Heard on the Street, Episode 29: Push Notifications and Tech History, with Airship’s Mike Stone
Airship has been innovating around push notifications for more than a decade, a lifetime in internet years. Airship SVP of Marketing Mike Stone, the latest guest on Street Fight’s Heard on the Street podcast, broke down the company’s approach to the mobile marketing business.
“There are two dimensions. One is the proliferation of devices and the channels that are attached to them, but there’s also that much more difficult thing of what consumers are willing to do,” said Stone. “The devices are one thing, but it’s also, once they’re there, where’s that line of creepy versus helpful.”
Studying the Relationship Between Phone Price and Income
The results of our study show that the more expensive your phone is, the more likely you are to come from a higher income bracket. Our model predicts that, for every dollar that the average price for a cell phone in a given zip code increases, the median income for that zip code will also increase by $122.70 — in other words, by a fairly significant amount.
Texting Allows Marketers to Reach Customers Where They Spend the Most Time
Seventy-six percent of consumers are already receiving texts from businesses, and a majority of consumers across all age groups would prefer that more businesses take up texting as a mode of communication, a new report from business text messaging platform ZipWhip indicates.
A whopping 83% of Gen-Z respondents and 82% of millennials said they “wish more businesses” would use texting. Even for older generations, that number made up a more than slight majority, including 76% of Gen-Xers and 64% of Baby Boomers.
Outsourced or In-House Delivery? We Did the Math
Local delivery is rapidly becoming a must-have for all kinds of businesses—people have become accustomed to online ordering and speedy delivery. According to a Go People survey, 65% of retailers will offer same-day delivery by the end of 2019, and according to Technomic, food delivery volume will grow by 12% year-over-year from 2019 to 2023. The question isn’t whether your business should offer delivery, but how.
Report: Huge Hole in Location Data Market for O2O Attribution
Good news for the whole location-based marketing industry—a new report from location data firm Factual based on a survey of location data buyers finds the field is getting more effective and better at measuring its results. Nearly 9 in 10 marketers said location data is driving more effective campaigns. Eighty-six percent said it’s growing their customer base, and 84% reported higher customer engagement.
However, while use of location-based marketing is set to grow to 94%, only 24% use it or are planning to use it to establish offline attribution.
AR Impacts Local Commerce, Disrupting Home Services and Retail
AR is emerging at a time when the physical retail world is undergoing significant transformation. Things like Amazon Go stores and the counteractive “retail as a service” movement have raised awareness and hunger for retail evolution. So AR’s retail shopping use cases fall on fertile soil.
But retail is just one way that AR intersects with local commerce. AR comes into play in another key local commerce category: home services. Innovators like Streem are bringing remote assistance to traditional service calls (think: busted pipe).
To Share or Not to Share: How Gamification is Swaying the Modern Consumer’s Loyalty
Although 94% of C-suite leaders consider customers’ data to be of paramount importance, privacy continues to be a hot-button issue. Data privacy practices have come under increased scrutiny with the passing of regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation, aimed at protecting individuals from the misuse and exploitation of personal information. Even as consumers continue to debate the tradeoff between convenience and control, one thing is clear—they are craving a more intuitive and personalized experience. How, then, can companies reconcile the differences and walk the tightrope as they acquire a 360-degree view of their audience?
Gamification is one path forward.
Heard on the Street, Episode 26: The Art of Digital Persuasion, with Jeff Hasen
Amid accelerated disruption in digital media, consumer touch points continue to fragment. That includes a growing list of interfaces and delivery channels for content—everything from smartphones to watches to headphones and speakers. So what’s a marketer to do?
This is the topic of Jeff Hasen’s third and most recent book, The Art of Digital Persuasion, which we discuss with the author on the latest episode of the Heard on the Street Podcast. In addition to lots of marketing tactics, Hasen has also learned a lot in a career that includes work as both a journalist and an ad agency exec.
Consumers Hungry for New Content Discovery Channels on Mobile
The content consumers are craving is personalized and brief. Over 40% said they would like content experiences between 15 and 30 seconds, and another 26% favored engagement somewhere between 30 and 90 seconds. Despite amplified privacy concerns of late, 68% indicated a willingness to trade some personal information in exchange for content tailored to their interests.
Brands still trigger-happy on mobile push notifications may want to reconsider. Twenty-five percent of respondents ranked them as their least liked content delivery method among current and future modes of discovery.
Visual Search and Local: A Match Made in Mountain View
Though visual search challengers such as Snapchat and Pinterest could shine in niche use cases such as fashion items, Google will rule as the best all-around utility for visual search. It has the deepest tech stack, and the substance (knowledge graph) to be useful beyond just a flashy novelty for identifying things visually.
The name of the game now is to get users to adopt it. Google Lens won’t be a silver bullet and will shine in a few areas where Google is directing users, such as pets and flowers. But it will really shine in product search, which happens to be where monetization will eventually come into the picture.
Single-Use Coupons: A Multi-Pronged Strategy for Each Phase of the Customer Journey
A savvy marketer can select a solution that enables her to launch personalized promotions that perfectly suit a target customer for a given phase. For example, an offer designed to acquire new customers should differ from the one that goes out with a view to retaining lapsed customers or further engaging the loyal customer. This is where single-use coupons provide immense potential to deliver personalized promotions, allowing marketers to segment their customers into the appropriate marketing phase—acquisition, engagement, or retention.
The 10 Commandments of Location Intelligence Marketing
The amount of location data can be overwhelming, making it difficult to understand when to use what information. Even the most experienced marketer can lose sight of the basic principles that guide successful use of location intelligence tools.
Based on our 11 years of experience helping mobile apps leverage the context of their users, we offer the following 10 commandments that every marketer working with location intelligence should keep top of mind to drive a successful marketing strategy.
The Promise of XR and 5G
As we approach the 5G era, the dramatic quantum leap of 5G service enhances many creative capabilities in XR, providing richer user experiences and giving marketers and developers a larger digital playground to expand their creative talents.
Still, there’s confusion in the market over how these innovations work and, critically, how they can work together. Let’s take a closer look.
Programmatic OOH Is Real. Why Isn’t Your Agency Using It More?
The ad tech industry’s state of flux and disarray spurs confusion and buyer skepticism of real innovation. This is particularly prevalent in rapidly evolving areas like programmatic that also contend with existing legacy trust issues. I come across this every day, as there seems to be a persistent rumor that programmatic Out of Home (OOH) is “fake,” and that, when looking under the hood, programmatic OOH is merely an automated process for reserving and purchasing inventory. This misconception results in missed opportunities for marketers.
Factual Partners with Airship and Braze to Power Location-Based Mobile Marketing
The partnership will enhance Airship and Braze’s efforts to furnish clients with precise mobile messaging based on the location of the customers they want to reach. Airship and Braze help brands engage their customers, retaining their business and ideally driving them back in-store. Airship rebranded, dropping the Urban from its name, last month.
May Focus: Visualizing Local
Street Fight is rolling into May with the theme, Visualizing Local: a look at how marketers are using visual content to boost visibility, presence, and conversions. This includes everything from images in search results and local listings to utilizing increasingly popular social media like Instagram Stories.
Report: Upon Unlocking Phones, People Flock to Social, Messaging
Anyone with a smartphone unimmune to our pervasive cultural addiction with digital communication will be unsurprised: It’s WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Facebook that currently capture most of the attention when we mindlessly unlock our mobile devices.
That’s according to media measurement company Verto Analytics, which released a report just this morning on the earliest part of the mobile journey: what happens right when we unlock our phones some 50 times per day.
Location Data Confidence in an Exploding Data Universe
Location intelligence, sourced securely and used in the right way, is an extremely powerful tool to craft precise targeting, predictive modeling, and creative media that drive meaningful marketing moments, massive ROI, and brand growth. Unfortunately, the location intelligence sector has also become a jungle of data fraught with fraudulence and insecurity.
Location intelligence is powerful, but in today’s highly scrutinized world, you have to challenge every resource you engage to ensure confidence in its quality. There are three critical questions you should ask data partners before you engage them.
12 Years After the iPhone, Marketers Need to Lean Into Digital Wellness
Once upon a time, “getting a Starbucks coupon as you walk by a Starbucks” was the Holy Grail example of the potential power of mobile marketing. With the iPhone turning 12 years old this week, it’s a great time to observe how drastically more sophisticated digital relationships between consumers and brands have gotten thanks to the supercomputers in our pockets.
Mobile is now about building a customer journey and taking patrons to the next level rather than a single, location-based transaction. You hear it a lot: the customer journey reigns supreme, but there’s a good reason for “customer journey” becoming like the Greek chorus in marketing. Consumers are inundated with messages from brands, so marketers need to be judicious about how, when, where, and why they reach out to customers.