Be Pushier to Engage & Retain

Mobile has changed the digital experience but it has not diminished the importance of messaging and there are now an abundance of solutions available to help brands re-engage and retain users from their smartphones.

Flurry from Oath (formerly Yahoo!), for example, recently unveiled Flurry Push, a free push notification offering from the new Flurry Marketing Suite that will enable app developers to send targeted messages across users Android and iOS devices.

For the unfamiliar, push notifications are essentially just messages sent to app users when an app is running in the background but not in use; that makes it possible to target users at critical moments when there has been a lapse in engagement.

Developers using Flurry Push will be able to choose between three types of push notification campaigns:

+ Promotional: Schedule one-time, daily, weekly, or as-it-happens push notifications to drive engagement with new features, events, contests or other app content.

+ New User Retention: Convert new users who have recently installed the app to active users and increase overall retention.

+ Event Driven: Re-engage and convert users following a specific event or behavior within the app.

Developers using Flurry Push will also have access to analytics, be able to access triggers (to automatically send messages based on app-install time, events or other audience attributes), and even take advantage of some segmentation capabilities (targeting users by geographic, demographic and behavioral attributes).

Brands including Yahoo Finance and Pacer Health have been testing Flurry Push, and so far, they've seen powerful results.

"Push notifications are a critical component of our retention strategy, but historically, we've had to build the feature into our app or partner with third-party messaging vendors," said Michael Caldwell, Co-Founder of Pacer Health, Inc. "Flurry Push has made it incredibly easy to re-engage users from directly within the Flurry marketing suite for free, and so far, we've seen powerful results."