A View from Above: Conversations with CEOs blog series is back with Mark Ghermezian, the CEO of Appboy, a leading customer relationship technology platform for mobile marketers. The company recently raised a series C $20 million led by Battery Ventures.
As the mobile space is moving from acquisition to retention, engagement with existing customers across multiple channels and devices is becoming a top priority, which is exactly where Appboy comes in.
Shani: How does mobile-first marketing automation differ from the marketing clouds of the world?
Mark: Mobile-first marketing automation firms like Appboy have been mobile from day one, while incumbent solutions were built on legacy email and web technologies, and treat mobile as a bolt-on, as just another vehicle to message customers.
We view the world differently than the marketing clouds of the world (Adobe, Oracle, and the like). We believe that customer interactions will increasingly take place on mobile and other connected devices, and that brands who want to build meaningful relationships with their customers will be much better served investing in a mobile-first marketing automation and CRM platform that was built to harness that customer interaction data in real time, and make it actionable for the data driven marketer.
It’s about being able to update your software as Apple and Android update theirs, being able to scale and perform in real time, and doing it in the cookieless world of mobile while still merging data from desktop.
What challenges does marketing automation solve for mobile marketers?
In short, it’s the “make it actionable” part I mentioned.
Mobile marketers today face a tall order. They have to coordinate and continually optimize campaigns in multiple channels at once. They have to reach customers with relevant messages that speak to each customer’s needs. And they have to do it on a 24/7 basis, always ready to send the right message to the right customer at the right time. It’s all about being context-aware. Marketing automation allows marketers to manage all these efforts in a single platform, and to scale personalized outreach to their entire customer base. Campaigns can be built to respond to customer actions, in real time.
Basically, marketing automation platforms allow marketers to build real 1:1 relationships with their customers, and do it at scale.
What do you see in terms of the engagement rates of push messaging this year compared to last year? What about email?
Our research has found that engagement rates can increase with the use of a few key tactics—and our clients are using them and seeing real business impact as a result.
We’ve just released our Emoji Study, which looked at over six billion push and email messages sent from June 2015 to June 2016 that included emojis. These eye-catching icons are making a big splash—we’ve seen a 609% year-over-year increase in their use. And while some emoji messaging campaigns in early 2015 were blasted to millions and millions of users, since October 2015 the average size of an emoji marketing campaign stabilized around 325,000 recipients.
Brands are increasingly taking advantage of segmentation and targeting, which appears to be paying off. The open rates for iOS and Android push notifications containing emojis have increased by 210% and 1,063%, respectively, year-over-year. Conversion rates associated with emails including emojis in the subject line have also increased 135%.
We’ve also seen that brands using more than one channel together in a campaign increase conversions—Delivery Hero, for example, sees a 2X uplift when using multiple channels in tandem. And sending campaigns to well thought-out segments of users, as opposed to sending the same general campaign to everyone, can result in a 3X increase in conversions.
Do you think push, email or in-app messages come at the expense of retargeting?Marketers will always have to balance dollars and effort in the channels that give them the best return. Each strategy is key to guiding a customer through their journey with your brand whether it’s within paid, earned, or owned channels. Obviously, you can’t fill a bucket without a source of water; but you can’t fill a bucket with holes in it, either. Ultimately, engagement efforts are all about reducing churn and keeping more of those hard-won customers around.
Additionally, acquisition and engagement strategies can be approached in tandem. If you know a user came to your brand through a specific campaign, you can direct them to the best in-app or on-site experience for them. Or, you can retarget them to drive them further into a funnel with your brand, or get them to complete an action like buying that pair of shoes they were viewing or have saved in their shopping cart.
How would you rate the quality of 3rd party data?
Brands should be thinking about first and third party data and how/where each fits to drive their larger business goals. Third party data is great for aggregating and leveraging insights that a company wouldn’t have access to on their own. In the case of attribution data, an app can use that information to segment users in their marketing platform, and reach them with more personalized marketing messaging.
Do you think marketers are doing a good job collecting and leveraging their 1st party data from mobile and other touchpoints?
Some marketers are doing a great job. Others don’t yet realize that to survive in today’s world, context-aware, personalized behavioral messages that pull in insights from first- and third-party data is key to taking the right action and seeing results. The biggest challenge here is synchronizing all the data that a company collects and organizing it in a meaningful way. If one system knows user X was on your website yesterday, but it’s not connected to the system that knows user X is also using your app today, you can miss opportunities to make your outreach highly relevant. You might even annoy customers with contradictory or incomplete messages. That’s why you need a single view of each customer and a technology that allows you to pull in bi-directional data that you can act on.
How are you connecting the dots across devices? Can scale and accuracy be reached? Appboy compiles all a user’s information into a single user profile (you can read about exactly how this is done here: How User Profiles Work). If a customer moves between devices, or between channels (like from an app to a mobile site on the same smartphone), the experience and marketing they encounter should continue to align with their preferences and with everything the brand knows about them.
Building on this data, marketers can create segments using any attribute or data point from user profiles. Scaling these tasks is the value offered by a good mobile marketing automation platform. And it’s certainly going to be more accurate than uninformed batch and blast messages.
What are the top trends that will shape the mobile space in the coming 1-2 years?
What we’re seeing is that apps are starting to become more like mobile websites, and mobile sites are becoming more like apps. This makes sense, if you consider that the most user-focused, efficient, and seamless qualities of each are rising to the top. Perhaps we’re converging on an approach that takes the best of each of these spaces. Consumers are after faster, better, more efficient, and the brands who can do that will win.
What this means for marketers is that reaching customers wherever they are and giving them a great experience becomes even more important. A marketer’s job won’t be about doing everything in every channel, necessarily, but about meeting customer expectations across channels.
That’s the promise of agile, authentic mobile-first technology.