Personalizing your strategy to deliver highly relevant and user-centric communication is the only approach to successful messaging campaigns in the 21st century. Traditional one size fits all broadcasts not only will drive your audience away, they will also underperform when compared with campaigns that take user preferences and behavior, geo-location, and context into account.
As more and more brands fight for a place in customer's notification center and email inbox, creating blanket campaigns that promote services, offer discounts or advertise products, will simply not suffice. In today's competitive market, brands need to create rich customer profiles, which can then be used to personalize messaging campaigns. Anything from age to interest or location to in-app behavior will play an important role when implementing successful campaigns.
Where to Start?
There are a few key steps that a brand will need to take to create a successful marketing strategy in Notificare. Failing to implement any of these steps will cripple the functionality at their disposal and will substantially reduce the success rate of a brand's campaign.
User Profile
Most apps and websites with a strong marketing strategy have one thing in common - they will always collect user data and build a user profile. This is no different when using Notificare. Brands have at their disposal everything they need to create a user profile. There is a minimal approach, where the user profile will only contain the unique identifier and a name, and a more thorough approach where key user data details are also known to Notificare.
The first approach is a very simplistic way of quickly creating user profiles, where all the devices, email addresses or phone numbers of the user will reside.
It is also pretty easy to implement and requires no other configurations other than using our SDK or APIs to complete the task. This is a good starting point and will unlock other features like server-side segmentation, user lookups and messaging personalization.
But a stellar strategy wants more. It needs other important bits of information and that's where things like Do Not Disturb, User Data Fields and Preferred Language come into play. All these features provide the stepping stones to take a brand's messaging strategy to a whole different level.
A great messaging strategy knows when to be quiet. This is why letting users specify a cool-down period is not a nice to have, it is an important step in any strategy, to listen to the user's preferences. In Notificare, a feature like the Do Not Disturb period is built-in into the fabric of a customer's profile and it can be easily implemented.
Another thing great messaging strategies have in common; they collect user-specific data. This is first-party data, directly harvested in mobile apps and websites from user input. Users will not only provide this data, but they will also expect a tailored treatment. Enter User Data Fields, the feature of Notificare where all the data brands want to collect from their users can be safely stored. It will not only allow for deeper levels of personalization, but it will also take rich user profiles to a new level.
Finally, a top-notch strategy speaks the customer language. Addressing customers in their own language can make a huge difference in a campaign's performance metrics. This is why it is also built-in in a user profile and can be customized as an organization sees fit. It is the first step when creating localized messages that convert better.
Geo-Location
Although for many brands, collecting a user location might be a sensitive topic, there are truly reasonable explanations as well as opportunities to consider asking consent to collect location data from users. It can elevate certain common features that are usually included in apps and websites. It can be used to create a better user experience when using a store locator or selecting a pick-up point. At the same time, when included in a brand's marketing strategy, it is also the way how you can deliver relevant messages when users are in certain region, enter or leave a venue or are around bluetooth devices strategically placed inside a store.
With Notificare, this is not only easy to implement, it is also a flagship feature of our platform. We've put years of expertise and many hours of development to create a battery efficient and very accurate solution. It is how a brand can get the full picture of how their audience is dispersed geographically, easily understand how their customer's foot traffic influences sales and how many eyeballs do their products get inside their stores.
Segmentation
Breaking down users into distinct groups based on shared characteristics, preferences or behavior, can help brands better understand their audience. While no two users will ever be the same, splitting an audience into different cohorts can expose how shared attributes influence an app or website usage and purchase patterns. This is how product teams can make safe assumptions towards increase engagement, satisfaction, loyalty and expansion.
With Notificare, these groups are broken down into two types, Segments and Tags. The first one is there to help marketers manage these categories. Either manually, via our dashboard, or automatically from different sources via our several data syncing mechanisms with cloud-based storage solutions. Tags, on the other hand, are a mechanism that is also available at the app or website level, allowing these applications to automatically categorize users or collect their preferences.
Event Tracking
Finally, the last step to help brands implement a great personalized messaging strategy, is event tracking. This is how a company can really understand its audience, measure the impact of certain changes, and transform user interaction into meaningful messaging campaigns. If built on top of all the other steps previously described, it can play an essential role in smart segmentation or highly relevant messaging campaigns. Thanks to some of our platform's best features, brands can combine analytics with marketing automation and effectively lower the threshold needed to design event driven messaging campaigns.
With Notificare, event tracking is available at both client and server level. This means, that these events are easily triggered from an app or website or from a backend application. It is then up to a marketer to take it further and connect the dots between these signals and highly relevant and personalized messages.
Making it Personal
With all these steps in place, brands now have all that is needed to launch personalized campaigns. From tailored in-app content to automated and personal messages, the sky is the limit. Leveraging all these options is pretty straight forward too and we can break it down into the following key points:
Personalized Content
By combining time, segmentation, location and device attributes and thanks to our Contextual Marketing features, a brand can offer personalized content perfectly tailored for each user. Thanks to the flexibility offered by these features, brands can create any kind of user interface when a customer opens their mobile app or browses through their website. Companies can easily tailor product recommendations based on gender, color preference or size depending on the geographical location of the user or the season of the year. This level of personalization effectively engages an audience and persuades users to buy more.
Personalized Messages
Thanks to all the steps described above, brands are also now ready to deploy personalized messaging campaigns. Rich user profiles will enable how personalization is done. Any of the user-specific data stored in these profiles can now be used in messages, effectively allowing brands to achieve higher levels of personalization without much effort. By using placeholders in messages, brands can easily add a personal touch to their content.
Placeholders are possible for data that is not stored in Notificare. Data included in imported CSV files can also be used in messages allowing personalization with data coming from other sources. For example, data from a brand's CRM system can be used to trigger a message about a customer's loyalty level and points without necessarily being stored in Notificare.
Rich profiles will also enable how localized messages are generated. Notificare is built to speed up how marketers create multi-language campaigns. Inside one single messaging campaign, teams can translate and localize content in as many region/language combinations as they want. Notificare will then deliver the appropriate content accordingly.
Perfectly timed messages are also a form of personalization. It is how brands can increase user satisfaction and strengthen loyalty. For example, a message reminding a user to check-in the day before a flight would be especially valuable. In Notificare, these kinds of messages can be achieved in multiple ways thanks to well-planned segmentation and our several scheduling mechanisms.
Location based messages add a whole new level of contextually to a brand's messaging strategy. Targeting users in a specific region that there is a daily promotion in a store in their proximity can effectively drive users' visits. Pretty much the same way, using geo-fencing, location based messages can offer a small discount when users enter a certain area around a store can also entice users to make a purchase. Using a BTLE device inside a store can also be an effective way of promoting products. These are just some examples of how location can become an important personalization feature in a brand's messaging strategy.
Finally, transforming all those events being generated by an app or website into automated and highly personal messages is pretty easy with Notificare. We've covered some of those examples in a recent post. These kind of messages are among the best performing campaigns in Notificare. Because they are specifically generated based on user behavior, marketers can easily tailor them to specific users, leaving generic messages behind once and for all. For example, if event tracking is used when customers add a product to their shopping cart and when they complete a purchase, by using our Marketing Automation capabilities, a brand can automate how they remind users that left products behind.
Curious?
Delivering the right content to the right users at the right time is what we strive for at Notificare. Creating moments of delight is what excites our team and if you would like to see it in action, please contact our Sales Team or leave a message in our Support Channel.