Push

Perhaps you and your phone were roaming, or you downloaded a new data-hogging app and forgot to use WiFi, but if you’ve ever gone over your smartphone data plan limit it’s likely a pain you won’t soon forget.

Our customer Onavo has gained a lot of attention and venture funding for its compression utility app for smartphones and tablets that puts users in control of their data plans by compressing data, tracking usage, and saving them money. However, the benefits delivered by the app were not being recognized as its magic simply happened in the background, whether users were actively engaging with the app or not.

Onavo turned to Urban Airship to power push notifications and after a few A/B tests decided to message users when they had saved certain amounts of data. Onavo’s push notifications are easily shareable anecdotes, which not only increased retention and app opens, but drove a 30% increase in shares and mentions across social networks. So now, when friends see friends save money, Onavo’s right there to welcome new users. Download the full case study.

Download the free Onavo app for iPhone/iPad or Android.

It’s official! Generation Connect is here and it’s on SNL. Check out their hilarious spoof on push notifications and please remember to look both ways before crossing the street.

In a world that’s more connected than ever, push notifications can expand our view, our insight and our actions beyond the 3-10 inch screen we religiously carry. Together with leading app developers and partners we are evolving mobile messaging to drive greater value for consumers and brands alike. We have sent more than ten billion push notifications for many of the world’s leading brands and mobile apps. Check out some of our real-world applications here.

Over 10 billion push notifications served!

Everyone at Urban Airship truly believes in the power of push notifications. We all work hard to deliver the promise of improved mobile engagement to our customers. So it is with great excitement that we announce the inclusion of push notifications in a new report by Forrester Research called, “The New Messaging Mandate”, which can be purchased here.

For the first time, an independent analyst firm recommends Push Notifications, along with traditional mail, telemarketing, email, social media and SMS, as a must have communication channel. Forrester has a great history in anointing significant technologies at the right time, and having them include push notifications in this report is very telling. Mobile messaging is becoming the most real-time, customer focused channel, but it is just really getting started, and push notifications are playing a very significant role. See the Press Release

Forrester has a real knack for timing as their report comes out around the same time that we see our 10 billionth notification sent since we launched two years ago. It’s exciting to see the path Urban Airship has taken over these past two years.  It was only a few months ago, in August, that we saw our 5 billionth notification. Since then we have seen an acceleration of new customers and users.

For fun, take a look at two fun graphics mapping our:
Journey to 5 billion notifications
Adventure from 5 billion to 10 billion

The introduction of iOS5 brought Newsstand, which made mobile subscriptions a reality for publishers. Now 8 of the top 10 publishing companies rely on our service to manage daily subscription content and send breaking news alerts to their users. Along with Newsstand came Notification Center, which created a better user experience for receiving push notifications. This improved experience has increased the number of pushes that users are open to receiving and brought new confidence to enterprise organizations that send notifications through their apps. In December when Amazon released the Kindle Fire, based on the Android operating system, they opened up a whole new audience for our Helium customers to message to.

Thank you Forrester for including us in your research.  Thank you customers and developers for trusting us to deliver on our promises. Thank you team for continuing to take Urban Airship to new heights.

Amazon shipped their first Kindle Fires eight weeks ago and since then we’ve seen a lot of interest in the platform from our customers. Consumers are jumping in too, making the Kindle Fire the best-selling product across all of Amazon.com since it became available. We’re also excited about the Kindle Fire, and even more excited to let you know that Urban Airship’s Helium push notifications for Android are already deployed on tens of thousands of devices: it just works.

Over the weekend we had several customers go live on the Fire using our Helium push notifications. Glu Mobile is just one of our customers who are using our push notifications for Android in all of their games for the Fire. When we asked Glu if they did anything special to activate push in their games for the Kindle Fire, Mike DeLaet, VP of Sales & Marketing said, “We just integrated the Urban Airship SDK into these titles like we do for all of our titles, which allows us to utilize push notifications on the Kindle Fire.” Our customers depend on Push to drive engagement and provide the best user experience possible for their applications. With Helium they can do that for the Kindle Fire today.

A little background: the Fire is an Android device with a few key differences. It is missing Google’s Mobile Services (Android Market, C2DM, Google IAP, etc). Additionally, your app cannot require a gyroscope, camera, WAN module, Bluetooth, microphone, GPS, or micro-SD to function. Beyond that, it’s Android 2.3.4 with a new screen size and functions just like any WiFi-connected Android device.

We know that in the world of mobile phones, tablets, PC’s, and other IP connected devices, powerful engagement tools are a requirement for success. We’re continually working to extend our services to any device and as many platforms as possible. But device and platform support only gets you so far–and that’s where our tools come into play. Urban Airship enables you to effectively address and engage with your application audience. With our recent acquisition of SimpleGeo, the future holds many exciting additions to our products, like enabling audience segmentation on a local level for the Kindle Fire and beyond. These are exciting times and we’re just scratching the surface on what we can do.

For more details on setting up an app for the Kindle Fire and selling it in the Amazon App Store, see their Developer FAQ. If you are interested in using Helium to power push on a Kindle Fire or any other Android device, check out our Pro Plans. And finally, if you want to make addressing your Kindle Fire audience easier, take a look at our FAQ on setting tags for your Kindle Fire app installations.

Swirl, an established online sample sale site created in partnership with DailyCandy, wanted to grow its already successful email based flash sale business by adding an offering built for mobile. They created an app to host daily flash sales and utilized push notifications to deliver alerts each day to notify users when new sales begin.

This new daily call to action, sent directly to customers’ mobile devices, resulted in a significant increase in traffic and sales and also added new life to previously slow weekend and holiday time periods.  Swirl’s daily Push is driving a 60% increase in mobile traffic and a 20% increase in total mobile orders.  Push also drives a 40% higher conversion rate than email driven, mobile browser.

Download the Case Study

“We don’t want our customers to miss out on a great deal. So we need a stable
platform that we can rely on to engage with our customers on a daily basis.”

-Janis Leahy, Senior Product Manager, Swirl

We are thrilled with the success that Swirl is finding and hope that other retailers can find the same success.  With the holidays right around the corner, there’s never been a better time to explore what Push can do for retailers.

Download the Swirl app in the itunes store here or visit the Swirl site.

Want us to share your Urban Airship success story?  Contact us.

Download the Case Study

As a marketer, it’s exciting to see companies large and small using Push Notifications to drive business goals.  The customer case studies we have produced over the past few months make it clear that Push is a powerful tool for business.  We’ve seen them deliver a daily dose of learning for Dictionary.com, make radio social for Jelli, and drive commerce for Swirl.  But like Peter Parker’s uncle Ben used to say, “with great power comes great responsibility”.

In the changing media landscape, it’s important to remember that the mobile user is in complete control of his/her experience.  Unlike radio, TV and print, mobile users will not tolerate broadcast advertisements sent to their mobile devices.  Misusing Push Notifications to serve only the needs of the app, ahead of the needs of the customer, is the quickest way to get turned off.  Follow these recommended practices of Push to assure a long lasting relationship with your users.

• If you remember only one thing remember this.  Every mobile user is an individual, treat them as such.
• Use notifications to solve a problem or delight customers, within the scope of your app.
• Segment your audience and deliver targeted Push paired with targeted content to deliver the best possible experience to your customers.
• Use timing to your advantage by incorporating quiet time preferences and optimize to times when users are most engaged with apps.
• Make it easy to opt in and opt out of notifications, location and social features.
• Measure engagement driven from Push and optimize.

If our recommended practices aren’t for you, make sure to follow the terms of Apple’s iOS agreement.

“You may not use the APN or Local Notifications for the purposes of advertising, product promotion, or direct marketing of any kind (e.g. up-selling, cross-selling, etc.), including, but not limited to, sending any messages to promote the use of Your Application or advertise the availability of new features or versions.”

At Urban Airship we believe the future of mobile will largely be driven by real time alerts and updates, based on personal context like location and preferences.  We are excited to welcome the SimpleGeo team and are dedicated to building products and services that will deliver our vision and ensure the success of our customers.

With the launch of iOS5 we’ve been busy updating all our phones around the office and watching the adoption numbers go up. But along with the new Notification Center comes a whole new set of visual styles for Push Notifications on the iPhone, iPod, and iPad. So we’ve updated Push Composer with a few new previews to cover the new visual landscape that is Push on iOS5! We’ve also added a few new features to boot. There are three new ways that notifications can appear, and a bunch of new user controls for governing these new features.

Lock Screen Preview

The most common view will be “Lock Screen” notifications, which are similar to previous iOS versions but with a new style and sans buttons.

Pull Down Display Preview 

This pull-down view displays all your unacknowledged notifications in an aggregate view (by app) and lets you launch the app from any specific notification or clear them all. Each of these is now available in full preview mode within Push Composer.

Banner Notification Preview

Additionally there’s the new “Banner” notification that rotates into view at the top of the screen when your device is in use, even within other apps.

Push To A Deep Link

But that’s not all. We’ve also added the ability to send Key/Value pairs of data directly with any push from within Push Composer. What this means is that you can include a “deep link” to a specific place, page, or story within your app. This long-standing API feature is now available directly through the web interface in composer.

Improved Byte Count Accuracy

We also improved the byte counts for your message composition to more accurately reflect the total space remaining in your message, especially around non-English characters.

 All of these additions join the previously available preview screens (for users on iOS3 & 4, and Android) as well as other great features like Scheduled Notifications, sounds, badges, and tags. Timezone calculations have also received some updates. Anything you can do within a Push message in our API can be accomplished with Push Composer.

Get started with Push Composer now!

Today, we expect that Apple will offer more insight into its new “Notifications Center” that will be baked into iOS5. We expect a lot more app developers will want to get smart about the best way to incorporate push notifications into their app, and so I wrote up some thoughts for our friends over at Adotas. Please feel free to share it around and we’d really like to see other thoughts and ideas in the comments if you have them.

Apple iOS5 And The Power Of The Push

Push notifications are about to really take off, and make a lot more sense. That is the power of Apple. But what will happen first?

The medium will gain momentum with the debut Apple’s iOS5, because the system’s new notification center makes push messaging more consumer friendly on iOS devices. Next, I think the real value of push notifications will become glaringly apparent as businesses realize its ability to get customers actively engaged with mobile content and applications.

This is also an enormous, and welcomed, shift for developers. It gives them another mechanism and medium for driving customers to interact with their brand while creating additional touchpoints, or engagement, with those customers. This is the new holy grail for mobile.

A Growing Push for Businesses

The expanding market for push notifications is timely and reflects its increasing relevance to businesses. The industry has learned that obsession with driving downloads is ineffective as a long-term strategy: Despite the money invested in developing mobile applications, only about 5% of mobile apps are used 30 days after they’re downloaded by customers.

Focusing on downloads is also becoming passé: It’s akin to the first waves of web marketing, when driving page views was the goal. In today’s mobile environment, businesses want people actively engaging, better yet, spending money while they’re at it. And do this on a continued basis, which is what success is all about.

Push notifications serve these business objectives because they can reach mobile customers, stimulate interactions with them, even if they are not using the app or their device at the time. Customers are responding. For example, according to a recent study by comScore, 14% of consumers representing Groupon and LivingSocial users said they engage with the app after receiving an offer sent via push notification to their phones. This is not surprising and the engagement rates are certain to grow as push matures and businesses become more familiar with it.

Push works because it takes advantage of mobile as an intent-driven platform. It focuses on the customer’s reasons and motivations for using a device, such as shopping, following sports scores, or playing a game, and it creates conversations with the users around those activities. But it’s also about real-time social sharing of content, like music, pictures, and video.

In addition, when you consider that most devices now are location aware, messages in real time become even more compelling. Finally, apps can be designed to include rich media such as video, audio, maps or actionable content like coupons or voter polls to a message, which enriches the entire experience and strengthens the overall appeal.

Businesses like push notifications because they generate a wealth of metrics that can be used to analyze the success of their ads, get to know their customers better and create one to one relationships that are more effective. The technology can generate quantifiable statistics on many variables that indicate, among other things:

• how often customers return to an app;
• how much time they spend with it;
• if they take an action requested by an ad;
• if they unsubscribe; and
• most important, how the app performs against others in its category.

A company will be able to tell, for example, if it is losing subscribers in a category that other firms are excelling in, and if this is the case, it can adjust its approach accordingly to better compete.

The SMS Angle

General trends in the mobile industry favor increased use of push notifications. For example, numerous research firms are projecting that app-to-device messaging will become a much more significant part of the SMS market.

A2P promotions delivered via push notifications should do even better than that. Push-based A2P notifications are easier to respond to, because the notification takes the customer straight to the app without requiring clicking through to a URL. The analytics that push notifications generate give it value that SMS can’t provide. And push is less costly and more valuable to brands, carriers and consumers than SMS.

Companies have of course embraced messaging via SMS because it can reach almost all handsets. But it is short-sighted to focus all of a company’s campaigns on SMS. It is not particularly easy to build programs and services around SMS, for one thing, but also the margins for SMS-based campaigns are razor-thin. SMS fees are assessed on a per-message basis, and depending on the type of message used and its destination, SMS messaging can cost an company up to 3 cents per message.

Push notifications, which travel over the mobile data network, are easier to build and distribute and as more and more mobile data networks are deployed around the world, the addressable market for push notifications will increase. Nor are push notifications limited to mobile. They can target any device that is connected to the Internet and the more screens the customer engages with, including connected TVs, set-top boxes and gaming platforms in the home, the more opportunity this will bring.

Finally, push services do not incur SMS fees and they can be purchased according to a variety of flexible pricing schemes that can be friendly to any business. Prices can be based strictly on the number of devices or the number of installed apps receiving the notifications, which can allow distribution of unlimited messages to those devices or apps.

So we look forward to seeing what Apple and iOS5 can do to bring more mobile innovation to the market, and are prepared to make that easy to take advantage of when designing and launching apps.

Read The Full Article

Push notifications and location updates are proven engagement drivers for mobile apps so there is strong incentive to maximize opt-in rates. Like it or not, most users will not give you a second chance open these valuable lines of communication. Asking for permission to send push notifications and to track location is a pretty big ask for most people. This is why every app developer should consider taking a look at how their app treats the opt-in moment and upon seeing the request, answer these two questions.

1. Have I had a chance to experience this app? Building trust is essential and building trust takes time. Instead of asking a user to opt-in right as they open the app (which is the default approach) let them explore the app and see all of the cool features and content that it offers.  Then link the opt-in to an action – whether it be posting their first comment, creating a user account, or beating the first level of a game. Even looking to delay the ASK to the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th time that they open the APP is being tested, and working successfully. After experiencing the cool features and great content that you’ve developed you will have increased your chances of getting permission to message, while providing context as to why you may track location of your users to provide valuable content tied to geo.
   
2. Is there compelling value exchange if I accept push notifications and location sharing? The term “push notification” can mean something different to every end user. While the term describes a technology ,that many people still do not understand, your users associate it with the inherent value that notifications will provide them. When you ask a user to opt-in to notifications and location sharing, think about how you can demonstrate a value exchange by telling them how notifications will benefit them.  What will they get in return for saying yes?  If you can put together a compelling case then you will have increased your chances of winning the opt-in moment and help increase the success of your app. In the end you must show with the value of the content and context to keep the relationship. 

Get it here: Guide to Push: Five Ways to Engage and Maintain Your Audience