This article provides you with information for setting up an onboarding campaign via a multi-step in-app message.
Introduction
With approximately 20% of users deleting an app after just one use, welcoming and onboarding users to your app should be a key pillar of your mobile marketing strategy and can help greatly with engagement and retention.
The below article will show you how to create an onboarding journey via in-app messages and our multi-step template.
This can be used as a stand-alone onboarding journey or could be incorporated into a Push-centric onboarding to provide cross channel onboarding.
Benefits:
- Increase engagement
- Increase retention
- Increase loyalty
Required Features:
- Emarsys SDK
- Deep links
- Custom events (to trigger the in-app message from a specific user action)
High level use case flow
Create the custom event
- Decide the point at which a custom event should be triggered (for example the first time a user clicks on a certain tab or page within the app).
- Create a custom event as per the SDK documentation here.
Create the Segment
- Link to the correct app.
- Add a condition to look for users whose app installation date is within 24 hours.
- Tick Update Audience from Segment once per day (to ensure new downloads are included).
Create the multi-step in-app message
- Give the campaign a name.
- Link to the correct app.
- Link to your segment.
- Create the templates.
- Decide on triggers and scheduling.
- Launch.
Segmentation
Create a Mobile Engage Segment where App Installation Date is within 24 hours - this will isolate users who have recently downloaded the app.
In-app campaign creation
- From the Mobile Engage In-app tab, click Create In-App Message.
- Fill in the general settings, giving the in-app message a name, linking it to the app, selecting Recipient source as Audience to target your segment and ticking the Update audience from segment once per day option (as a result your segment will be dynamically updated, in this example once per day, so as new users who download the app will also be added).
- On the Content Creation page select an in-app template to use as the basis of your message. In this case, select the Multi-step option.
- In the Preview pane select the desired template from the three options shown for each step within the process.
Type the text of your in-app message directly on the preview and add images from your Media DB directly on the preview as well.
Use the Styles tab to alter elements such as the background colour, button colour and shape.
- To add subsequent screens to your multi-step in-app journey, click Add Step and fill in the details accordingly, including what the button click should trigger, in this example Step 3 would be displayed after the user clicks the button on step 2.
Do not include too many steps in your multi-step journey! The maximum we would recommend is five steps, but three is typically the optimum from a customer experience stand point.
If you feel more steps are needed, it may be better to look at other ways of providing the users the relevant information, such as hardcoding certain screens in the app or using one off in-app messages triggered via specific custom events.
- From the final screen, ensure you set the button to decide what action should occur when a user clicks the in-app button.
Options include:
- Deep Link
- Custom Event
- External URL
If your final screen refers to a specific feature or piece of functionality within the app that you want to direct the users to, then use the Deep Link option.
If the final screen is more generic, you may want the final button click to be a custom event - this could then trigger an Interactions journey and you could analyze the numbers of users completing your Multi-step in-app onboarding journey.
Ensure you select the relevant option depending on what experience you want your users to go through.
- The final step is to fill in the details on the Scheduling page shown below
In this use case the trigger will be the custom event created as part of this process.
As this is an onboarding journey designed for new users, ensure the option Deliver this message to recipients at most is set to once.
Ensure your Multi-step onboarding journey focuses on introducing key elements of your app that you would want your users to start using early in their app experience and provides relevant information to help users get the most out of the app.
In a retail or ecommerce environment that might mean using the first screen to let users know how they can find the latest releases within the app, the second screen might highlight a specific feature such as how to use the wishlist, whilst the final screen may drive to an action such as creating an account and highlight the benefits of doing so.