Release the minimum viable product, iterate often, and respond to user feedback. These are all pretty standard beliefs for the development teams of the world. Unfortunately, the user isn’t always interested in upgrading. Maybe they haven’t noticed the small upgrade overlay on the app store icon or perhaps they don’t know the value of your latest version.

Today I’ll walk you through two complementary in-app messaging campaigns that will help increase the likelihood your users will upgrade to the newest version of your application.

As a refresher, the Localytics in-app messaging platform allows you to send rich, customized messages, specifically crafted for individual audience segments directly based on your analytics data. Because it is based on your user segments and in-app triggers, you are able to refine the experience to best suit the right audience rather than a broad-stroke, non-targeted, campaign.

Campaign 1 – Standard Upgrade Notice

Our first campaign will be similar to what you’ve seen throughout apps far and wide; it will target anyone who launches an older version of the application. From the marketing tab, create a new campaign named “Broad Advertisement”. After naming the campaign you have two options on what your campaign will look like, you can upload your layout and message or you can easily build a creative right in the Localytics interface. This creative should have some descriptive text calling out the benefits of the next version (e.g. “Fixed that annoying bug that causes app to crash” or “Now with more bacon!”) and a call-to-action, prompting users to click through to upgrade to the latest version. Through the Localytics Creative Builder, you can ensure that the typography and color fit within your specific style guidelines.

The goal of this campaign is to target all users of the previous version of the app. For this campaign, we’ll filter our users where the dimension “application version” isn’t the current application version. We want to target all users who are even remotely active; any user who’s had at least one session in the past month will be our qualifying action. This combination of filtering and qualifying behavior ensures we’re only targeting users who are even slightly active on any older version of the app.

With our creative done and recipients identified, we’ll identify an aggressive event trigger. When selecting an event trigger, pick an event that you’re sure will be fired early into a user’s session. Picking an event that is almost guaranteed to happen for every user ensures that most users will receive the campaign.

Schedule this campaign to run for 90 days.

Campaign 2 – Targeted Notification

Our second campaign is more granularly targeted. We want to target only users who are engaging with features that have improvements in the newer version of the application. For purposes of our example, the V1 of our app has sharing functionality. V1 allows users to share to Facebook. In the V2 release, our app enhances sharing to include Twitter, SMS, and email in addition to Facebook.

From the marketing tab, create a new campaign named “Targeted Upgrade – Sharers”. Develop your creative, using either the creative builder or uploading your own. Your descriptive text should be specific. In our sharing example something like “In V2 you can share even more ways, we’ve added Twitter, SMS and email sharing”; the call to action should, as in campaign 1, prompt users to click through to upgrade.

The goal of this specific campaign is to target just users of V1 who are utilizing the sharing feature, which is enhanced in V2. As in campaign 1, we’ll fitler our users where the dimension “application version” isn’t the current application version and target users who are remotely active.

Unlike campaign 1, we don’t want a trigger that will fire early in a users session. We want to hit the users at just the right place and just the right time. As we are targeting just users who are utilizing the sharing feature, we’ll want to trigger the creative appearance on the “sharing summary” event.

Schedule this campaign to run for 90 days.

Hopefully every release of your app adds valuable features for your users, and you can follow this pattern to drive upgrades by targeting frequent users of upgraded features.

Wrap up

After activating both of these campaigns, your users will start receiving the upgrade notifications. To help you further understand the impact these campaigns have, navigate to the app versions by day report in your Localytics dashboard. In that report, add a comment on the day you’ve activated these campaigns; going forward you’ll always have that indicator as a reminder. Running these campaigns for a few weeks should reduce the number of users you have on older versions of your application.

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M-commerce is one of the fast growing and unique segments of any retailer’s engagement with their buyer. With the rapid adoption of mobile, especially in commerce, it is vital that your marketing campaigns be more engaging and relevant to mobile users than ever before.

Today I’ll walk you through setting up a campaign that will increase sales.

As a refresher, the Localytics in-app marketing platform allows you to send rich, customized messages, specifically crafted for individual audience segments directly based on your analytics data. Because it is based on your user segments and in-app triggers, you are able to refine the experience to best suit the right audience rather than a broad-stroke, non-targeted, campaign.

Adding items to a shopping cart and never checking out, what could be worse? This behavior is frustrating as a marketer and something that is yours to improve. You continually want to find ways to improve those major conversion events throughout the business, and with mobile it is even more imperative to optimize the experience given the small form-factor with which the shopper is working. In the M-commerce world, the major conversion event is purchasing. With Localytics mobile app analytics you can create a countless segments, e.g. one that tracks users who have multiple items in their shopping cart with a total value greater than $100 but never check out. Then you can create a campaign that targets this user segment. The campaign should encourage them to checkout and perhaps offer promotions to help facilitate the checkout conversion.

How can you start a campaign like this in your app?

Step 1 – Tag the app & build the segment

First, as you’re working through your Localytics implementation, create an event for “item added” to shopping cart, your application likely has a way to track this already. This event will track how often items are added to the user’s shopping cart. With this event you will likely want to add a couple relevant bits of information about that “item added” e.g. item name, value, quantity. Then, using the same approach used to create the “item added” event, you’ll create an event for “check out successful”. This event will track each time a user successfully completed the order process.

From the Localytics dashboard, navigate to the Segment screen and create a segment of users who, in the past 30 days, did the “item added” event and then never did the “check out successful” event. Name the segment “Non-purchasers with items in cart” and save it. This segment will now track all customers in the past 30 days that have added an item to the shopping cart and never checked out.

Step 2 – Build the campaign

Now that we’ve built a segment of users who have items in their shopping carts and haven’t checked out, we can target those individuals directly.

From the marketing tab, create a new campaign named “Free Shipping – Stale items in cart”. After naming the campaign you have two options on what your campaign will look like, you can upload your layout and message or you can easily build a creative right in the Localytics interface. This creative should have a some descriptive text and a call-to-action, prompting users to click through to their shopping cart or a pre-checkout page. Through the Localytics Creative Builder, you can ensure that the typography and color fit within your specific style guidelines.

The goal of this campaign is to increase sales from a known group of interested buyers; as such, we can be aggressive in when the creative is displayed. We will want to make sure when we are selecting our targeted recipients that we use the segment “Non-purchasers with items in cart” which we created in Step 1 above. In addition to using the segment, we want to make sure that we target shoppers that are continuing to browse through products therefore we can define a qualifying action or event such as “category viewed”. To make sure that we don’t overwhelm the shopper with messaging we will qualify them for this messaging if they viewed a category four times in the last five days.

Once we know who we are going to target, we need to decide when to deliver the message via a trigger. You could use an event trigger such as “product viewed”. Using this event as a trigger allows you to not only entice the user to add an item to the cart as they are already interested in a product but will also help facilitate the completion of the purchase within that session.

The conversion event for this campaign will be the “check out successful” event. Setting this event as the conversion event will let us see how many people saw the creative, how many clicked the call-to-action, and how many eventually checked out. Schedule this campaign to run for 365 days.

Step 3 – Review performance and adjust accordingly

With your campaign active, you will begin to see results within the campaign dashboard. You will see the number of impressions, clicks and successful conversions. In monitoring this dashboard, you may see your campaign get many impressions but few clicks. If the trend continues, should consider testing your campaign further using an A/B test. As part of Creative Builder, you can create or upload multiple creatives for each campaign and track effectiveness of each. If your campaign is generating lots of impressions and clicks, but few conversions, it may be a sign that your promotion is not enticing enough to push the shopper to purchase and you could reconsider other promotional options.

Wrap up

After running this campaign for a few weeks, you should see fewer people with un-purchased items in their shopping carts. You should continue to monitor your analytics for other areas where you could run a campaign. Other areas that may be worth targeting: unspent reward points / gift card balance, users purchasing as guests rather than registered, and limited time / flash sales.

With the broad release of the Localytics contextual marketing platform, I wanted to share with you three campaigns that every customer should run. As a refresher, the Localytics contextual marketing platform allows you to send rich, customized messages, specifically crafted for individual audience segments, automatically, based on your analytics data. Because it is based on user segments and in-app triggers, if you can analyze something, you can message to it in-app.

One of the most common questions I get when chatting with customers is “What campaigns should I run”? While the answer to that question varies by app type, industry segment, and goals, there are three campaigns that I think every app should run.

Rate my app

You’ve got your app in the app store and no one is rating it. A high rating can significantly increase your app’s adoption while also, potentially, bringing you fame and fortune. There are thousands of different ways to prompt users to rate your app, and a quick google search yields hundreds of code snippets.

Using Localytics in-app messaging, you can target all users of your app and request they rate it. But let’s take this concept to the next level. It’s not always desirable to have all your users rate your app. All things being equal, you’d want the users who were most deeply engaged with your app to rate it. They’d be best qualified to write a compelling review. Based on the analytic information generated by Localytics, you can target just those users. As an example, you could target users who had both many sessions per week and who triggered a number of events in the core functionality of the app.

Upgrade to the latest version

You’ve added great features and you fixed all the annoying bugs. Your new users get a great new experience, while your existing users plod along enjoying v.Old. As with app rating, there are a number of different ways to get users to upgrade. Denial of features, pushing notification, or simply letting them continue all work, to some degree.

With Localytics contextual marketing, you can prompt a user to upgrade at just the right time. Using the analytics you’ve already implemented, you can target a campaign for users as they are active in a section that, if upgraded, would have new functionality. Additionally, the message your user sees will have a link that will take them directly to the itunes store to upgrade, reducing potential drop off. Also, because you know the section your user is active in, you can gear the message specifically to that area. As an example, if I was in the sharing section of an older version of your app, you could prompt me upgrade by tell me about all the great new sharing features in the new version. Prompting me at the right place and right time is much more compelling than a simple message to “upgrade now”.

Outage notification

Your app is running smoothly. Your adoption is growing in leaps and bounds. Then, the cloud service upon which you depend, suffers a major outage. No one can access your app. You hit all the social media channels; but people opening your app have no idea why it’s not working. You could push an app update that lets users know what’s going on, but that requires both app store approval and user action.

With Localytics contextual marketing, you can broadcast a message out to all users. Sending an in-app message does not require an app update and allows you get your notification users within minutes of an outage. Additionally, once the outage is over, you can quickly remove the outage.

I hope these campaigns give you some idea of how to get started with in-app messaging.