Urban Airship Brings Real-Time Mobile Marketing Automation and iBeacon Targeting to Push Messaging
The most significant evolution in the history of push transforms the types of mobile experiences that brands can provide to their customers
BARCELONA, Spain – February 26, 2014 – Today at Mobile World Congress, Urban Airship unveiled its next-generation solution combining high-performance push messaging with real-time mobile marketing automation, dynamic audience segmentation and iBeacon targeting. Available this quarter, the solution offers an evolutionary step forward in the ability of marketers and product teams to drive more real-time, relevant and responsive mobile experiences that delight customers and keep them loyal.
For the first time in the industry, every swipe on a push message, tap on a landing page, or proximity to an iBeacon can build richer mobile audience segments for better targeting and deeper personalization over time. For example, a shopper might walk into a children’s clothing department triggering an iBeacon message with seasonal specials, and also become part of a children’s clothing audience segment for a back-to-school campaign later that year.
“As the U.K.’s largest betting company, we’re thrilled to be working with Urban Airship to experiment with iBeacons at a leading cultural event—the Cheltenham Festival,” said Alex Rutherford, head of mobile sportsbook, William Hill Plc. (LON:WMH). “With iBeacons near the racecourse and throughout Cheltenham, we’ll be able to trigger hyper-local, real-time engagement experiences, as well as take advantage of Urban Airship’s unique capability to leverage these micro-location insights as dynamic segments going forward.”
With Urban Airship’s latest release, marketers can more easily react to campaign responses and other customer behaviors—including inactivity—with real-time triggers for push messages, in-app messages and deep-linked landing pages. As one example, apps can more effectively on-board new users by automatically triggering a welcome message that highlights key features the day after first app open. Subsequent messages can be tailored to focus on different app functionality based on users’ interactions with the first message—creating an adaptive, multi-step welcome series. Other user behaviors such as account registration, trying a new app feature, liking or sharing app content, entering a store, achieving a new status level or not opening the app for 15 days, might trigger additional follow-up messages to continue to deliver the most relevant and engaging information.
Beyond customers’ responses or non-responses informing the next message they receive, Urban Airship’s timing delays and frequency limits help ensure a relevant and responsible approach to driving engagement and fine-tuning the customer experience. For example, a business might trigger a free shipping offer two days after a shopping cart is abandoned, but avoid sending it more than once per month per customer.
“The real-time automation and deep insights Urban Airship brings to our mobile experience helps us leverage the free RetailMeNot Coupons app's advantages of always-on immediacy, retail offer alerts and location-awareness, critical features that influence conversion behaviors,” said Jag Bath, senior vice president, RetailMeNot, Inc. “As soon as we saw Urban Airship's offering, we knew it was going to be the right choice to power engagement for our millions of users.”
Push Evolves to Focus on Customers’ Interactions Not Just App Information and Campaigns
Many of the world’s leading brands use technical resources to integrate Urban Airship into apps and deliver billions of messages each month in real-time, such as breaking news, sports scores, peer-to-peer notifications and transactional pushes. Alternately, mobile teams can compose and schedule push and rich in-app message campaigns, as well as define and target precise audience segments using any combination of behaviors, preferences and location profiles. Now, with Urban Airship’s new solution, marketers and product teams can use an intuitive interface to setup their own automated programs for real-time messaging, design and deep-link to landing pages anywhere in the app or on the mobile web, and manage and analyze these campaigns through message response reports, in addition to having the data connected into existing analytics systems like Google Analytics or Omniture.
All in all, marketers are now less reliant on developers to deliver responsive, real-time experiences at scale and are empowered to take greater ownership of business outcomes.
“Our mission is to tell people what they need to know, when and where they need to know it, and we’ve done this for years with the world’s most adopted push messaging platform and a vocal focus on good push best practices,” said Scott Kveton, CEO and co-founder, Urban Airship. “However, today marks a new, more relevant, personalized era for push notifications. The best organizations can now build off of prior push relevancy efforts including fine-grain user controls and deliberate segmentation and targeting, to respond to users’ actions in real-time, at scale, and with iteratively greater accuracy over time.”
Additional Customer Quotes
“SXSW has a long legacy of being the preeminent event where the digital and physical intertwine and new technologies take the world stage,” said Scott Wilcox, director of technology, SXSW. “iBeacons represent the next exciting foray into the melding of digital and physical experiences and we’re looking forward to their use at Mobile Saturday, a daylong track dedicated to mobile at SXSW Interactive.”
“Craftsy is very focused on messaging our users at the right time with the right content, and have relied on useful segmentation and scheduling functionality from Urban Airship,” said Josh Scott, COO, Craftsy. “We’re very excited to be among the first customers using its real-time marketing automation capabilities. These will make customer engagement more automatic, more effective and importantly, more responsive to a customer’s current status.”
About Urban Airship
Urban Airship enables brands to build relationships with their constantly connected customers through Mobile Relationship Management. Its solutions streamline the creation, delivery and management of highly targeted cross-platform mobile push messages, in-app messages, rich app pages, Apple Passbook passes and Google Wallet cards. With billions of messages and tens of thousands of passes delivered each month, Urban Airship’s technology sparks exceptional consumer experiences, drives app engagement and increases customer loyalty and lifetime value for leading brands such as CBS Interactive, Cinemagram, ESPN, Groupon, Walgreens and Warner Bros. For more information, visit www.urbanairship.com and follow us on Twitter @urbanairship.