Mereja

Author: Richard Ting

  • Don’t Let Mobile Apps Get Pushy

    Americans are addicted to their smartphones. A recent report by Flurry Analytics revealed that Americans spend about 2 hours and 38 minutes a day glued to their mobile devices, with 80% of that time spent in/on mobile apps. With over 700,000 apps available for download in both Google Play and the Apple App Store, it is safe to say that apps have reached critical mass.

    With this intense competition, brands and mobile app developers are forced to reevaluate tactics for growing user retention and engagement rates, which is increasingly difficult. Some brands — like ESPN and Yahoo — are embracing the philosophy of “less is more” by consolidating their overall portfolios of mobile apps and redesigning their “everyday” apps to appeal to overloaded users. But many other are embracing push notifications, which are proven to quadruple mobile engagement rates and double retention rates compared to apps without them.

    The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal leverage push notifications as tools to break important news. Retailers like Sephora and Gilt use them to support time-sensitive flash deals. Airlines like United use them to keep travelers up-to-date with flight statuses.

    While push notifications can be incredibly useful, many mobile app developers and brands have resorted to using them as a cheat to achieve coveted retention and engagement. In some cases, it’s starting to backfire. We’re beginning to see a tidal wave of push notifications from mobile apps that alert users of every mundane activity, irrelevant sales promotion, or social network update. Essentially, these push notifications just add more digital noise and drive users to tune out or even delete certain mobile apps from their devices. Just yesterday, I received a last-minute Ticketmaster alert to purchase concert tickets for a band that I don’t like for a concert in a city that I don’t live in. On other days, the activity in my Facebook life causes my phone to constantly buzz. But then again, Facebook’s aggressive use of push notifications is well documented.

    Evaluating the value of push notifications against the noise that they create is a slippery slope. Given the proven success of these alerts and with strong retention and engagement rates viewed as the Holy Grail, we need to find a palatable solution for future app development.

    Here are some guidelines that brands and mobile app developers need to consider:

    1. First decide if the mobile app is brand appropriate. Does your brand have a proper mobile channel strategy in place that fits into your brand’s overall business objectives? How does this mobile app fit into that strategy?

    2. Does the mobile app legitimately create value for your consumers? If not, then don’t build it.

    3. Focus your mobile app — don’t water it down. What are the one or two features that will help drive mobile app engagement and retention?

    4. Create social engagement layers for your mobile app that encourage users to come back. Why would they care and what would move them to share your mobile app?

    5. Use push notifications only when necessary and make sure the content in your push notification is relevant and personalized. Create a push strategy the same you would create an email strategy. Push notifications should not equal SPAM.

    6. Deliver the notification at the right time to the right audience in the right context. Segment. Push content to specific groups based on their individual profiles and behaviors. Push notifications should be geo-targeted, audience targeted, and time-sensitive.

    7. Use analytics and social listening to continuously improve your app by tracking what consumers care about. Your app is a work in progress. Analytic services like Parse are helping brands and agencies best determine if push notifications are working.

    Average users have 41 apps on their mobile devices — and that number continues to rise. Utilize push notifications appropriately to help bring attention of your mobile app. Don’t let your mobile app’s greatest asset for driving retention and engagement become it`s greatest nuisance as well.

    Innovations in Digital and Mobile Marketing
    An HBR Insight Center

  • The Customer Profile: Your Brand’s Secret Weapon

    Today, my Facebook mobile newsfeed showed me a sponsored post for The Hobbit: Kingdoms mobile game even though I’m not a fan of The Hobbit and I would not consider myself a mobile gamer.

    I also went to CNN’s mobile site. An activity that I’ve done often for years, yet CNN still hasn’t gotten around to serving up to me targeted content based on my interests and previous reading or browsing history.

    Yesterday, I received my weekly SMS mobile coupon from Target even though I haven’t clicked on one in over six months.

    Guitar Center continues to email me about their deals on drums and guitars even though I don’t play either instrument and the only purchase that I ever made at Guitar Center was for a gift — three years ago.

    Last month, when I tweeted to American Airlines about a delay, no one tweeted back to me and no one realized that the tweet was also from a long-standing AAdvantage Gold member. There was no connection between my two profiles and, as a result, American Airlines showed me no love, no special treatment, not even a sympathetic virtual shoulder to cry on when my flight was delayed.

    These brands are missing out by not fully understanding who their customers are. Let’s face it: the signal-to-noise ratio is still fairly low among brands. Aside from a select few companies — like Amazon — most brands still have no unified view of what their customers are saying, doing, or buying on their websites, in retail, and across social media. As a result, instead of better targeting and personalizing brand messages, experiences, and deals, most brands are still embracing the “spray and pray” tactics commonly used during the height of traditional advertising.

    But brands already have siloes of data about their consumers. Combined, this information would be enough to create the ultimate 360-degree customer profile, which would allow enhanced targeting and personalization. These siloes include:

    • What they’re saying — social CRM. What are your consumers saying about your products and services in social media? Are your consumers’ brand sentiments shifting from positive to negative or vice versa?
    • What they’re buying — purchase history. What is the last product a consumer purchased from you? How often does he buy from you? What are her favorite products? Are people making more or fewer purchases?
    • What they’re doing — brand interaction history. Are they using your mobile apps? How often are they using them? Are they visiting your website? Are they spending more or less time with your brand?
    • What they’re liking — social interest graph. What interests do they share on social media channels, and who is in the network of people who share similar interests?

    It may seem simple to combine these discrete data sets into one holistic customer profile, but there are major technology obstacles brands need to get past.

    Facebook recently took a step forward in helping to create these profiles through partnerships with data companies Epsilon, Acxiom, and Datalogix. The venture combines the three companies’ records about customers’ offline purchase histories with Facebook’s custom audiences product. As a result, brands can now match shopper loyalty programs with Facebook users based off of their Facebook ID, phone number, or email address.

    This type of partnership will ultimately push advertisers down a path where customer profiles are the secret weapon, allowing brands to:

    1. More intelligently push content and experiences to their consumers
    By mapping out better consumer target segments, brands can push out more personalized experiences and messages on their websites, in social media, on mobile, and in retail. For instance, car dealers will now be able to reach someone who has specifically browsed or liked a certain make/model of car on an advertiser’s website or Facebook property and who has shown behavior that he or she will soon purchase a vehicle.

    2. Improve their real-time marketing efforts
    We saw a ton of real-time marketing recently during the Oscars and Super Bowl where a good majority of the real-time efforts felt like spam. Brands like Kellogg’s, Stella Artois, and U.S. Cellular jumped on the bandwagon, pumping out generic tweets and images about the Oscars and mass broadcasting them via social media. None of it was very interesting, personalized, or targeted to a brand’s high-value customer. Brands that make the leap into real-time marketing and engage with their most influential customers in a personalized way will have a decided advantage over competitors.

    3. Improve a customer’s lifetime value by better engaging them over the long term and with purpose
    As discussed by Bill Lee in “Marketing Is Dead,” in the past, the definition of customer lifetime value (CLV) was based only on a consumer’s purchases. In the future, with the proliferation of social media, a customer’s CLV will have to factor in the influence the customer wields over their social networks and ultimately how much that influence drives others into a transaction with a specific brand. This social factor will be weighted by reach (number of connections in the social graph), frequency (amount of sharing), impact on others (overall or for the category), and individual engagement with the brand. With this updated calculation of CLV, a brand must have a 360-degree view of the customer. Brands will want to spend more time engaging and dialoguing with customers who have a higher CLV.

    Though digital channels continue to proliferate and consumers continue to distribute their time spent with a brand across this fragmented landscape, most brands are still using outdated tactics to reach the masses. Some advertisers are creating a virtual landfill that makes it difficult for any message to resonate. To surgically cut through the noise, advertisers need to develop richer customer profiles. It’s not the sexiest of topics in advertising, but it’s one that will ultimately allow brands to target and personalize the experiences and messages that consumers deserve.

    The Future of Advertising
    An HBR Insight Center