In today’s increasingly complex mobile marketing landscape, it is an ongoing challenge to continually build customer engagement and minimise the risk of churn. Marketers have numerous mobile engagement channels at their disposal, such as push notifications, email, message centers and in-app messaging, to reach out and connect with their audience. The problem is how do you correctly select the right channel for the right customer?
Contextual Relevance
To deliver truly customer-focused in-app experiences, it’s essential to choose messaging channels based on their contextual relevance. In the case of in-app messaging, this means engaging with all of your users at the right moment during their in-app session. It can be as simple as welcoming new users to your app or alerting them to service updates on their account or recent purchases. By using this channel intelligently, marketers can effectively convert one-day users into long-term users.
Structured Nurturing Process
Where in-app messaging really excels is in creating a structured nurturing process, as well as its innate ability to prolong in-app session time. An in-app message could be triggered, for example, when a user is close to hitting a new milestone. In the case of a gaming app, the user may have failed to complete a level three times in the past week but they have reached their highest recorded score to date in this particular session. A message could instantly be delivered offering additional life points, encouraging the user to continue actively engaging with the app and prompting a purchase at the most compelling time.
As illustrated, this form of messaging is highly contextual and rooted in analytics, and it can be triggered based on unique user interactions. Helping customers navigate your app, guiding them through key user journeys and funneling actions to conversions is what in-app messaging is primarily designed to achieve.
In-App Messaging for Content Marketing
Like push notifications, in-app messages are temporary by nature – unless you add a Mobile App Inbox. A centralised inbox inside your app essentially acts as a dedicated content repository for all of your users. For every in-app messaging campaign you deliver to your users, you can send this content directly to the app inbox, allowing your users to access content at their own convenience. It’s a great way to drive engagement and increase customer loyalty using rich, personalised messaging.
The importance of Testing
To guarantee a successful in-app messaging campaign, multivariate testing is critical to help you pick the campaign that will maximise goal completions. This essentially means testing out different variants of message to measure the impact on a variety of metrics, including conversion rates, click-through rates and revenue generated from campaigns.
Key Takeaway
In-app messaging should feel like a natural part of the app, not additional app marketing. It’s the most effective engagement channel to create a stronger, richer in-app experience by delivering tailored messaging to targeted audiences while they interact with your app.