13 Best Practices For In-App Marketing

1. Combine App data with website data

If you are capturing an email in your App and website you need to a strategy to combine the customer data and gain insights. This will develop richer segmentation and targeting of future campaigns.

2. Use location as an opportunity for marketing.

Trigger personalized, real-time messages based on a customer’s location. If you have a physical store location you need to take advantage of bacons and geo fencing.

3. Analyze customer behavior

Heavily track all customer interactions to learn about their customer experience, including preferences, past history, interactions and location. This will allow you to drive more contextual content through all digital channels.

4. Create a plan to onboard new users and keep existing users engaged

Develop a cadence to communicate with your user over regular intervals you can guide new customers to engage and re-engagement with your App.

5. Create integrated cross-channel journeys and experiences

While planning your App engagement you need to determine how you can track users across channels. How will you track if App users are visiting your website? If a user follows an email link will that link go to your website or App. You need to develop specific engagement points that you can track across devices.

6. Mobile Apps/Push Notifications

Ask your users to interact and go deeper into your App. At a minimum you should incorporate asking for reviews and having users follow you on social media. A better practice is to track products users are clicking on and then notifying the customer if that items is on sale. Or better yet, just offer them a discount on a specific product they liked.

7. Consider App Only Coupons

Offer exclusive coupons for App users only. This is a great tactic for enticing your web customers to install and use your App. App only coupons can also be an effective strategy to re-engage App users.

8. Offer a preference form to increase content relevancy

Allow users to select what they want to receive and when, what they like and dislike. For instance I might only want to get emails when discounts are above 15%.

9. Enable an in-app notification inbox

Having a message center is enables you to send messages that can be delivered even if a user hasn’t opted into push.

10. Implement a strategy for inactive user

Define and identify inactive app users, and develop a plan to re-engage them. This is the same concept as email funnels. If you are in an email funnel and do not open and email they send you a different follow-up email and a person who opened that same email.

11. Measure your results

You need to plan and track how mobile push notifications impact your marketing results.

12. Consider the total mobile experience

Optimize SMS campaigns to link to specific pages within your App rather than routing all traffic to the home screen. If you are running email campaigns you should always forward users to specific landing page that has a clear call to action and trip wire.

13. Offer an incentive to opt-in to SMS

A small discount or even just providing exclusive content can really make the difference in regards to higher opt-in rates.