This article provides you with information for setting up Inbox order confirmation campaign.
Introduction
Communication with your customers post purchase is key to creating a great customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle. Whilst sending order confirmation via push notifications and/or In-app (see an example here) can prove successful, executing this via Inbox has a number of added benefits.
Whilst a push notification or In-app can be great for grabbing the users' attention, once they interact with the message it is gone. With Inbox you can deliver a richer more detailed message directly to the app Inbox that a user can come back to as it is stored in their Inbox within the app. As an order confirmation is likely to contain significant pieces of information that a user may want to check repeatedly (such as their order ID, list of products purchased, delivery details etc) having this message remain in the app provides an improved customer experience.
Push and In-app also have limited space to get across the all important information required in such a message whereas with Inbox, a brand has far more space to play with to ensure all the necessary details are supplied to the user. Couple the above with an average Open Rate of 22% for Inbox messages means delivering these types of transactional messaging via Inbox is a no brainer.
Emarsys do not offer an out of the box app Inbox UI. To give brands full control over look and feel the Inbox needs to be built by the brand. There are then additional SDK calls to be placed to fetch the Inbox messages. See the SDK docs for more details in the Emarsys Help Portal.
Benefits:
- Improved customer experience
- Drive loyalty
- Drive engagement
Required Features:
- App Inbox (built by the brand)
- Additional SDK Inbox calls
- External events
- ESL/external event personalisation
- Interactions
High level use case flow
Create an external event which you can do in one of two ways, ensuring that all relevant information required (order ID, product names etc) is passed with the event payload;
- Via the Admin menu - External events
- By using the Create an External Event API endpoint
For more details on external events, see External events.
Create the Inbox message:
- Link to the correct app
- Link to the Automation Center (this will make it available in Interactions)
- Add content including any action buttons, if required
- Include personalization in the form of ESL, if required
- Click Ready to Launch
Create the Interactions journey;
- Use an External event node as the trigger and select the relevant event
- Add an Inbox message node and select the previously created Inbox message
Inbox message creation
- From the Mobile Engage tab select Inbox followed by Create New Inbox Message
- Fill in the General Settings, linking the message to an app and choosing whether to target a Segment or in this case an Automation Center.
High Priority and Internal ID are both optional fields. Internal ID can be set by the marketer for internal reporting or grouping together campaigns (e.g. summer sales).
Leaving High Priority blank is the standard setting. You can mark the message as High Priority but how these High Priority messages are displayed within the Inbox are controlled by the app developer.
- Create the Inbox message on the Content Creation screen add images, pull in personalization if required and add action buttons if desired:
To pull in order/product information you can use External Event Personalization to take information from the external event payload.
If the customer has placed a large order with multiple products, consider how adding all that detail into the Inbox message would work from a CX perspective. Although you have more on screen room to play with than a Push Notification, it may still prove a better customer experience in instances, where a customer has purchased many items in one order to only display the Order ID in the Inbox message for example.
See the link to the Push Notification use case at the start of this article to understand how you can do this via ESL
Ensure the action button in the Inbox message is set to Deep Link and you direct the user to the relevant area in the app, such as the ‘My Orders’ area or equivalent.
Interactions
- From the Automation menu select Automation Programs, click Create Program, then select Behaviour-focused journeys (Interactions).
- Select the trigger for the Interactions program, an External Event in this case (as per the screenshot below).
- Select the event from the drop-down after double clicking the event node.
- Add a Mobile Engage Inbox Message.
- Activate the program.
Create follow-up journeys to keep the user updated on their delivery via further External Events. For example, when the item is shipped trigger a similar journey to the above and send an Inbox message updating the user on their order being shipped and any further details that may be relevant about their delivery that cannot be easily put into a Push Notification.