Urban Airship Introduces New Mobile Experiences to Allow Businesses to Achieve New Levels of Reach, Relevance and Immediacy with Audiences
Key platform enhancements include the industry’s first interactive in-app campaign solution, smartwatch support and a Mobile Data Bridge to combine online and offline customer data
BARCELONA, Spain – March 4, 2015 – Today at Mobile World Congress, Urban Airship unveiled major enhancements to its mobile app engagement platform, enabling businesses to easily deliver personally engaging experiences to their customers across an expanding mobile surface area—outside apps, inside apps and on Apple Watch and Android Wear. Collectively, Urban Airship’s solution enhancements arm businesses to tackle the three most pressing opportunities facing mobile marketers today:
1) Reach the entire app audience, beyond push opt-ins, and message each stage in a user’s lifecycle
2) Achieve more personalized, relevant messaging by bridging the offline-online data gulf
3) Deliver new levels of customer immediacy with notifications on Apple Watch and Android Wear that users can consume with a quick glance
New In-App Campaigns Make it Easy to Reach the Total Audience
With today’s announcement, Urban Airship introduces the industry’s first in-app campaign solution with out-of-the-box tools for mobile marketers to easily build engaging, interactive messages that reach all app users. A seamless workflow and intuitive user interface enable business users to build in-app campaigns and author landing pages that feature interactivity, deep-links to app or mobile web pages, dynamic data tags for future segmentation and conditional automation rules for triggered follow on campaigns. In-app campaigns are shown immediately on app open and can be sent to the entire audience or targeted segments. Marketers can also send the same message as a push notification with controls to avoid message duplication, so users responding to notifications won’t also see the in-app campaign.
By managing and messaging users through their lifecycle with an app, mobile marketers can better affect their top challenge—70 percent of people no longer use apps 30-days after download. New Lifecycle Lists give businesses powerful capabilities to onboard new app users, grow adoption and improve retention, by automatically tracking new users, active users, recent uninstalls and more, and making them available for use in interactive in-app and push campaigns or other messaging channels like e-mail for re-marketing.
Bridging the Online-Offline Data Gulf
While mobile offers the richest source of behavioral and contextual data, companies have customer information in many enterprise business systems that can now be joined together to deliver next-level relevancy. Two new powerful data integration solutions—a Mobile Data Bridge and Audience Uploader—give businesses flexible methods to combine online and offline data within Urban Airship or any enterprise business system.
Urban Airship’s Mobile Data Bridge enables businesses to listen for key customer events in their other customer databases like a CRM, melding the data with mobile behaviors within Urban Airship for more personal and automated messaging. For example, a retailer can create a loyalty member campaign that sends a welcome message when they enter the store, asking whether they’d like to use the loyalty points they've accrued. Customers that want to define segments in an external system can use the Audience Uploader to import resulting lists into Urban Airship for mobile messaging campaigns with response data returned to external systems to close the loop.
“We rely on Urban Airship to help us get the right message to the right customers across the UK,” said Rhys Jones, Head of Sky Go. “As an active beta user, Audience Uploader made it very easy to instantly message audiences using Urban Airship with segments we defined in other business systems.”
Delivering New Levels of Immediacy with Smartwatches
With forthcoming support for WatchKit and the industry’s only out-of-the-box support for button-enabled notifications, Urban Airship will enable businesses and developers to rapidly extend their mobile experience to Apple Watch. Simple taps on the Apple Watch face will give consumers powerful controls to respond to messages, set preferences and execute actions within a brand’s app and other apps, such as setting calendar appointments or initiating phone calls. Together with Urban Airship’s existing support for Android Wear, businesses can rapidly deploy glanceable moments to the wrist that drive deeper engagement and garner more insight outside of apps.
“It’s important for organizations like France Télévisions to remain at the forefront of mobile innovation given the benefit it delivers to our audience,” said Olivier Lendresse, Deputy Head of Content and Services. France Télévisions. “Urban Airship’s out-of-the-box support for advancements like interactive notifications and Apple Watch, help us more rapidly and easily achieve that goal and stay focused on great content and exceptional user experiences.”
This in-the-moment engagement opportunity is further accentuated with deeper integration of location and proximity data from Gimbal, enabling marketers to trigger automated campaigns based on real-time entry and exit data for geofences and beacons. From neighborhoods and stores, to consumers’ position within aisles, marketers can use mobile notifications, interactive in-app campaigns and in-app message centers to bring digital experiences to physical environments.
“Mobile engagement is moving from sending notifications to full-fledged campaign experiences across a continually expanding mobile surface area,” said Brett Caine, CEO and President, Urban Airship. “We’re continuing to set the pace of innovation by removing all the complexity for marketers so they can rapidly and effectively communicate with all customers in personally relevant ways.”
Availability
All enhancements will be made available over the next several weeks, supported by Urban Airship’s SDK (v6) available this month. Urban Airship customers can contact their account manager now to be considered for early access programs. More information and registration for a product webinar can be found at www.urbanairship.com/products/whats-new.
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, landing pages, Apple Passbook passes and Google Wallet cards. With ten billion messages and tens of thousands of passes delivered each month across two billion app installs, Urban Airship’s technology sparks exceptional consumer experiences, drives app engagement and increases customer loyalty and lifetime value for the world’s largest retail, media & entertainment, sports and travel & hospitality brands. For more information, visit www.urbanairship.com and follow us on Twitter @urbanairship.