Understanding how customers interact with their favorite apps is crucial for predicting engagement — and with prediction comes personalization. With this intelligence, mobile-savvy brands can communicate more effectively with users.
In 2016, my mobile marketing company analyzed millions of mobile interactions, and our data showed that personalized content inside push notifications boosts engagement four times. What’s more, personalized send times lifted retention seven times.
The modern app is smarter than its predecessors, able to personalize content down to the individual user rather than broad segments. With this in mind, here are my top three predictions for why 2017 will be the year of the smart app:
Smart Apps Will Showcase Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics will enable apps to anticipate and react to a user's desires before they're even expressed. More than an add-on, I believe predictive analytics is poised to become a must-have for engagement and retention. A Forrester report predicted this trend several years ago, and the technology has further developed since then.
Predictive analytics is already showcasing its strength in apps that consumers use every day. Here are a few examples:
- Retailers like Amazon offer product suggestions based on recent purchases.
- Travel and tourism apps like Foursquare combine user-selected "tastes" and visit history to recommend new destinations.
- Media apps like Last.fm present curated suggestions based on artists in your listening history.
In all three cases, the goal is to predict the individual user's taste and curate content around it. But it doesn't stop there: Today's predictive analytics tools are deriving trends from much more than past purchases.
We already know that personalization is the key to unlocking user engagement, and I predict that everyday apps will use personalization in even more relevant and applicable ways. For instance:
- Retail apps will hyper-personalize product suggestions based on past shopping purchases, seasonal trends, or personal events like a spouse’s birthday.
- Ride-sharing and traffic apps will suggest locales and destinations based on past trips or calendar appointments.
- Dating apps will recommend new matches based on external events within other apps, such as two people listening to the same artist on a music service.
In other words, it won’t just be about relevance. Smart apps will suggest content at the moment you’re most likely to engage, drawing from previous choices and interactions with the app. For example, based on checking users’ geo-locations and calendars, a dating app might suggest meet up times at trending bars or cafes nearby, taking into account both users’ historical preferences.
Smart Apps Will Make Chatbots Ubiquitous
In 2017, more brands will be able to serve consumers using conversational interfaces across the app. Last year, messaging apps surpassed social networking apps in terms of monthly active users — and brands need to be where users are. As such, chatbots have become the new hotspot for mobile-first brands.
Banking apps can use chatbots to predict balances based on recurring transactions. Alternatively, retail apps can personalize the shopping experience through AI-powered chatbots, much like the service you'd receive from an assistant at a brick-and-mortar store.
Apps can automate aspects of their service by inserting chatbots into their marketing strategy. This will help new customers during buying cycles by recommending products or answering questions that push them to purchase. The best part? Chatbots get smarter over time, applying machine learning from day-to-day conversations to improve interactions with customers.
Forrester outlines the rise of chatbots in its October 2016 report, "The State of Chatbots": “As smartphone communication shifts from voice to text and images, consumers are adopting messaging at an unprecedented pace … Successful chatbots depend on core technology such as natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning — aided by thousands of iterations to drive learning.”
It's relatively easy to incorporate automated chatbots into your mobile marketing strategy, such as Facebook Messenger or Slack. This can empower you to reach your customers with speedy, millennial-friendly responses that drive app interactions and sales.
For app publishers, there are several developers tools like Wit and Botkit designed to help with bot creation. Or, for the non-developers among us, products like Chatfuel offer a code-free way to create chatbots. Use cases for chatbots abound, but if you're short on inspiration, you can browse Botlist, an app store for chatbots.
Smart Apps Will Usher In Mass Adoption Of Automation
Mass blasting your users with generic content is a tired tactic. Instead, forward-thinking marketers are beginning to look at automation in a new light. In 2017, I predict mobile teams will bring personalized parameters into automated messaging campaigns. This personalized touch will improve user conversions, reduce acquisition spending, and drive a greater ROI from each user.
Personalization has the potential to touch every key mobile marketing metric. When combined with push notifications, personalization impacts not only retention, but also engagement. We've found that personalizing push notification content results in four times higher open rates, while sending notifications based on behavioral triggers offers a further improvement of 800 percent.
In 2017, I predict app managers will take mobile marketing automation more seriously, launching personalized campaigns with approachable content for everything from onboarding to shopping cart abandonment.
Rich data will make it possible to craft personalized experiences within the app. This might mean incorporating information from a user’s history, price trends and seasonality. For example, say you’re about to book a flight for the holidays: A smart travel app might provide fare information for your preferred airline and flight times, suggest a hotel based on your loyalty accounts, select a car rental from your favorite brand, and even offer reservations at a trending restaurant in town.
Technology That Anticipates Our Needs
As I look forward to what the rest of the new year will bring, I envision a world where technology predicts our needs and automatically offers solutions — often before we realize we need them. In 2017, with the help of predictive analytics, machine learning algorithms and mobile marketing automation, we will make strides toward this dream.
