Want to extend the engagement and value of your mobile proposition outside of your app? Then Urban Airship may just have the solution for you. Its latest upgrade to its mobile relationship management tools includes the ability to add interactive notifications to lock screens and message centres on iOS, Android and Amazon Fire.
According to Urban Airship, brands can deliver more value and drive deeper engagement outside of apps by offering greater interaction and choice through this new push notification format and, in turn, gain more immediate insight into what customers care about to drive higher conversions.
These interactive notification buttons can easily drive users to take specific actions with deep-links to different in-app or mobile web landing pages where every click can assign or remove user attributes for multi-touch automated campaigns and more responsive, relevant and actionable mobile experiences.
“Interactive notifications take push messaging from informative and hopefully targeted alerts, to the primary way users can choose-their-own-adventure with mobile experiences that adapt to their needs,” explains Brent Hieggelke, CMO, Urban Airship. “These messaging-originated user interactions will soon be more important than organic use of static app content, telling businesses what customers want more or less of within their immediate context and moment of need.”
And it is already working for William Hill. “The marketing automation, dynamic segmentation and iBeacon targeting Urban Airship introduced earlier this year, are perfectly poised to take interactive notifications to the next level,” says Alex Rutherford, head of mobile sportsbook, at the gambling company. “The ability to deliver superior, targeted mobile experiences that adapt to users responses and anticipate what they need next will widen the lead of mobile-first thinking firms.”
Similarly, media company ABC News in the US is also amazed by the increase in engagement this can offer. “Since incorporating Urban Airship’s in-app message center into our app and enabling users to ‘star’ stories to receive updates and personalized notifications, we’ve seen engagement soar, including a 500% increase in live video streaming,” said Peter Roybal, head of mobile product, ABC News. “Interactive Notifications will allow us to extend this personalization into the notification itself, using Follow and Share buttons to increase personal curation and socially promote our content and brand.”
Urban Airship’s support for message centre-style widgets enable brands to gain front-and-center visibility in the Today View of the iOS 8 Notification Center or anywhere in the Android experience. Urban Airship’s drop-in widgets can be easily tailored to deliver extremely targeted and dynamic information for at-a-glance access by users, joining landing pages and in-app message centers as methods to get rich content in front of customers.
Other new enhancements to Urban Airship’s solution include event analytics for tracking user activities, such as button taps on interactive notifications and in-app conversions. By directly and indirectly attributing users’ goal completions to each campaign, businesses can better understand the impact of push messaging to drive greater engagement and ROI. A new A/B testing capability leverages this event data to help businesses optimize messaging’s impact on conversion goals.
Initially available through an API, Urban Airship’s support for iOS 8 interactive notifications is now integrated into business user workflows in its intuitive UI, including 13 pre-defined action buttons for more rapid adoption and deployment. Business users can easily create, target, launch and optimize the complete messaging experience with out-of-the-box capabilities to create deep-linked interactive pushes, capture attributes for user clicks, define automation rules and real-time triggers, optimize messaging performance and track customizable conversion goals across digital channels. In addition, Urban Airship now supports native social sharing integration, enabling users to easily share interactive notifications and app content to aid in app acquisition efforts.
