Adobe Enhances Mobile Marketing Offering with Integrated Analytics, Optimization, and Messaging for Apps

According to Adobe Digital Index, mobile accounts for 50 to 70 percent of all consumer interactions with brands, with app session launches increasing 51 percent year-over-year. At the same time, the data shows that the ‘usefulness’ of many apps drops quickly following the initial launch. Consumers like to experiment, but few become loyal. Retail shopping apps for example, are launched only about 13 times on average before they are abandoned. In general, an app hits 50 percent of its total life span in as little as five to six months after installation.

Brands are even having a tough time acquiring new customers, much less engage with them. New monthly downloads have only grown five percent since last year. There are more apps to choose from, but consumers are being highly selective.

These challenges put pressure on marketers to understand why interest in their apps is fading so quickly. New mobile marketing capabilities, provided by the integration of two Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions – Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target – help companies understand how their apps are performing in real-time and allow them to continuously test and improve the way a company engages with customers after the app is downloaded for the first time.

Redbox Grows App User Base by 100 Percent

Redbox is a great example. As a company that operates more than 40,000 DVD, Blu-ray Disc and video game rental kiosks throughout the U.S., Redbox has a digital network that spans 90 million consumer touch points across email, mobile, web and loyalty programs. With over 60 percent of online traffic coming through a mobile channel, Redbox has been an early adopter of new mobile marketing technologies to optimize the customer experience. Leveraging Adobe Analytics and the Mobile Core Services SDK, the company is able to measure the effectiveness of mobile campaigns and continuously iterate the experience to drive engagement and rental behavior.

The Redbox app allows customers to locate the nearest kiosks and browse and reserve content for quick pickup. It’s a bridge between the physical and digital Redbox experience. Since sending out the first push notifications in 2012, Redbox has seen their app user base grow by 100 percent. The company has continued to optimize push messages to be more personalized and delivered at the right times. For instance, Redbox found that 9:00 am is the best time for push messages, with a 2x increase in rental numbers within the first hour of a message being sent. Over the course of a day, the company saw rentals increase by 1.5x.

Through Adobe Analytics, Redbox saw the first push message in a “welcome series” – designed to engage customers immediately after download with promotional offers – garner a 56 percent open rate across Android and iOS. The continuation of the program led to better retentions and conversions, while driving increased revenue and cross-channel engagement via text, email and social. In the first half of 2015, push messaging even became the number one driver of new sign-ups to the Redbox Text Club. With a proactive approach to mobile marketing technologies and a focus on the consumer experience, Redbox mobile channels have seen the strongest YoY growth within the company’s expansive digital marketing network.

New Mobile Capabilities in Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target

Adobe Marketing Cloud has seen significant growth in mobile marketing usage over the past year. The number of companies using Adobe for app marketing has grown over 200 percent while the number of active users that access its Mobile Core Service has increased by over 300 percent. Adobe was also recently named a leader in Gartner ‘s 2015 Magic Quadrants for Web Content Management and Mobile Application Developer Platform reports. New capabilities in Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target include:

• App Analytics: With app analytics, marketers can access data about user acquisitions, downloads, revenue, rankings, and ratings across app stores and understand where customers are launching apps – by country, region or even points of interest. Having these real-time insights allows companies to deliver optimized and targeted experiences including in-app content changes based on user engagement, timely in-app messages, push notifications and more. The integration of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target also introduces the ability to set up postback URLs to advertising networks for mobile apps crediting the ad network responsible for generating a conversion event like an install, a purchase, or login. This helps marketers better quantify the success of their app user acquisition campaigns.
• App Optimization and Personalization: Adobe’s offering is the only one in the market today that uses A/B and multivariate testing to deliver and adjust personalized app experiences in real-time. App feature testing helps businesses immediately understand what experiences and messages work and which ones don’t. It also helps brands personalize content for audience segments based on in-app behaviors, location, and the consumer’s profile.
• Mobile Messaging: The 2015 Adobe Mobile Maturity Survey reports that nearly 50 percent of organizations use push messaging and re-launch campaigns to drive user re-engagement. With Adobe Marketing Cloud, brands can re-engage app users by delivering relevant push notifications to their home screen when they need to be informed about breaking news, new offers, or account status alerts. In addition, when users launch the app experience, marketers can engage customers with relevant messages that are triggered by real-time, in-app behavior and promote new content, cross-promote apps, or help users with navigation.
• Location-Aware Experiences: According to Adobe Digital Index data, 57 percent of organizations are using or plan to use beacon technology within the next year. Adobe Marketing Cloud offers location targeting through beacons, which allows marketers to take advantage of this emerging technology and develop location-specific experiences and messages for push notifications and in-app content.
• Unified App Data, Workflows, & SDK: Adobe Marketing Cloud brings all app data and workflows together in one place reducing complexity. It features an app-centric user interface for integrated workflows across Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target. In addition, a unified Mobile Core Service SDK for iOS, Android, and Windows, enables access to multiple solutions across Adobe Marketing Cloud.

If marketers look at their sea of mobile apps, they realize how much the app landscape is shifting and growing. Success with mobile apps requires them to keep app content fresh and personalized by understanding how the app is performing at all times. We’re excited to do the heavy lifting for mobile teams by introducing these capabilities and fully integrating insights (analytics) and action (targeting, optimization & messaging).

To learn more about Adobe and mobile marketing, check out: http://www.adobe.com/go/mobile-engagement