The future of mobile CRM

With customers beginning to tire of the onslaught of push notifications how can you ensure your message keeps getting heard?

Push notifications must have initially seemed too good to be true for the gambling industry. The ability to communicate directly and immediately with customers with an open rate close to 100% was like something out of a fantasy world for an old-school email marketer. But with Betfair alone sending 30m notifications in nine months, this is now a heavily saturated market. And getting your voice heard is increasingly an issue as customers are starting to turn off the wall of noise on their phones.

After a brief period of all-out assault on iPhone users, brands are starting to understand how to use the platform in a more targeted and intelligent manner, with the use of rich-push and in-app messaging starting to gain more prominence. It will be far harder to win back people’s trust than it was to lose it, and so the new battle lines are beginning to be drawn

In-app messaging, rich-push and targeted messaging with customers fully in control is where the current thinking lies. “You have such a potential disadvantage if you frustrate the customer,” Michael Richardson, co-founder and EMEA technical director of push messaging specialists Urban Airship, says. “The customer is 100% in control of this channel. They can turn o_ notifications, and they can delete the app, so you really have to respect them.”

The key to this is putting the user in full control of the notifications with a clear panel within the app allowing them to turn notifications off either en masse or individually. At the current time, however, most of the apps from the major operators take a brutally simplistic approach to push messaging. Users hit with the pop up message on opening the app asking for their permission are often opting in to all notifications, and the targeting is left solely to the marketer on the other end.

“One of the things we recommend is giving the customer more control in the application. Push notifications are the only voice you can have on this channel and just like an actual voice it needs to not be annoying. Giving the customer control is hugely empowering,” Richardson says.

The good, the bad and the ugly

A good example of easily controlled notifications can be found within Betfair’s Sportsbook and Exchange apps. Both apps offer a full screen of individually selectable options for areas like offers and alerts from various sports. The more relevant a notification is for a customer the more accepted it’s going to be. In Betfair’s case this is through sending score updates to users of their exchange and sportsbook app who have placed a bet on football, tennis or horse racing. Of the 30m sent, around 3m were opened and of those 38% went on to place a bet. In other words that is 1.14m bets placed from 30m push notifications sent.

Ross Sleight, chief strategy officer at mobile marketing experts Somo, agrees the consumer needs to be in control. “Customers need to control the messaging. The more personal, relevant and contextually aware the messages are then the more they will accept them. The more mass segment, boring and irrelevant they are the more they will reject them,” he says. There are multiple examples of bad push messaging in the mobile world, from messages sent at two in the morning to messages begging the user to come back to the app because they are missed.

So what makes a good message? “Ensuring that you offer a specific audience a valuable engagement at the optimum time is the mantra here,” Sleight says. “The context and timing of mobile push messages is crucial.” This doesn’t need to be score updates or unique targeted offers to be of value to the customers, with service messages also proving effective at driving engagement. Bet settlement alerts have proved successful in the past both in terms of user feedback and activity.

Keeping it relevant

The key to avoiding the dreaded switch off is relevance, and this is driven by data and targeting. This doesn’t mean the death of mass brand messaging, but it does mean being very selective in how you use it. For a major event such as Cheltenham or the Grand National sportsbook operators can afford to go big with a major offer to a large section of its user base. For example Paddy Power might push a message advertising a money-back on the favourite winning for one of the big Cheltenham events to any user who has bet on horse racing.

“You can have relatively large campaigns that have the voice of the brand behind them,” Richardson says. “You should have some strategy around it, and it should be short and relevant to what is going on. You can also use those to test out while you are doing background work on the one-to-one service orientated stuff.” But the smarter operators are moving away from the mass market and towards targeted, personalised user-specific content.

Paddy Power is one of the leaders in push and they noted in a recent presentation a concerted drive towards ever more segmented messaging. “We want to continually be developing the possibilities of rich push, high-touch segmentation and advanced geo-location,” the firm said. Some segmentation at Paddy Power is cleverly done through their use of team pages on both the desktop and mobile app where users choose their favourite football team.

Paddy Power mobile users are then shown stats and data on their team and sent push messages directly related to the upcoming fixtures. Around 200,000 people have signed up for the team pages so far giving Paddy Power a large group of carefully self-segmented customers for them to directly target. It’s something of a marketers dream, but the content still needs to be right.

“Providing value with the message is the key thing. Is this going to be relevant to the consumer right then and there? That is the winning strategy we are seeing,” Richardson says. “Expectation among consumers is getting higher and there is more expectation on a good notification strategy. We are sending 6 billion a month so you need to make sure they are relevant to the customer.”

Moving in-app

Relevant targeted messages will only take a CRM strategy so far, however. With the sheer volume of push messaging, as shown by Urban Airship’s 6bn a month number, there will be an increasing reluctance to hit the ‘allow’ button on new apps from customers. And as users get more accustomed to, and accosted by, push they will soon learn how to turn off notifications they had previously opted in to. The solution to all this is in-app messaging.

In-app messaging gives a unified inbox that allows operators to address its entire audience, including people who have not opted into notifications. The next time they log into the app they will see they have messages and that familiar nagging icon in the bottom or top corner of the screen is hard to resist. “We recommend you don’t have that on the application icon as that can be quite frustrating,” Richardson says. “Inside the app it’s a very strong driver that is more passive than active and it takes advantage of the platform but doesn’t drive people crazy.” In the US in-app messaging on mobile is being used by a number of major brands including Starbucks, and it offers far more than a simple platform for generic status messages and offers. The ability to use rich-push within the app is a huge opportunity to do brand messaging, show off a new feature or cross sell into a new app. Urban Airship cite an example of surfing brand RipCurl offering notifications of surf contests where the user clicks on a link and is sent to a webcam feed from Malaysia. But that’s just one example.

Sportsbook operators could use rich push to direct users to streaming feeds or in-play coverage of events users have bet on. Gaming operators could use rich push to demonstrate its live casino offering or demo new games, while poker operators could show strategy videos or live feeds of tournaments. Sleight says he has some concerns rich push will fall into the trap of alienating consumers by trying too hard to be flashy or glitzy, but says it has significant potential for driving engagement. Richardson also notes its potential for two way engagement. “You can use that to further enhance the customer experience and things like surveys are going to become a lot more common,” he adds. But once more the key will be not to abuse the function and risk alienating users, who retain the power to simply delete the app and use a less intrusive competitor’s product instead.

“I think the onus is going to be on the brands to demonstrate up front they are going to provide value to the customer and not expect people to blindly trust them,” he says. The home screen of the device is the most valuable real estate on the planet and before somebody lets a brand communicate with them on that they are going to need to know it is going to help them in some way. “Even before a prompt to opt in for notifications you need to demonstrate value. That is going to be key in the future,” Richardson says. And for operators, that is something they can’t afford to ignore.