaps) merged their point of sale system right into GrubHub’s infrastructure, meaning that 1:30am Chalupa is made to order, not sitting around on a shelf. Win-win.

Red Robin, which has been behind the digital curve, recently launched a “Mobile Yum” truck to cross the U.S. and get more intel from customers on what they want from a mobile carry-out/delivery experience. Then you have apps like Ritual, based out of Toronto, that help busy employees go pick up lunch without having to wait in line. Ritual has a built-in feature called Piggyback that allows co-workers to make bulk orders on anything, i.e. coffee. And if you’re wondering how that business model works? For restaurants, Ritual provides real-time data on store experience, food quality, and customer satisfaction metrics. Ritual makes money by taking a 10-to-13 percent fee from restaurant sales that the app generates; if a restaurant brings in a customer on their own, they pay no fee for transactions on the app.

The bottom line

There are already research reports and predictions that Gen Z will have a “seismic” impact on the food service and restaurant industry, largely in the context of mobile coming to the forefront and delivery/carry-out being the focus of the entire sales and marketing effort. As you can see above, we’re already more than halfway there -- and those that haven’t embraced it are rushing to catch up. If you work in restaurants, remember: laziness is always a good place to start the argument, and then add in pervasiveness of smartphones, and you’ve got your play. Now it’s time to get creative.

Inbox, Places, and Push: Which Channel Brings the Highest Engagement?

trodde@localytics.com (Thomas Rodde) — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 12:30:00 GMT

The fact is, the spotlight will always be on push notifications, with in-app coming in close second. There are two more channels that still receive even less attention though: location-based and inbox messages. These are two innovative and effective, yet underutilized ways to reach out to your app users.

Location-based messaging (or “Geo Push”) gives marketers the ability to send real-time push notifications to users the instant they enter or exit a specific location regardless of whether they have the app open or not. Inbox messaging offers a more long form, less upfront opportunity than push; these messages are stored in an app user’s in-app mailbox (similar to an email inbox). Users can return to these messages at any time within the app.

Maximizing ROI by Channel

Even if these channels are not your primary marketing strategy, they should at least be considered for use as supplements to push or in-app campaigns. Our data points to noticeably higher performance in campaigns that send Inbox and Geo push messages compared to regular push notifications.

This data comes with some caveats, though. Specifically:

Geo push is more effective than push because location-based messages target a user’s location in real time. We’ve found that targeted campaigns are the most effective, and a Localytics survey found that 42% of users say that campaigns that target them based on their location will cause them to use the app more.
Inbox metrics are difficult to track because a message “open” only occurs when the user clicks on the message, then clicks on the call-to-action within the message. All of these metrics are therefore based only on users who actually opened the message to begin with.

	places	inbox	push
Open Rate	9.74%	18.68%	3.91%
Conversion Rate	11.68%	37.2%	5.47%
Engagement	6.29	12.29	3.9

Users open geo push messages at 2.5 times the rate that they do push messages, convert 2 times more, and are 1.6 times more engaged with the message. The engagement metric here represents the number of sessions the average user completes within seven days of message receipt, while the open rate represents the number of interactions users had within one day of receiving the message over the number of messages sent. The conversion rate is calculated as the number of users who performed the conversion event out the number of users who received the message.

Of course, inbox performs very well. While some of this can be explained by how the channel is measured, it’s also clearly effective since more than one-third of users who view the message in their inbox go on to convert and users who check their inbox complete sessions in app three times more than users who open push notifications.

Inbox shows its true colors when we look at how apps that send these messages perform in terms of usage.

Apps that send inbox messages see 50% more launches per month than the average app, while apps that send location-based messages see about a 20% lift in launches per month. The message should be clear here: regardless of how the channel is measured, users who view inbox and geo push messages are more engaged and apps that send them create more engaging experiences.

All in all, these channels are highly appreciated by the most loyal users. Why not reward them?

Methodology

Localytics is the leading mobile engagement platform across more than 2 billion devices and 12,000 mobile and web apps. Localytics processes 3 billion data points daily. For this analysis, push, app inbox, and geo push open rates were calculated using the total number of interactions users had with messages within one day of receipt divided by the total number of message receipts. Conversion rates were calculated using total users who converted divided by total users who received messages within one day. Engagement is measured as average sessions per user within seven days of message receipt.

How Mobile Geofencing Is Transforming Your Deliveries

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 12:30:00 GMT

When marketers talk about geofencing, it’s usually in the context of pushing offers to potential customers when their smartphone enters a specific zone. It’s been a pillar of strategy for retail brands looking to connect with customers in real-time. And for those doing it well, it's paying off in a big way.

There’s another side to the geofencing discussion, though: deliveries

Framing all this up

The ruthless efficiency behind the rise of Amazon -- remember, the company was initially going to be named Relentless -- has given way to what some call “The On-Demand Economy.” Other services -- think Uber/Lyft, Postmates, Favor, etc. -- have sprung up around this. Even Netflix and Prime are examples. The basic tenet they all have in common: customers expect things to be there almost immediately. As The Wall Street Journal said as far back as 2015, the on-demand push is “reshaping society as we know it.”

Well, increasingly retailers are feeling pressure there -- and specifically logistics managers. If you’re a mid-size brand and aren’t in bed with Amazon in terms of having a dedicated shop, how can you compete with the customer experience of Amazon? Close to 72% of retailers are attempting to enter the same-day delivery world, which can be an emotional and physical drain on resources.

This all matters majorly monetarily too: research from the Georgia Institute of Technology on supply chain issues shows that companies with those types of issues report 6.92% lower sales growth and 10.66% higher growth in cost.

How can geofencing help?

1.) Better Customer Experience

Geofencing allows for a better customer experience because it can provide real-time alerts to customers on where their package is. Let’s say your package enters the fencing zone on a truck and you immediately receive a push notification that it’s nearby. Or, if it's with Amazon, you can get real-time tracking on exactly where your package is en-route:

Image Source: The Verve

2.) Improving Operations

From a business perspective, geofencing also addresses that Georgia Institute of Technology stat above by delivering real-time intel to managers on route problems and general delivery glitches. Logistics directors can replan routes based on construction or other recurring issues.

The customer side and the organizational side get married together when a customer can use geofencing and push notifications to alert a brand that the package has been received safely. Brands can build a conversational exchange off this interaction, including pushing about quality of delivery, packaging, and initial experience. Using those conversations effectively can help with customer retention, which is obviously a cornerstone of any brand strategy.

3.) Insights Into Future Technology

And lest you think this is all about brown and white trucks whizzing around your neighborhood, it’s all going to move to the skies. Big providers like Amazon, Walmart, and DHL are already wading into the regulation space for geofencing and avoidance technology around drones. In five years, you might be getting a push that your Charmin is about to be dropped into your backyard. That’s honestly not even a joke. It might be happening that soon.

Final Thoughts

97 percent of the way we’ve thought about and discussed geofencing for years is around ads, customer acquisition, and event/trade show management. There’s another side, though! It’s a bedrock element of the on-demand economy’s growth and customer satisfaction rates.

8 Apps That Help You Do Good

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 12:30:00 GMT

We love flashy tech and sexy cool stuff, of course, because we’re all only human. Instagram is often cited as the worst social media for mental health, especially in younger females, but it’s still massively popular. It’s fun to see pictures of your friends, right?

But if there’s truly always “an app for that,” we can also be using our app ecosystem to give back and make the world a better place right from our smartphone and (potentially) corresponding bank account.

What are some ways to do that?

1. RoundUp

You buy stuff and there’s a pesky amount of change until the next dollar amount. Well, why not donate that change to a non-profit and help them, over a series of gradual change deposits, really make a difference in the world? There are 900,000+ nonprofits to choose from on RoundUp.

2. Charidy

All-in-one donation ecosystem where you can donate in under 10 seconds, but also manage all your donations -- which can be a benefit come tax season.

3. Share The Meal

Donate as much or as little as you want when you’re sitting around waiting to meet a friend -- let’s say $5 -- and the app will share meals with less-privileged abroad. To date, they’ve shared over 33 million meals. Quick, easy, and impactful.

4. Be My Eyes

This is a free app that connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers and company representatives for visual assistance through a live video call. When someone needs help -- to identify a can of food, read a sign, or find a missing object around the house -- you’ll see a notification appear on your device.

5. Golden Volunteer Opportunities

Remove the excuses from “why I don’t volunteer” by automating as much of the process as possible. The suite actually now benefits both volunteers and volunteer organizers.

6. Blood Donor

This is a U.S.-only app from the American Red Cross -- although there are other regional options, like Canada’s GiveBlood -- that makes it easy to give blood both in times of need (i.e. after an emergency) or just in general.

7. Budge

Get competitive with your friends. You make a bet with them -- say, lose 10 pounds or run a 5K or whatever. If they hit their target, you donate. Fun, friendly, and some nice spirit of community/spirit of competition context going on at the same time.

8. Donate a Photo

Send a photo to Johnson & Johnson’s website and they give $1 to a charity. The photos reside in a gallery on their website to give visitors “the feels,” and they take the money (north of $4M to date) and spread it around to charitable causes (200+ to date). You’re already idly snapping pics with your phone anway (esp. On vacation), so why not donate them to a cause bigger than yourself?

There are tens of thousands of do good/give back/charity apps out there these days. The above is just a smattering. What are some of your favorites?

Smart Home devices are a $54B industry. What does that mean for mobile marketing?

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 12:30:00 GMT

The smart home world has been growing rapidly in recent years. To wit:

Abundant growth in the tech industry for home-related smart products, which are linked to the Internet of Things, is predicted to excel this year. Overall, expenditures for devices that create smart homes are expected to reach $44.1 billion, according to the International Data Corp.

That’s a lot of Nest thermostats, right? (Some claim it’s closer to a $54B industry, as an aside.) But before you start making assumptions about the smart home ecosystem, consider this. It’s basically akin to early-stage Apple in terms of product linking and purchase patterns. In fact, from the same article above:

“Absolutely this is a growth industry and people are still learning the power of IoT devices,” says Mark Spates, product lead for Google Home + Nest. “Typically, someone will purchase a smart speaker like Google Home, then they’ll add a Chromecast followed by a smart light bulb and then you really see their imaginations take off.”

Buy one thing --- > buy six more things. And look at how many areas of the home these devices are in right now:

The home is being transformed. So what exactly does that mean for mobile marketing?

Think about how people are using these devices

It’s best to begin your thinking in small terms, actually. When consumers think about “smart home” additions, they commonly begin in these areas:

Thermostats
Lights
Plugs
Detectors

Some basic executions here: think about how awful it is when you’re making steak and the damn fire alarm goes off and you need to find a ladder/step-stool to get up there and shut off that infernal beeping? Smart homes fix that. You basically grab your phone, open an app, and turn it off. Annoyance averted (largely).

Or imagine having a coffee maker that gets rolling right as you do, or a curling iron that does the same. That’s the power of a smart home: the promise of efficiency, which is the same as the power of tech overall.

Mobile marketers can find ways to incorporate themselves into this world. And it all begins, as does everything in the modern age, with …

Data is the play

Smart, connected homes and better Internet of Things tech means more data spinning around everywhere. This is where brands can capitalize. Think of some of the possibilities:

Kitchen: If you use a smart fridge, consumer packaged goods brands can see what you use, when you’re low, and push you discount offers and recipes.

Living Room: Want flexibility over your lighting in terms of eating vs. playing with kids vs. Netflix vs. “the mood” being set? GE already has an app-driven experience for that.

Outside: What if you could virtually unlock the door for your kids when they finish school and you’re not yet done with work? There is an entire “smart doorbell” industry, perhaps punctuated by Amazon acquiring Ring, but it also might be an innovation that saves late-stage Sears.

The equation goes something like this:

More data + On mobile + App-controlled {even more data) --- > Motherlode for mobile marketers

And the industry is headed this way: Google and Amazon, for example, are expanding their smart home data gathering efforts. This may shift somewhat in an era driven by privacy concerns of consumers, but smart, connected homes are increasingly going to give marketers access to family-level data. If they can use that wisely -- and remember, many familial decisions are made by the female, so market smart there -- they can be successful.

The bottom line on the next phase of mobile marketing

Mobile has become omnipresent. Smart home devices are growing rapidly. Most smart home devices are managed through mobile (logically). The great promise of mobile is individual-level user data. If you add all this together, you can see where mobile marketing is truly headed in the next 3-5 years: within the context of protecting privacy and making sure they were “invited in” to the home, brands will continually get more granular familial data they can use to market their associated products, be that lighting, yogurt, mattresses, or car batteries. This is the next wave of mobile.

What are your thoughts on the smart home app market? Comment below.

How Mobile Apps Transformed Modern Day Travel

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 12:30:00 GMT

Take a look at this headline for a second:

Survey: Nearly two-thirds of travelers rely on mobile apps during trips

Now think about your life while traveling for a second. Ask yourself a couple of questions:

Before the trip, how did you look at fares? You might have used a laptop, sure, but many of those “Where are we headed next?” discussions happen over nights out with friends. So did you check on airfare and hotel on your phone? A Kayak? Expedia? Or heavyweight app AirBNB?

When you wanted to know if you could afford the trip (#RealLifeProbs), what did you do? Did you check your mobile banking app?

What about when the trip was booked and you had those amazing moments of anticipation between cubicle drone work? Did you scroll through articles about the location on your phone? Did you set alerts? Did you look for apps that focus on that area just to make sure you have them on your phone? Did you get one of those local transport apps that can pull up subway/bus routes in different cities?

When it was time to almost depart, how did you make your friends jealous? This is a crucial component of human psychology, after all. Did ya hit IG? Facebook? Snap?

When it was ACTUALLY time to depart, how did you get to the airport? Uber or Lyft perhaps?

And when you got to the airport, what did you use to check-in for your flight and where was your boarding pass? Was it on mobile?

When you waited for that flight, what were you doing? Using social to make your friends more jealous? (#Naturally) Or checking an itinerary-management app? Or using WhatsApp to communicate with people you know abroad? Or reading a book or listening to a podcast?

And then when you landed (#joy), what was first? Some more jelly pics on Instagram? Back to itinerary management? Maybe a mobile banking question about currency exchange?

At this point in the process, the majority of actions you’ve taken around this blissful vacation are mobile-driven. In fact, on average, travelers use 10 to 12 apps throughout the searching, booking and traveling parts of their trip. And the breakdown of those processes? The top three most important features identified by leisure travelers in their travel apps are the ability to search and book flights (68 percent), real-time flight alerts throughout their journey (64 percent) and being able to see an entire trip itinerary in one place (67 percent).

And you know what? Newer tech is rising to prominence to deepen our connection between mobile and travel. To wit:

54 percent of U.S. leisure travelers would prefer to use an app for adding extras to their bookings on-the-go -- and the ability to pay using Apple/Android pay (touch ID) within their travel apps is an important feature for 42 percent of U.S. travelers. (Source)
44 percent surveyed have used voice to search for some part of their trip, up 3 percent from the previous year; and, 20 percent of travelers from the U.S. consider voice search to be a great influencer while traveling. (Source)
39 percent want to use a digital room key to unlock their hotel room door from their smartphone; and 36 percent said they prefer the option to check in to their hotel via an app, rather than at a reception desk. (Source)

If you ever, for a second, doubt the power and impact of mobile -- just remember this. The moments in live that people truly cherish and remember, i.e. in some ways even live for -- new experiences in new places with friends old and new -- have almost entirely shifted to a mobile ecosystem. Now, it’s not entirely true that travel agents are dead as a profession, but if you’re flexing yourself as a travel agent in 2019, you had better have a very strong grasp of mobile in terms of marketing yourself, communicating with clients, and syncing their info in the way they want it. And that way, of course, is mobile.

To learn more about how well Travel Apps performed in H2 2018, check out the benchmarks here. To get a deep dive on optimizing your Travel App for mobile marketing success, check out our eBook:

Is The UK The Next Mobile App Hotspot?

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 12:30:00 GMT

We’ve been talking about Asian market smartphone penetration in the context of the rise of mobile marketing for a few years now. That’s logical, as most of the world’s population lives on in Asia. But what about tiny little England, once the mightiest of superpowers? Their smartphone usage is intense:

85% of respondents -- 41 million people – now own or have access to a smartphone;
More than half admit to using their phone while walking; 4.5 million while crossing the road;
Quarter of 16-19-year-olds respond to messages they receive in the middle of the night;
55-75-year-old ‘silver swipers’ are the fastest-growing adopters of smartphones.

This is from Deloitte UK’s “State of the Smart,” which is their seventh annual survey on smartphone habits. Check out this pull quote:

Paul Lee, head of research for technology, media and telecoms at Deloitte, comments: “Most people can relate to ‘smartphone zombies’, either through being one or bumping into one. But this is just one indication of just how infatuated we are with these devices, for better or worse. While we may be glued to our smartphones, it is important to acknowledge that these devices are also, increasingly, the glue that is binding society together, and will soon become the primary way to communicate, interact and transact with customers and fellow citizens.”

Indeed. Will the UK be at the forefront of some of these trends?

It’s on the rise in the UK

Mobile marketing is definitely on the upswing in the UK, with 122.32 mobile subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. Mobile retail revenue in the UK hit a peak around 2011-2012, and while it’s stayed close to that ever since, there’s a possibility ad revenue overall will crack 20 billion Euros in 2019.

What would a mobile marketer need to know about the UK market?

A few key things:

The UK is a market leader in programmatic digital ad spending, with mobile dominating among channels. Programmatic media buying on mobile will reach 82% of total programmatic ad spend by 2018. It’s definitely a data-driven market, perhaps even more than the US.
Advertisers spend a significant amount of their budgets on video and playable ads; it accounts for 37% of all mobile display. Video traditionally has higher retention rates, and marketers in the UK are onto that.
Retargeting is a big play, through the standard channels (Facebook, Adobe tools, etc.) and through centralizing marketing channels’ information through different CRMs, DMPs and ad servers (DoubleClick, Sizmek, and others)
Average CPI rates in the UK are also relatively high and are comparable to the US – for both Android and iOS. The fact that payouts are high also leads to a increased percentage of mobile ad fraud, as spammers tend to target countries with higher CPI and CPA payouts (like they do in the US, Germany, and Australia).
Personalization is an increasing area of growth; UK marketers haven’t mastered it yet, ala many US marketers, but they’re continually trying to get there.

What about the impact of Brexit?

If Brexit goes through, some App Store rates will rise for consumers, which could make the paid market app landscape a bit tougher. The Brexit landscape is increasingly unclear at present, but one potential concern is the UK’s mobile phone test labs. If Brexit goes through, they could be shuttered. Could that halt mobile innovation? And also, subsequently, mobile ad spend?

If you’re based in the UK or market extensively to that area, we’d love to hear from you. What’s the biggest difference vs. US-based marketing? Where do you see challenges and growth opportunities?

Personalizing The Mobile Experience (Part 2): Getting From Stage 2 to Stage 3

nromain@localytics.com (Naike Romain) — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 13:30:00 GMT

Last month we shared some advice on how you can get started with mobile campaign personalization and move from Stage 1 to Stage 2. Now we’re going to level up by sharing examples of campaigns that can take your personalization efforts to Stage 3.

Stage 3 campaigns build on the targeted audiences of Stage 2 and incorporate liquid templating and a/b testing. This leads to even better open and conversion rates by getting even more personalized.

Quick refresher: Liquid templating allows you to pull information specific to each user, like their name, favorite content or categories, and other details into each message. The most common liquid templating uses data like a users location, transaction history, and lifecycle stage. It often looks something like this:

With A/B tests in Localytics you can send up to 10 variants of each message to determine which elements of your message work best. Tests on the header copy, emojis, and animated gifs have helped marketers determine which messages or offers their users prefer.

Let’s dig into how you can use both Liquid and A/B Testing in Stage 3.

Recovered Revenue Campaigns with Abandoned Cart Notifications

We know that 80% of online shoppers abandon their carts. Retailers often use a well-timed message to remind users of any forgotten items in their cart. With liquid templating, you can boost the relevance of the message by including the specific items that were left behind and increase your conversion rates. To test these campaigns you can try using different offers, like offering a small discount or free shipping, to see which drive more users to convert.

Product or Content Recommendation Campaigns with Related Items

Another good method for personalizing your campaigns is to reference a prior purchase. You can use liquid templating to introduce your users to new items that would complement what they’ve already bought by using liquid to reference their last purchase in the message. This strategy also applies to media apps. You can use past reading or viewing behavior to recommend other content and in the message itself include what you know the user has enjoyed in the past. To A/B test you can try creating a version of the message that includes an image and a text-only version to learn if seeing the product drives more engagement.

Re-engagement Campaigns with User Preferences

We know that a large number of app users begin to churn after 90 days so to bring them back into the app and keep their attention, you need to put forth your best, most relevant content. You can try sending a special promo, asking for feedback or sending a thank you note and personalizing it based on the users stated preferences. If your users have selected preferred genres of content, shopping categories or brands, you can use liquid to customize your message creative based on their preference and drive engagement.

By including dynamic content with liquid your messages become way more relevant to your users. It shows a level of familiarity with their needs and preferences that a general message can’t. It also saves you time. Instead of having to create unique segments for messaging users in a specific location or specific age group, you can create one message that when delivered, contains a unique detail about the user. WIth A/B testing, you’re going to learn the optimal message formats and content style, giving you the ability to be much more effective in the future.

While taking on the new techniques may seem scary at first, the upside is enormous! You get the benefit of building a better relationship with your customers by only sending them highly relevant messages and you’ll increase conversion rates. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to get even more out of your campaigns with personalization.

For a deep dive on mastering the stages of personalization, check out our new eBook:

[New Overall Benchmarks]: Push Engagement and Retention Soar in 2018

trodde@localytics.com (Thomas Rodde) — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 13:30:00 GMT

Since push notifications entered the scene their use has grown at an exponential pace, but the story has not always been so bright. In 2016, we discovered that mobile engagement was in a crisis. Since then, we’ve seen signs of improvement in the form of greatly increased retention, but the current state of push notifications has not quite reached its full potential yet.

Despite the mobile engagement crisis, our biannual benchmarks remain the best way to compare how your app is performing relative to the competition. This time around, we found both good and bad news. Let’s start with the good news. For reference, check out our newest benchmark report, which combines all four industry verticals (Travel, Media, Business, and Retail) into one overall report.

Push Engagement and App Retention On the Upswing

The increase in use of targeting in mobile campaigns has yielded positive returns when it comes to actual messaging performance: push notification engagement rates are on an upswing. Engagement is calculated as the number of sessions the average user completes within seven days of push receipt.

Push engagement saw increases of 38% on Android and 32% on iOS YoY from 2017 H2 to 2018 H2. This change is coupled with 15% and 22% increases respectively from the first half of 2018 to the second, indicating a strong trend upwards.

What’s more, retention has proven to be stalwart as well, pointing to a substantial change in how marketers think about reaching their end-users. These days, users are retained at a much higher rate than they were just a year ago.

The final numbers for 2018 bring the overall retention rates for 1-month, 2-month, and 3-month periods up 44%, 35%, and 31%. Compare this to last year, when they averaged 40%, 31%, and 26%. That’s a 10% increase in retention of users who launch an app after one month, a 13% in 2-month retention, and a whole 20% increase in 3-month retention.

Retention has an undeniably positive effect on your business results. In fact, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95% and acquiring a new customer can be five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one according to HBS. Increasing retention is merely a function of offering value to users by sending targeted pushes with dynamic content, guiding them through the app experience with on boarding and in-app notifications, and A/B testing your messages. It all comes down to how personal the experience is and how much users feel that you care.

The Downside: Time In App Is Trending Down

2018 was the year that marketers took the concept of retention and completely defied our expectations. However, it was also the year that we learned how difficult it is to follow the winning formula: maintaining a strong user base and incentivizing more time in apps. The second half of 2018’s benchmark report brought this concept even closer to the forefront and indicated that there are still some areas where marketers could improve their strategy.

For instance, monthly app launches increased noticeably in 2017, but decreased in 2018. This reflected in time in app as well, which decreased 14% in the last year. Session lengths, on the other hand, did not see as much change, only dropping 4% year over year.

	2017 H1	2017 H2	2018 H1	2018 H2
App Launches - Monthly	15.89	14.34	13.70	13.20
Session Length - Monthly (minutes)	04:38	04:38	04:33	04:20
Time in App - Monthly (minutes)	73:34	66:23	62:20	57:09

This decrease in total usage metrics likely reflects how apps have shifted in terms of their utility to the end-user. Initially, consumers enjoyed spending exorbitant amounts of time using apps; today they’ve become tools for exploring their interests and getting things done. That being said, it’s not impossible to draw users back in and offer them valuable content on a regular basis.

Activating Users the Right Way

There are a few tried and true methods for reaching out to your app users that show how well you know them (without coming off as too invasive). At the top of this list is personalizing notifications so that your message draws people in. We find that marketers as a whole might achieve even better results with a more personalized approach. Targeting with user profiles (i.e., name, birthday, location) and behaviors (last item viewed, did or did not checkout) or A/B testing and inserting dynamic/liquid content into messages are some of the best ways to accomplish this. Check out how marketers are performing overall in this area.

The great news is that use of targeting is high, coming in at 94% of campaigns, with only 6% sending out less effective broadcast notifications. On the other hand, while targeting audiences using profiles is quite effective, a combination of behavioral and profile targeting yields the best results. In addition, marketers may be missing out on the magic of dynamic content, as only 5% of mobile marketing campaigns feature it despite the potential gains, and A/B tested campaigns come in at around 10%, which gives us something to work towards.

All in all, we extend congratulations to 2018's app marketers for having reached stage 2 out of 4, which is an intermediate personalization level. Be sure to celebrate, but not too hard!

...and once you're done, check out our most recent benchmark report:

[NEW DATA] Business & Technology Apps: How Did They Fare In 2018?

jperro@localytics.com (Justina Perro) — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 13:30:00 GMT

During 2018, we saw apps in the Business & Technology sector really start to gain momentum which isn’t too surprising since people use their phones more than ever both professionally and personally. But just how well did these apps fare last year? Let’s take a look.

For reference, included in the Business and Technology app category are Productivity, Medical, Business, Reference, Finance, Education, and Utilities apps.

Retention Rates Improve While Time In App Declines

The Business/Technology vertical has enjoyed an upward trend in retention since 2017, which is in line with overall retention trends in mobile:

Specifically, the Business/Technology vertical saw one month retention increase by 2%, two month retention by 6%, and three month retention by 7% YoY. In contrast, we’ve seen app usage generally decrease YoY since 2017. App launches decreased by 4% from 2017 H2 to 2018 H2, while session lengths decreased by 28%.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially when looking at it paired with the rising retention rates. What this most likely is an indication of is app familiarity combined with a strong user experience. The users in the Business & Technology sector use apps to complete tasks and carry on. Being accustomed to the app means users can complete the in-app tasks faster and spend less time within the app. This story aligns with an ongoing trend we see in the app world; as users grow to love an app more, they'll remain more loyal to it, but spend less time in it.

Personalization Efforts Are Strong Across Vertical

Another positive trend? Mobile app marketers in Business & Technology are getting smarter with personalizing their campaigns and it’s paying off:

The above chart highlights that 90% of campaigns in this vertical are considered targeted meaning only 10% of marketers are still using the proven ineffective broadcast messaging.

We know there are different stages of personalization, so are happy to see that 40% campaigns in this sector are in Stage 3 and using both behavioral and profile audience data to personalize their messaging. Another 23% and 27% use only profile rules and behavioral rules respectively putting them in Stage 2 and 10% have no rules at all (Stage 1).

Area Of Opportunities: Liquid Content & A/B Testing

Now that we’ve highlighted the positive, let’s look at where Business & Technology mobile app marketers can improve. For starters, currently only 3.6% of campaigns in the sector contain liquid content. If you’re not familiar with liquid content check out t his great blog that breaks it down. App marketers could improve and get closer to providing a true 1:1 experience for users by seeing them as individuals with preferences, and serving up those preferences within the app and also with messaging like push notifications.

Another area of opportunity is A/B testing. The current A/B testing rate is fairly good (9.8%), but still leaves something to be desired. A/B testing your mobile marketing is something every thought leader in the space does, and it only serves to make your campaigns smarter, better, and more successful. Knowledge is power, and the knowledge you gain from A/B testing is priceless.

Final Thoughts

Business & Technology apps really hit their stride in 2018. In order to continue the momentum this year, mobile marketers and product owners need to build on their personalization efforts even more through tapping into the deep insights they collect on their users and moving closer to providing a 1:1 user experience.

To see our full report on Business & Technology apps in 2018, click here.

Becoming A Mobile Influencer: Liquid Methodology vs. Combination Methodology

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 13:30:00 GMT

The fact is: a lot of brands still struggle with mobile marketing, and they use quick-fix approaches to try and get better, like running a mobile app ad on instagram that generates plenty of downloads but with no real strategy to retain them.

So how does a company actually get good at mobile marketing and become a thought leader in their space? There are dozens of different approaches to this question, and a quick Google search will give you thousands of different answers. Selfishly, we’d say … continue to read our Localytics blog. We have some real gems, hidden and otherwise.

But for now, let’s discuss a compare and contrast idea that can really help move your brand in the right direction on mobile.

Understanding the personalization formula:

If you want more detailed info on each sub-category here, consider reading our full eBook on personalization.

For now, we want to focus on the “message” aspect of personalization.

When most marketers think of personalization, they think of being able to insert things like a recipient's name into their message. This is done with what’s known as dynamic, or “liquid,” content - content that changes for each recipient. It can be used to not only insert a recipient’s name, but also do things like mention a specific topic of interest, determine what pictures get shown, and much more.

Dynamic content can be very effective; when you include it in a push notification, the average open rate increases by just under 9% (or a 5.7% increase over non-dynamic). However, it’s important to recognize that dynamic content alone is not enough to ensure a personalized experience.

Think about what happens when you buy a shirt and then, 48 hours later, you get a push notification to buy that shirt and it includes your name in the notification. Do you really care about your name being there, since you’ve already bought the shirt? Probably not. Instead you’re wondering why the app didn’t realize you already purchased the shirt.

This is where we need to bring in Behavioral and Profile data.

What is profile data?

Profile data is a snapshot of who a user is. Think name, age, gender, etc. Some aspects to remember:

It’s captured using SDK or pulled from other systems (like a CRM)
It provides a snapshot of who the user is at the current moment
It can be harder to obtain as a user generally has to take the time to provide some of this information themselves (e.g. while creating an account)

What is behavioral data?

Behavioral data is a snapshot of what a user has done inside your app or website. Think of it as the actions a user has taken: opened app, read article, upgraded subscription, purchased product. Remember:

Captured using SDK or Events API
Provides information on what a user has done in the past
Generally easier to collect as there’s no onus on the user to provide this information manually

How do you maximize the two?

You use what we call “a combination methodology.” Essentially, you move from audiences that only use profile or behavioral data to audiences that utilize both types of data.

By making use of all the data that’s available to them, brands using the combination methodology can send far more compelling and individualized messages, thanks to the granular audiences they have created.

Consider a news app that promotes their paid subscription without annoying casual readers by targeting the campaign only at customers that currently have a free subscription (profile data) and who have read at least nine articles in the last week (behavioral data).

Or, an event ticketing app that sends targeted push notification letting a user know one of their favorite artists, Adele, is coming to town. While the audience of customers interested in Adele is fairly large, yet still targeted, you get much more targeted by including users who are located in the specific city she’s performing in (profile data) and haven’t purchased tickets yet (behavioral data).

When you combine the two types of data, you get much more flexibility in ensuring the right message gets to the right person.

And -- while we do love great IG app ads -- the above is the true path to mobile influence.

[New Benchmarks]: Travel App Messaging Gets a Boost in 2018

trodde@localytics.com (Thomas Rodde) — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 13:30:00 GMT

Considering 57% of U.S. travelers feel that brands should tailor their information based on personal preferences and past behaviors, and 80% of travelers use a smartphone app to research a trip, it follows that mobile app marketing should be a primary focus for travel companies.

In the past, we’ve found that travel app users are among the most loyal in the mobile space. This time around, the tune has changed slightly: users are much more likely to open push and in-app messages and convert, however these users have become slightly tougher to keep around. We dove into our mobile benchmark report for the second half of 2018 to get a better sense for how the data is trending and why, uncovering the some fascinating insights in the process.

Insight #1: Travel and Lifestyle app notification open and conversion rates have increased considerably since 2017.

Open rates across both Android and iOS initially saw a decrease starting in 2017, but regained momentum and have been reaching new heights in 2018.

In-App open rates for Android apps began at around 11.83%, with iOS at around 9.47%. They both dipped a few percentage points, then sprang up to reach 19.85% for iOS and 13.46% for Android. Travel in-app open rates are rivalled only by Retail and eCommerce’s, which saw a high open rate of 19.63% on iOS for H2 2018.

While not nearly as dramatic, push open rates have been steadily increasing on iOS and making a comeback on Android.

At the same time, conversion rates for Travel & Lifestyle apps have also been on the rise, indicating stronger in-app and push messaging and ease of conversion.

	2017 H1	2017 H2	2018 H1	2018 H2
Android In-App Conversion Rate	2.97%	2.55%	4.9%	3.65%
iOS In-App Conversion Rate	2.78%	5.35%	4.6%	4.26%
Android Push Conversion Rate	0.39%	1.05%	0.94%	1.62%
iOS Push Conversion Rate	0.2%	0.38%	0.46%	0.78%

Insight #2: Retention has dipped slightly since the first half of 2018.

Retention measures the percent of users who return to an app one month, two months, and three months after the app is downloaded. Churn is the opposite; it measures the percentage of people who do not return to an app one month, two months, and three months after download.

Although push and in-app have been showing great improvement since 2017, retention is another story. Travel apps performed well on this metric in early 2018, but have struggled to keep up in the second half of the year.

Reducing churn by 5% can increase profitability by 75%. Focusing on customer retention is key to growing and maintaining great mobile apps and customer communication and knowledge should be the app marketer’s highest priority. Travel app marketers: keep the end-user in mind at all times and create an immersive app experience by building effective onboarding strategies and indicating the value your app provides to users from first launch.

Insight #3: Targeting, liquid usage, and A/B test usage is extremely strong.

When it comes to personalization, Travel & Lifestyle app marketers cannot be beaten. They target audiences in 98% of their messaging, only broadcasting 2% of their messages. 44% of their messages are targeted towards audiences based on behavioral and profile attributes. Behavioral attributes tell you what a user has done in the past in your app, while profile attributes tell you who a user is.

Liquid content is messaging catered to specific users based on information about them. For example, a message might read “Want to create your own fantasy {favorite_sport} team? Try it out with players from {favorite_team}!” This content varies according to the user’s profile information. A/B testing can be used by marketers to test out certain messages on an audience, in the process discovering what types of communication the audience prefers. App marketers in the travel vertical use liquid content to enhance 7.3% of their messages and A/B test nearly 9% of the time.

Insight #3 lends credence to Insight #2: personalization brings great results. Here are two areas where we find strong personalization impacts marketing positively:

Messages whose audiences use both profile and behavioral criteria have 2.2X higher conversion rates than messages whose audiences used just profile criteria.
Targeted, liquid messages have nearly 3X higher open rates than simple broadcast messages.

Keep these data points in mind next time you’re building a mobile marketing campaign and are considering whether to broadcast the message to all users or to target based on segmentation data.

Travel App Marketers: Focusing On Improving the App Experience

In closing, the progress travel app marketers have made in push and in-app is impressive, however, retention should always be their highest priority. To increase retention, use a few of these strategies:

Continue to A/B Test.
Continue to enhance an individualized experience with liquid content.
Remarket to users who have churned from your app via. non-mobile channels to bring them back.
Engage with users using Rich Push and Geo-Push
Check out our 2019 App Marketing Guide!

For more juicy data, take a peek at the benchmark report here:

Methodology

Localytics is the leading mobile engagement platform across more than 2 billion devices and 12,000 mobile and web apps. Localytics processes 3 billion data points daily. For this analysis, Localytics examined increases in user retention after one month, two months, and three months since the first half of 2017. Push and in-app open rates were calculated using the total number of interactions users had with messages within one day of receipt divided by the total number of message receipts. Push and In-App conversion rates were calculated using total users who converted divided by total users who received messages within one day. Personalization levels were determined using the percent of campaigns that were targeted based on behavioral and/or profile criteria, the percent of campaigns that used liquid content, and the percent of campaigns that were A/B tested. All data is based on Travel and Lifestyle app usage.

Developing Apps for the Cloud

Rilind Elezaj — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 13:30:00 GMT

With the advancement of modern technology, businesses are constantly facing the challenge of staying relevant to the evolving technology. Provided that the number of customers and transactions is continually growing, the need for better computational platforms has become imminent. With cloud computing, businesses can store large volumes of data comfortably and they can deliver services at scale without going down for maintenance.

The cloud is safe and very dependable model which enables companies to enhance their reputation and increase their efficiency. Cloud apps are applications that have been developed for the cloud and often deal with complex amounts of information moving to and from. They include databases, multimedia applications, and even large-scale online games that involve several players from diverse locations.

Developing successful apps for the cloud is an easy process for an app development agency but very intense in its execution. Initially, the infrastructure and architecture of the app have to be designed very efficiently and cautiously. Moreover, a clear flow of network traffic needs to be established in order for users to connect their devices with the cloud app and that within the cloud network.

This traffic has to be secured and the developer usually develops a security algorithm for the network to filter out unwanted traffic thus keeping the infrastructure safe. Also, the software has to be designed so that no information is lost even when one of the serves in a distributed model goes down for maintenance.

The cloud software is designed as a cluster of machines which share and distribute their computational load among each other. That said, any server going down will be supported by the rest of the cluster, thus keeping a company in a continual operational state.

Storage information on a cloud application can be done on a separate machine to ensure that additional information always has sufficient space to occupy. Apps that a developer designs for the cloud also tend to be quite beautiful in their making and easy to use from any device. Mostly, a responsive design is employed to ensure that the same web application displays easily on multiple devices.

Consequently, the users of the application are able to make use of cloud apps through a user-friendly interface. Banking applications, for instance, can have a cloud backend to take care of information processing and storage while the user interface on the web and mobile applications takes care of security and information access.

Security challenges are common when one is developing apps for the cloud and the developer has to design several layers of authentication frameworks to prevent unauthorized access to confidential information. In addition, the network via which the cloud application is being accessed has to be set up in such a way that it filters off the suspicious IP addresses, hence boosting the integrity of the entire architecture. Moreover, implementing security protocols for the cloud app gives confidence to users that their information is not lost along the way. Cloud apps are strong and can take care of excessive traffic loads easily.

Testing the application thoroughly during development is another way to ensure that it is secure and stable enough to be launched. Whenever the cloud applications are being deployed, all additional features like databases and sources of information should be interlinked and tested thoroughly by scripts and actual users. Should there be any bug detection during the testing process, they are immediately eliminated and reprogrammed to ensure there is a bullet-proof application running on the cloud.

Any internet using business can use the cloud to scale up their operations and be more visible for customers and users globally. Being aware of the capabilities of your cloud applications for your business is useful to ensure that you are providing excellent services efficiently. Cloud resources give you more compute resources at a fraction of the cost which is very profitable for running a business or an organization online. Developers and designers of such app are very useful when you want to start out a venture that is built atop the cloud.

About The Author:

Rilind Elezaj is currently the Communication Specialist at Outsource2EU. He is an experienced Digital Marketer with a demonstrated history of working in the marketing and advertising industry. Rilind possesses a strong entrepreneurial mindset and has devoted his career to enhancing the sphere of digital marketing. In his methodological approach, Rilind integrates web development and other digital marketing solutions to create hybrid strategies that bring the best results.

Personalizing the Mobile Experience: Getting from Stage 1 to Stage 2

nromain@localytics.com (Naike Romain) — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 13:30:00 GMT

Earlier this week we shared the outcome of our analysis 23 billion push messages and proved that personalization makes a meaningful impact on the effectiveness and performance of your messages with the launch of our new eBook.

You can play with the equation in different ways but in order to succeed you need to start using data to make your messages more contextual and relevant to your users. That means thinking about who should (or should not) receive each campaign, what content is going to be useful to the user, and even when the message will be delivered:

For our customers in Stage 1, getting to the next level might feel daunting. It shouldn’t though. In order to get to Stage 2 and get up to a 48% increase in conversion rates, all you need to do is create better defined audiences.

With better defined audiences your existing campaigns could be performing a lot better and you could identify new opportunities to reach out to segments of your app users that need some special attention. Here are some examples of audiences you can build and campaigns you can run to take your app marketing to the next level:

Awareness Campaign with New Product Announcements

New products are a great reason to stay in touch and stay top of mind with your app users. Keeping your announcements relevant is the best way to make sure your notifications don’t get ignored. To create an audience for your next new product you’ll want to pull from behavioral data to include when the user was last in your app or what they last viewed. To take it a step further, you can use profile data to tie in the message the users' interests.

Stage 1 Message: We haven’t seen you in a while! Check out our new spring arrivals from designers you’ll love!

Stage 2 Message: New Shoe Alert! We’ve got spring arrivals from Steve Madden and Cole Haan you’re going to love!

Retention Campaign with Milestone Messages

A great way to keep your customers engaged with your app is through encouragement. You can use positive reinforcement to build up an affinity with your brand and make them feel valued. To identify the users that belong in this audience, you need to start with behavioral data. For example, create segment app users who have been subscribed to your Media app for 1 year or for a retail company, try identifying your users who have reached your a new loyalty member tier or spending threshold.

Once you have those groups identified, you can get even more specific by adding in data you’ve gained about who they are. For instance, Media apps can combine the subscription date with data about the users' favorite movie genre. A retailer might want to use a favorite shopping category, like shoes, clothing or accessories.

Stage 1 Message: It’s our anniversary! Thanks for being a subscriber for a whole year.

Stage 2 Message: Hey, Emily, it’s our anniversary! Cheers to being a subscriber for a whole year. Our future is bright as long it's full of watching Julia Roberts romcoms together.

Advocacy Campaign with NPS Surveys

One of the best ways to acquire new users is for existing users to spread the word about how much they love your app. If your App Store rating doesn’t reflect how much users enjoy your app, an NPS campaign to drive reviews is a great way to get a more accurate score. To make sure that you’re getting reviews from users that are having a good experience, you’ll want to define your audience with behavioral data that tells you how often your app is being used. You can also add in profile data to include users who have reached a loyalty membership tier or spent a specific amount with you.

Stage 1 Message: Tell us how we’re doing! We’re looking for feedback from users like you so we can make the app better. Please rate our app below.

Stage 2 Message: We’re looking for feedback from tier 2 loyalty members to make our app better. Your review can also help other customers decide to whether or not we’re the right fit for them. Would you please rate our app?

Final Thoughts

While it might seem that the best way to reach your users is to message everyone at once, the data has proven that there is more value to being more targeted with your campaigns. There is so much to gain by creating audiences based on what you know about your users and how they use your app. Start building audiences in Localytics today! You can also learn more about our research by checking out the Stages of Personalization eBook by clicking on the below banner:

(New eBook) Your Guide To Achieving Personalized Mobile Experiences

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 13:45:00 GMT

Although thought leaders in the marketing industry have been preaching the benefits of personalization for years -- and although we all know some amazing personalization campaigns, like #ShareACoke -- there’s surprisingly been very little in the way of hard data around how effective personalization can be.

As a result, many mobile marketers don’t know what they’re leaving on the table by not doing it well.

What we did: analyzed 23 billion push notifications sent by Localytics customers during 2018 and let the data tell us exactly what personalization can do for marketing campaigns. Using a K-Means Analysis (also called K-Means Clustering), we uncovered the natural progression of content personalization.

The reveal: you can put a brand’s marketing into one of four progressively more sophisticated groups based on what methods the brand uses to personalize their messages. We’re calling these four groups the Stages of Personalization. We also discovered that the more sophisticated the Stage, the better the average message performance.

We find that personalization actually offers a strong competitive advantage -- and as a result, you can’t view it as “too time-consuming.” You need to make time to get it right. The returns are there.

These broader findings also align with consumer surveys: Per Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer, 57% of customers are willing to provide their data in exchange for a more personalized experience. The problem is that only 22% of customers are satisfied with the level of personalization that brands are delivering, per Segment’s 2017 State of Personalization Report.

If your brand delivers a strong personalized experience, it will stand out to these unsatisfied customers. So how does a brand do that, exactly? Glad you asked. We took those 23 billion pushes and grouped our client base into four categories on a personalization spectrum from “broadcast” (just pushing out messages with little to no personalization) to a “mastery” stage.

What we learned through the data and what you’ll uncover when you read our eBook:

The personalization formula
The 4 stages of personalization and evaluating how far along various companies are
How to effectively craft a personalized mobile message
The tangible benefits of a personalization strategy & how long it takes to set one up

Click the below banner to check it out and learn how to create the powerful, 1:1 mobile experiences your customers want:

3 Real Customer Lessons For Mobile Marketers

sbraithwaite@localytics.com (Sydney Braithwaite) — Sat, 09 Feb 2019 13:45:00 GMT

At Localytics, we're big believers in sharing real mobile stories for you to learn from. Some of the best lessons any mobile app marketer or product owner can learn comes directly from their peers, so we pulled together 3 quick lessons from real customers of ours to showcase for today's blog:

Lesson #1

Enterprise Customer A Profile:

Top 5 Forbes Largest Private Companies 2018
Revenue: $60B
Industry: Food
Brick-and-Mortar Locations: 3,000+
Mobile Monthly Active Users (USA): 3.5M+

Lesson: Mobile is more than just another channel.

Customer A has traditionally treated mobile as just another channel to funnel existing marketing strategies through, but they have decades worth of deep data insights they can leverage to understand how to personalize offers, what products to place at the ends of aisles, and in general, how to anticipate what their customers need on a weekly basis.

As part of their 2019 strategy, Customer A is embracing mobile and using their data to create better customer experiences that boost revenue and retention. With the help of the Localytics Customer Success team, Customer A is scoping out several strategies including how to capture more in-app behavioral data, leverage their Localytics-Salesforce connector, and bolster an already robust engagement strategy with rich data straight from users’ pockets.

Lesson #2

Enterprise Customer B Profile:

Top 30 Forbes World’s Most Valuable Brands 2018
Top 50 Forbes Top Regarded Companies 2018
Top 100 Forbes World’s Most Innovative Companies 2018
Market Cap: $130B
Industry: Household/Personal Care
Brick-and-Mortar Locations: 3,000+
Mobile Monthly Active Users (USA): 170K+

Lesson: Strategic consultative support for mobile can be well worth the investment to a busy team.

Although Customer B made its fortune in the more traditional beauty industry, its vision of the future is spans beyond traditional industry lines and is heavily investing in securing its place at the forefront of where personal care and digital technologies overlap.

Customer B has launched a variety of apps in recent years, spanning from high-performing eCommerce apps to cutting-edge IoT apps. In their partnership with Localytics, an obvious gap started to grow -- Customer B was pushing the frontier, but there was no extra internal bandwidth dedicated to the maintenance and nurturing of existing assets and mobile app users.

This gap served as an opportunity for Localytics and Customer B to work even closer together through a Managed Services partnership, where dedicated Localytics resources work side-by-side with Customer B teams across multiple brands to assist with planning, executing, and measuring strategies to drive success.

Lesson #3

Enterprise Customer C Profile:

Top 50 Forbes World’s Most Valuable Brands
Brand Value: $14B+
Industry: Media
Mobile Monthly Active Users (USA): 20M

Lesson: Planning out campaign segmentation takes time, but it’s worth it.

Customer C has worked with Localytics for years, but only recently changed its mobile business model by rolling out a subscription service. As part of launching this service, Customer C was careful to not disregard years worth of data they have about their user base.

With the assistance of their Localytics Managed Services team, Customer C identified and created several audiences segmented based on viewing behavior and preferences. The execution of these campaigns and reporting on results requires dedicated time, but since they're tailored to the end user they yield very high conversion rates and result in revenue lifts well worth the extra effort. This close partnership continues, as the teams collaborate on building out workflows that engage users differently based on subscription status, viewing habits, preferences, and more.

Final Thoughts

Mobile is not a "one size fits all" channel. Every customer of ours has unique needs and goals based off of their industry and customer base. And because of some unique qualities of mobile such as deep user segmentation and location based messaging, digital strategies you've used on other platforms don't transfer. That's why it's important for you to have a dedicated mobile team who are really focused on driving results with your app. Keep this in mind as you work on your 2019 marketing strategy, and you'll be in good shape.

New Mobile Data: How Did Apps Fare During Super Bowl LIII?

trodde@localytics.com (Thomas Rodde) — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 12:30:00 GMT

Despite complaints of this year’s Super Bowl being too boring by some viewers, the game did not fail to captivate the mobile crowd. The total number of devices that streamed the game reached 7.5 million this year, an increase of 20% over last year.

True to form, our data pointed to spikes in engagement in the hours leading up to and following the Super Bowl, with a few app categories performing extremely well. We uncovered that New England app users spent more time on their mobile devices during the Super Bowl, while Californians were perhaps more fixated on their televisions.

Find #1: Mobile Users Most Engaged With Apps Before and After the Game

Generally speaking, we’ve found that push notifications are opened at the highest rates near the middle and end of the day. These are the times when users are most likely to be looking for updates, whether they’re glancing at the afternoon news or winding down before bedtime.

Sports games follow a similar pattern, however there’s a caveat: reaching users with a notification at a pivotal moment can make all the difference in their brand perception. In fact, 63% of respondents to a Localytics survey on streaming apps said they were more likely to open and use an app if notifications from the app contained breaking news concerning sports teams.

When it came to app engagement during the Super Bowl, time in app saw its biggest spikes right before kickoff around 6:00pm EST, with total time reaching nine minutes and one second in New England and seven minutes and ten seconds in California.

At this time, New Englanders were 31% more engaged with mobile apps than Californians. The curves for both regions dipped at 7:00pm and reached a minimum at 9:00pm, likely indicating strong audience interest in viewing the game’s final outcome on their televisions. Post Super Bowl, New Englanders took to their phones to celebrate as we saw time in app spike up to eight minutes twenty eight seconds.

Drilling this data down by app launches and average session length, we find that launches actually peak at 9:00pm EST while session lengths dips dramatically after kickoff. The takeaway here is that people were more engaged with the game than to their phones, especially as it started to pick up in intensity around 9pm.

It’s clear that the best time to interact with mobile app users is either before or at the very beginning of a sports game. Remember that users become more interested in the game in its final stages, so a push notification at that point will not yield great results. On the other hand, users will be much more engaged with apps following the action.

Find #2: Media and Entertainment Apps See Most Game Time Engagement

Since the Super Bowl is a huge night for media and entertainment outlets, mobile app launches under this industry vertical saw a huge boost.

At the beginning of the game: Average Entertainment app launches increased by 45% compared to the average of the previous four Sundays.
During halftime: Usage in entertainment apps also increased by 10%, while Social Networking apps increased by 6% and Music apps by 7%. Users were likely replaying Maroon 5 classics, discovering Travis Scott, and trying to remember who Big Boi is.
Near the end of the game: Sports app usage increased by 27%, a Entertainment by 12%, and Social Networking by 9%.

Find #3: Patriots Fans Post Game Mobile Activity Shows They're Loyal

Last year, we predicted that the Patriots would be back soon, but we weren’t sure how soon that would actually be. The fact that they played the Super Bowl and won this year is testament to the team’s dynasty (yes, we went there).

New England mobile users were 34% more engaged with apps at the very end of the game too, indicating strong fan loyalty. That type of spirit is unbeatable, so it would not be a surprise to see Tom Brady back next year.

Methodology

Localytics is the leading mobile engagement platform across more than 2 billion devices and 12,000 mobile and web apps. Localytics processes 3 billion data points daily. For this analysis, we adjusted timing to match Eastern Standard Time. The comparison between New England and California app engagement was done based on users who had at least one session during the game and opted to send us geographic information. In analyzing app category lift, we measured the average number of times users launched apps at each hour from 5:00 to 11:00 on Super Bowl Sunday. We then calculated the increase compared to average launches at the same times on the previous four Sundays. All data is US-based.

5 Ways Apps Improve The In-Store Retail Experience

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 13:45:00 GMT

Around 57% of shoppers use apps while in-store, and it seems pretty apparent there’s a strategy that can be carved out of that retail rock. How do you create in-store functionality within an app? Who’s doing it big in that world?

1. Store Mode:

Image Source

Home Depot has done this, and Kroger was even doing a version back in late 2015. Let’s say you need a really specific type of nail (Home Depot) or sliced jalapenos (Kroger). You know how infuriating it can be to find these things when the store is vast and the signage is generic? Well, if you whip out your phone, the mobile experience relieves pain points. On Home Depot, for example, you can do voice search, image search, and barcode scan -- and they’re going to get you to the exact aisle and bay. No more off-task discussions with retired former KPI warriors who needed a way to fill their days and like telling people where doorknobs are. No, head in phone and living that scan life. You good.

2. Mobile Pay:

Image Source

Target does this well in-store, as do numerous other brands. Why should you need to fiddle with your cards and deal with that terrible EMV chip reader when you can simply scan your phone and pay? Making the in-store process as seamless as possible is key to driving more in-store visits.

3. App/Brand Partnerships:

Image Source

How about the Starbucks-Spotify partnership? It’s all about that link between mobile loyalty and content. Spotify’s streaming is integrated with the beverage brand’s popular mobile loyalty program, My Starbucks Rewards, which boasts 10 million users, and enables customers to curate playlists for Starbucks stores. Plus: it’s logical. What are people mostly doing within a Starbucks?

4. Geolocation and deals:

Let’s talk about a semi-creepy story from a few weeks ago. I go to an Ashley Furniture to buy a couch with my girlfriend. We decide on one -- during the process, I hadn’t opened my phone -- and my girlfriend wants to buy the couch on a specific credit card for airline mile purposes, but she left that credit card at home. That’s about a 15-minute drive, so half-hour round trip. She goes to get it and I sit down on a bed at Ashley. Now bored, I open up some social app -- think it was Facebook -- and instantly get two different ads for Ashley. The first is generic, and then upon scroll, the second is for the exact bed I am sitting on at that moment. Now, I don’t think their geo-targeting was that good and the Occam’s Razor answer here is serendipity, but still. If someone is in-store and on-mobile, send them deals. I didn’t need a bed at that moment but I could have gotten that bed 35% off. I mean, damn.

5. Loyalty Information:

Where does my account stand? What does being loyal and in-store get me? Some deals? Some two-for-ones? That’d be nice. What’s the point of me being loyal and you having my data if you’re not using the data I give you to personalize the experience I have when I physically visit one of your locations?

Is it any wonder that only 1 in 5 consumers are happy with the level of personalization provided by their apps, meaning 4 in 5 would like it all done better? If someone in your loyalty ecosystem walks into a retail brick and mortar, they should be treated like a queen/king. Deals should be flowing.

What else have you seen in terms of in-app functionality for in-store visits? Comment Below.

[New Data] How Media & Entertainment Apps Performed in 2018

jperro@localytics.com (Justina Perro) — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 13:45:00 GMT

It’s been quite a journey for the Media & Entertainment (M&E for short) app industry over the past several years as they’ve worked to find their niche in the market. There have been some notable kinks to work out such as:

subscription based model versus freemium
in-app advertising do’s and don’ts
long-term app monetization

Thanks to the domination of streaming apps (think: Netflix, Spotify, etc.) and the fact that more people access the news and social media apps on their phone than ever before, Media & Entertainment apps have enjoyed steady growth over the past several years.

But how are things going in terms of important mobile app metrics like time-in-app, retention, and push engagement? Let’s take a look at what we’re seeing:

1.) Media & Entertainment App Users Continue To Increase Their Time Spent in App:

During 2018, M&E apps enjoyed the longest average time-in-app since we started tracking back in 2015. Time in app increased YoY across the vertical about 10% and even with a slight downturn during H2 2018 still hovered well above 2017 session lengths.

The dip in time-in-app during the second half of 2018 was most likely due to a decrease in the massive sporting events that H1 enjoyed like the World Cup and the Winter Olympics.

All in all the story here is very positive, and shows that M&E apps are doing a great job at keeping their users engaged by offering the right content and experience.

2.) Media & Entertainment App Retention Dips YoY:

While time-in-app numbers are on the up and up, app retention is a different story. App retention over the first 3 months since initial download was down across the board in month 1, 2, and 3 YoY. The biggest drop off was 3 months after download which saw a 28% decrease YoY.

Why are we seeing an uptick in app churn? We have a couple theories to contemplate:

Increased competition: There’s no question that certain parts of the M&E app industry have seen explosive growth in the past year. Networks and cable providers alike are all jumping at the opportunity to have their own streaming service app after seeing the success heavy hitters like Netflix and Hulu enjoy. Not to mention cable providers see streaming apps as a way to win back cord cutters (e.g. DirectTVNow). All of this boils down to a big spike in competition.

Decreased focus on engagement: Complementary to the increase in competition point, mobile app marketers in the M&E sector need to be laser focused on engaging their users long term. Offering the standard experience is not enough. Ask yourself the following:

What are you doing to differentiate and build up brand loyalty?
How will you prevent users from jumping ship to a similar app?

App user engagement needs to be a large part of your 2019 marketing strategy. Lucky for you, we have you covered. Here is a fail proof (and free!) guide to help improve your app retention this year:

3.) Push Notification Engagement Enjoys Substantial YoY Growth:

Now back to some more good news. We saw a substantial lift in push notification engagement across the M&E industry during 2018 for both Android and iOS. App launches due to push notifications were up almost double YoY from H2 2017 to H2 2018.

Mobile Marketers of M&E apps deserve the credit here as this is a strong indication that their push strategy is on point from tapping into the plethora of profile and behavioral data captured daily to tailor the message with the end user.

They should keep this momentum up in 2019 by continuing their efforts to personalize their push strategy so that every message sent resonates with the end user, while tapping into rich push, which has proven to increase engagement by 30%, as much as possible.

Final Thoughts

Overall, the state of the M&E sector of the mobile app industry is very positive. It’s clear that mobile marketers have found their stride, and have put the right strategies in place to create more meaningful and engaging experiences with their users.

However, the drop off in retention shows us that competition is fierce. App users have an abundance of options when it comes to streaming and entertainment, so you need to ensure you’re offering a truly unique experience to stand out from the crowd.

During 2019, focus your efforts on finding your niche in the market and driving home that 1:1 experience your users crave.

5 Healthcare Apps Transforming The Industry

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 13:45:00 GMT

If you’re a football fan, something interesting happened this NFL season. More and more, both on game telecasts and popular outlets like Bill Simmons’ podcast, you heard ads for Roman. If you’re not familiar, that’s a discrete, app-based process for getting treated for erectile dysfunction.

This is a sea change in many ways: for decades, we’d almost never associate, or market to, “guys’ guys” watching NFL with any notion that they might have an ED or general health problem. It would be all beer ads, maybe a few snack commercials like Doritos and other “masculine” product placements. That was the game for generations.

But the game is shifting. Health care is a massive industry, but its execution-level -- i.e. scheduling appointments, seeing doctors, filling out paperwork, etc. -- is not often sleek or user-friendly. And when there’s a lot of money at stake and the issue is “easier use,” tech comes calling. The same thing happened (and is happening) with recruiting.

What are some of the bigger players? What’s happening in the space?

1.) DoctorOnDemand

Fro $40 per consultation, you can see a doctor via video, have the doctor write you prescriptions, or simply get questions answered. Mobile video has been hot for years -- and again, there are parallels here to the recruiting space, where interviewing candidates on video, or letting them pre-record answers to questions on mobile, also recently got hot. Since the actual idea of getting into a doctor’s office and seeing one can be a challenge (we recently got told the next appointment at a given doctor was in 3.2 months), bringing mobile video into the equation is a potential game-changer. Others are in the space too, like Teladoc through Aetna.

2.) HelloMD

Here you get quick access to specialists for follow-up questions or in-person appointments. Again: meeting that need through a better user experience and faster connectivity. This is where traditional health care delivery models have struggled and where mobile tech can close the gap.

3.) PillPack

Think of all the meal kits out there, or other subscription-based models. Now imagine you can manage all your pill prescriptions from one app, they get automatically refilled four weeks before they’re set to run out, and they get sent to you with containers in order of how to take them + instructions. Life-saver for some, right? Indeed. That’s exactly what PillPack does, and it has one of the better marketing tag lines we’ve seen recently: “Pharmacy simplified.”

4. Doc.ai

You knew AI would make this list somewhere, didn’t you? Doc.ai has attracted millions in investment already. It uses AI to help people enroll in clinical trials, help determine the healthiest places they’ve lived, and see what their genetic data can tell them about health and longevity. It’s partnered with Anthem Health on an end-to-end data trial that resides on blockchain, and some have called it “the human face of healthcare AI.”

5. Apple Health Records

… has a 78 percent favorability rating among initial users, and this is happening at the same time former Apple boss John Sculley is saying the company will disrupt healthcare in the same way the iPhone disrupted mobile. Stay tuned on whether that’s true, although it’s clearly a major focus of the company, and that focus is largely tied to mobile.

Can VR help the opioid crisis?

Perhaps:

VR holds particular promise for the noninvasive, non-addictive treatment of patients with chronic or acute pain, potentially offering an alternative to opiates and other traditional pain treatments. Clinical trials performed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA have shown that VR-based treatments are an effective tool for reducing pain. In a randomized controlled trial enrolling 120 patients, hospitalized patients experienced a 52% reduction in pain when receiving the VR treatment, with pain relief extending even after the headset was removed. Additional studies are underway to determine how VR solutions, when used in tandem with other digital tools including wearables and nerve stimulation devices, may reduce pain and lower costs for patients with orthopedic work-related injuries.

And that leads us to the biggest point

The entire goal of mobile in healthcare started out as better user experience or faster access to key resources. But now the picture is evolving very rapidly: healthcare could be completely shifted by mobile tech within the next few years. And whether that means discrete ED ads during NFL games become almost normative or whether that means Apple recaptures its mojo by understanding your unique health data, we don’t know exactly. But we do know the future of the space is in mobile.

8 Mobile Apps for Successful Road Trips from Origin to Destination

ParkMobile — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 13:45:00 GMT

Road trips often make for cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and better bonding experiences than traveling by plane. Sometimes taking the family or a group of friends on a long road trip is the best way to spend a holiday and see different places in your state or throughout the country (or many different countries, with passport in hand). However, road trips can also be stressful if you’re not prepared.

Luckily, modern technology has made road trips A LOT easier and more enjoyable. Several applications for your smartphone or other mobile devices have been specifically designed to aid a road trip crew along its journey. To save you time researching all those apps that will make your road trip as successful and fun as possible, here are 8 of the best to guide you all the way from your origin to your destination!

1. Waze

If you live in a busy, traffic-filled city, you have likely heard of or used Waze to help ease your commute. Waze is a community-based traffic and navigation app that crowd-sources real-time traffic and road information to alert drivers about heavy traffic, accidents, and other hazards along their way.

Not only is Waze a great app for your daily commute, but it can actually save you hours of time on long road trips. Before you start your journey, just plug your destination into the Waze app, and you will have the opportunity to follow the fastest route based on traffic and construction information.

Check the app periodically throughout your road trip, and Waze will alert you if anything along your route changes. For instance, if construction or an accident is causing a traffic build-up along the highway, Waze will guide you through an alternate route to avoid too much delay. Use Waze to steer away from hours of stop-and-go traffic on your next road trip!

2. Tollguru

Depending on where you’re headed, the tolls along highways can get pretty pricey. Tollguru is the only Trip Calculator app on the market that is free for users while also calculating toll and gas costs for all toll roads, turnpikes, tollways, bridges, and tunnels in the USA, Canada, Mexido, and India.

After you’ve calculated the fastest route using Waze, you can use Tollguru to see if that route is also the cheapest. Tollguru will help you save money on tolls, especially if you’re traveling long distances across many big cities. With Tollguru, you won’t have to be surprised by an expensive toll along the way and will have full knowledge of the money you’ll need to have at the ready if you should run into a toll. Ever been caught without exact change at a pay station along the highway? Tollguru can help with that!

3. iExit

Of course, no road trip would be complete without several adventurous and/or restful pit stops. Sometimes the hidden gems you find along the highway help you cultivate the best memories. With iExit, you can see what’s ahead while you’re driving on the interstate, so you know which exits have the best gas stations, rest stops, temporary lodging, restaurants, and even hospitals.

iExit will even give you information about all the stops along any interstate, including real-time fuel prices as far as 100 miles away and Travel Coupons available for hotels. The app will even show you the Yelp reviews for the restaurants and other businesses along each exit.

4. GasBuddy

If you’d rather keep the restaurants and hotels a surprise but still want to find the best gas prices, GasBuddy is another app that will help you along your road trip. You can find the cheapest gas, plan your trip around fuel prices, and even pay for your gas with GasBuddy.

You can even sign up with GasBuddy to receive a special gas card and save on fuel each time you swipe. You just link your checking account securely with GasBuddy and get a card mailed to you. Then start saving with every fill-up! It’s free to save 5 cents a gallon, $4.99 a month to save 20 cents a gallon, and $6.99 a month to save 20 cents a gallon plus get roadside services like towing, flat tires, jump starts, lock outs, fuel delivery, and winching.

5. ParkMobile

While you’re navigating through stops along the way or even getting to your final destination, you can save time and money by paying for parking through your mobile device. ParkMobile is a pay by phone parking app that serves millions of spots in over 3,000 locations nationwide. Using ParkMobile, you can save your license plate number and up to 7 different forms of payment and park much more easily and conveniently at meters, on college campuses, and even in major event spaces and sporting arenas.

If you’re out and about after parking with ParkMobile, you can also add more time to your meter using the app remotely, as long as you haven’t used up the maximum amount of time allotted for your chosen parking space.

ParkMobile also offers services in some areas that will allow you to reserve your parking in advance. If you know you’re going to be stopping in or arriving at a busy city with limited parking, check your ParkMobile app to see if you can reserve a spot ahead of time. Using ParkMobile, you don’t have to worry about losing time or adding stress to your journey while parking along your route!

6. Roadtrippers

For the ultimate road trip planning app, check out Roadtrippers. Using the Roadtrippers trip planning function, you can plan your trip by adding and collecting places that look interested along your journey, from your origin to destination. Don’t know where you want to go yet? You can also use the app to explore places and see what fascinating detours you might find.

Roadtrippers is a great app for the strict trip planners as well as those with major wanderlust. The app allows you to refine your choices and make sure you know exactly where you want to eat and stay along the road, or explore new places by finding fun pit stops you might have never expected to encounter.

Roadtrippers Plus (which costs $29.99 per year) offers even more services like an offline map to help you continue planning even while off the grid, save as many trips on the app as you want with up to 150 waypoints per trip, and check out live traffic conditions along the way. You can even choose the map style that suits you best!

7. Google Play

Though all the planning apps will certainly give you peace of mind along your road trip, you also want to think about entertainment along the journey! Google Play Music allows you to choose a playlist that suits your mood for free, so you can listen to multiple artists and songs, or choose a playlist in the style of your favorite artist.

Many music streaming apps offer similar services, so it’s really about choosing your favorite. Google Play is free with a few short commercials here and there, but like with other music streaming apps, you can pay a monthly fee to avoid any ads and listen to music to your heart’s content.

8. Audible

If music makes you fall asleep on road trips, and you prefer to get your brain involved, listening to audiobooks using Audible is a great alternative. If you’re new to Audible, you can try it FREE for 30 days. After those initial 30 days, Audible costs $14.95 per month for one free audiobook and two Audible originals per month. Cancel anytime, and you can roll over any unused credits for up to five months!

And, if you don’t want to pay money for your audiobooks, check with your local library. Many local libraries offer free audiobook downloads that would be fulfilling entertainment for a road trip as well.

No matter how you get your audiobooks, listening to a book on a road trip can be a great way to stay stimulated and entertained while you drive, maybe learn something new, or let your imagination wander!

____

Hopefully these apps will give you an arsenal of tools to help you have the most convenient, enjoyable, and well-planned (or spontaneous) road trip possible. Though going out and exploring on the road has always been a thrilling way to travel, modern technology has made it much less stressful while also offering ways to find destinations and pit stops you may have never thought of before.

And, of course, enjoy the journey!

How The Weather Channel Aims To Change The World With Hyper Local Forecasts

mcanavan@localytics.com (Ted Bauer) — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 13:45:00 GMT

IBM recently doubled down on weather data at CES and announced GRAF: Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting System, which aspires to provide the most accurate weather for literally anywhere in the world. It runs every hour and crunches a whopping 10 TB of data per day so that you can get accurate weather within a three-kilometer (just under 2 miles) range.

Changing The World With Weather

This is a crucial idea beyond simply the confines of tech: Remember, 60%+ of the world’s population relies on agriculture, with 2.1M farms in America alone. If population growth estimates hold, we need to produce 70% more food by 2050. That’s going to be impossible without some convergence of tech and agriculture, and that convergence needs to reside at an intersection involving weather. Weather is the biggest disrupter to agriculture by a wide margin (“It’s the Uber of agriculture,” just kidding, that was a bad joke), and IBM CEO Ginny Rometty even acknowledged the global implications in her CES remarks, noting that it would impact “farmers in Kenya and Kansas.”

Other potential end users of the data, as noted at CES: Airlines to better predict when a plane might encounter turbulence or other patterns that could affect a flight; insurance companies managing recovery operations and claims around natural disasters; and utility companies monitoring for faults or preparing for severe weather strains on their systems.

Responsible Technology

The Weather Channel app has 100M users, and if you factor in places like Weather.com and Weather Underground where the data is also used, you’re up to 300M monthly users. IBM promises the data will be used “with consent,” as much data sourced from businesses will be coming from customers that are both partners and end users of the data.

“As we work on these technologies, all that data that we talked about, that ownership, they belong to the user, and with their permission, we use that,” Rometty said at CES, adding, “These technologies also need to be open and explainable.”

The Weather Channel's Success Lies In Thinking Global

The Weather Channel app was the most-downloaded weather app in India last year, which is an important fact to understand what IBM is trying to do here. First, this play is something you will increasingly see: even if an app was born in the United States and has great mobile engagement there, eventually the market will saturate.

Close to 59 percent of the global population is on the Asian landmass. Your business needs to turn global, and if you can’t reach an Indian/Chinese middle class, go to a larger chunk of the populace: those who rely on successful agriculture for their livelihood. They absolutely need hyper-local weather. Now the Weather Channel digital assets are pointed globally and can deliver more long-term returns for IBM. The strategy is coming together.

3 Lessons Mobile Marketers Can Learn From The Cheetah App Ad Scandal

nromain@localytics.com (Naike Romain) — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 13:45:00 GMT

You may have noticed the news about Cheetah, the Chinese app developer, and the ad scheme to take credit for app installs that they weren’t driving. Through click-injection, they were able to collect app install bounties and potentially cheat their ad partners and Google out of money they didn’t actually earn. Further, they were able to figure out which apps were being downloaded to a users device by requesting unnecessary permissions. Cheetah has responded to deny involvement in any ad fraud.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about mobile ad fraud --there have been reports of mobile ad bots simulating clicks and actual users for some time-- and it’s probably not the last of it. While the industry unpacks how to deal with responsibility and repercussions for these schemes, there are some takeaways that mobile marketers can learn from this right away.

Lesson #1: Evaluate Your Acquisition Sources Regularly

First, this should be a reminder to evaluate your acquisition sources regularly. You can use Localytics’ attribution reports and integrate with other attribution management tools for deep analysis of your ad performance. If you see any irregularities or sudden spikes, it’s worth investigating further to make sure that the results you’re getting are accurate and the users you’ve acquired are real.

Which leads us to the next lesson:

Lesson #2: Measure The Success Of Your Acquisition Efforts With More Than One Metric

Number of installs can’t be the only way to validate whether or not an acquisition source is actually driving users to your app. It’s easy to look at an attribution report and see where the most users are coming from. However, when measuring installs alone you could be missing out on the fact that the users aren’t actually engaging after the app is installed.

By also measuring the LTV, conversion rates, or time spent in the app of ad acquired users, you’ll get a much more accurate picture of where your most valuable users are coming from. That way you don’t have to worry about spending your ad dollars on the wrong types of ad partners and you can increase your investment with partners that are connecting you with the right audience.

Lesson #3: Trust Is Earned And Easily Broken

Finally, stories like this damage the trust between app users and brands.The app developers were able to pull this ad scheme off by getting users to share a lot of information about their device through the app’s permissions. The Cheetah apps were then able to learn which new apps were being installed on the device and take the credit for the install.

When the average app user learns that their apps can use their personal information (and drain their phone battery) for profit, they’re a lot less likely to allow permissions in the future. For app marketers, it’s going to continue to be a priority to clearly explain why they need certain permissions before requesting them.

Final Thoughts

Based on the issues with Cheetah, anyone using ads for user acquisition should be watching the source of their installs carefully. Being more thorough by adding criteria to your attribution and user engagement reporting will help to spot any fake users or installs early. App users are also going to be on the lookout for any unnecessary permissions that are being requested. Building Soft Asks into your onboarding experience will go a long way to build trust with your users so you can deliver the best app experience.