Unlocking Data to Fuel Personalization

By Michael Lavoie

Spring is a time of new beginnings and Airship’s new App Experience Platform (AXP) is all about enabling mobile app marketers to rapidly create better app experiences that result in deeper engagement and business impact within your app.

In the last edition of Navigator, I outlined the components of AXP and why we designed them. Now, I want to highlight one of the most exciting components of AXP: the ability to drive personalized experiences.  

We are all working in a moment of exciting change and the mobile app imperative (or what I often refer to as Mobile App 2.0) shifts attention from using push notifications to drive app visits to creating engaging, differentiated and contextual experiences within the mobile app. At Airship, we call this Mobile App Experience or MAX. Brands that thoughtfully design the customer experience around the mobile app are driving more downloads, higher activation rates, deeper and more regular engagement, and, perhaps most importantly, more loyal advocates who are driving significant performance for their business. Leading brands like Chipotle, SiriusXM, and The Home Depot not only reference their mobile apps in their advertising, they often feature the app and its value proposition for customers. These approaches are great for driving downloads and helping customers (new and existing) understand the value and utility of the app. But, how do you maintain ongoing engagement that leads to business impact? 

The answer: make the app experience personal for the customer.

Personalizing app experiences has been proven to increase response and drive behavior.  When done correctly, it also leaves the customer with an elevated impression of your app and your brand. However, personalization has traditionally been difficult to execute, especially at scale.  Enter AXP, designed specifically to deliver the tools necessary to personalize app experiences and to do so with low/no reliance on valuable (and scarce) development resources.

The most important ingredient in personalization is data. Brands usually have plenty of customer data, but most have limited or no access to it on a consistent basis. In fact, when reflecting on 2021, data integration projects were the most common among Airship customers, but many of those projects were delayed due to technical resource availability on the brand’s side.

If data is the fuel for enabling personalization, how does Airship’s AXP help make it more accessible? AXP Mobile Data Hub is designed to arm the mobile app marketer or product manager with the tools to collect, store, manage and access the important pieces of information you need to personalize and customize experiences for your customers. Using no-code and template-based features in AXP’s UI, you can quickly create surveys, preference centers, experiments, and data collection forms within your app to capture data directly from customers (Watch these 2 minute overview videos: Surveys, Preference Center, and Contact Management). The information you collect on a customer’s interests, preferences, desires, aspirations, time horizons, expectations or disposition can be used to curate app experiences and offers specific to each individual. The data can be paired with other information you may have available on your customers like purchase history, behaviors, and demographics to further customize each customer experience.

Armed with access to data, marketers and product managers now have the ability to create and automate targeted, personalized mobile app experiences that continually drive your customers into the app, engage them upon arrival and aid them in taking the actions that drive their interests and your business objectives. In fact, (spoiler alert) we’ll be introducing enhancements to our Journey designer in AXP’s composer solution later this month. These enhancements simplify the steps for automation and increase the options for curating mobile app experiences.

If it isn’t obvious already, we are thrilled about AXP and its ability to elevate the mobile app experience. If you’d like to learn more about how AXP can enhance your mobile app experiences, contact your account manager or email us at team@airship.com and we’ll contact you. Thank you for your continued support and trust.