This article provides you with information for setting up Inbox promotions campaign.
Introduction
Many promotions a brand will want to send to its app users may be longer term offers. Sending these types of promotions via push notification or In-app have drawbacks in that when the user interacts with the message it disappears, leading to users forgetting the offer and potentially missing out, leading to a poor customer experience.
With a Mobile Inbox marketers can deliver rich media messages directly to an inbox located within the app. Much like an email inbox these messages can contain rich media, personalization and allow the user control in terms of marking messages as unread or deleting those they have used.
These Inbox messages are the perfect solution to deliver longer term offers that may last more than a day or two and customers could use over a long period of time, allowing them to keep the offer at the forefront of their mind before they decide to use it. With the added benefit of not requiring permissions (unlike push notifications) you can reach your entire app user base.
With average open rates of 22%, Inbox messaging is the perfect addition to your mobile communications channels and when used in conjunction with push notifications and In-app can take your mobile strategy to the next level.
Benefits:
- Increase engagement
- Increase revenue
- Increase retention
Required Features:
- Emarsys SDK
- Deep links
- App Inbox (built by brand)
High level use case flow
In this example a combined segment will be required to facilitate this use case made up of the following.
Segment 1
- A Smart Insight segment where ‘Affinity to product categories’ is the offer category. In this example we’ll use ‘Shoes’ but make this relevant to the specific promotion
Segment 2
- A Mobile Engage Segment where ‘Contacts who are identified’ and ‘Last App Activity’ is within 3 days (this will ensure you're also targeting active app users)
- Link to the correct app
This segment will find customers who are known app users with recent activity, who also have an affinity for a certain product category that will match the offer.
To create combined segments, see Creating combined segments.
If you do not use Smart Insight you could utilize Contact Fields with relevant details or add in Custom Events to the ME Segment to determine affinity with certain categories or products to make your Inbox promotion more targeted and relevant.
Or by using only ME Segment criteria such as App Activity you can target only active app users if you want to target an engaged but wider audience.
Create the Inbox message:
- Link to the correct app
- Select Segment as the recipient source and choose your Combined Segment
- Set the ID and Priority if needed
- Create the Inbox message
- Launch
Internal ID is not a mandatory field. It can be used by the marketer to mark a campaign for internal reporting purposes or to group campaigns together (such as all those related to a certain offer).
If Priority is ticked as High Priority then the message can be displayed differently when it is delivered to the users Inbox. How High Priority messages are displayed is under the control of the app developer and not Emarsys.
Segmentation
Create a Smart Insight Segment where ‘Affinity to product categories’ is ‘Shoes’ (or the equivalent for your specific offer)
Create a Mobile Engage Segment where Mobile Push Notifications equals ‘Enabled’ and is linked to the appropriate app.
Create a Combined Segment of the two previously created Segments, using an ‘AND’ operator.
Inbox Message Creation
- From the Mobile Engage Inbox Campaigns tab click Create Inbox Campaign to begin creating the Inbox message
- Fill in the general settings, giving the Inbox message a name, linking it to the app, selecting Recipient source as ‘Segment’ and adding your Combined Segment. Additionally, if required, add in an Internal ID and mark as High Priority:
- On the Content Creation page type your message directly into the preview pane. Pull in personalization tokens to include personal info in the message:
- Click on the side bar to the left of the preview screen to include functionality such as action buttons with Deep Links to take users directly to the offers page.
To add action buttons to your Inbox you will need to have SDK version 2.16.0 or higher.
- Add additional language versions via the Languages tab.
- Use the Inbox Settings tab to add additional data to the message that is passed in the root parameters this is done via JSON.
- Move to the Scheduling page and decide on message expiry and scheduling as per the below:
The maximum amount of Inbox messages that can stored in the Inbox is 25. If you send another message to an Inbox that is full, the oldest message will be deleted to make room for the new one.