As any seasoned industry insider will tell you, one of the hallmark’s of the app business is intense competition. For this reason, organizations need to have as much efficacy and efficiency built into their communications strategies as possible. From this perspective, audience notifications are a powerful tool for increasing app engagement, app open rates, user retention and revenue, among others. However, the prevailing logic in the market is to follow a multichannel approach as it is considered the industry standard by current market incumbents.
Multichannel has its place in certain industries such as Finance and eCommerce, but more often than not fails to deliver results in the world of app communications. The multichannel approach follows a hedging strategy, the thinking being that by implementing a mix of communication channels, the desired results should statistically be achievable. It also should be noted that this approach can work, but requires a large amount of resources to manage and run effectively.
The purpose of this article is to create an understanding around the top 5 problems with multichannel user engagement platforms, and to make a recommendation as to what would certainly be a better bet.
Multichannel requires a larger team
A multichannel communication strategy requires more people in the team in order to manage each of the channels effectively. This is not generally an issue for well established businesses that have strong market presence and revenues and already have marketing departments dedicated to the growth of their app. However, most digital businesses find themselves in either the startup phase, or running agile teams to keep overheads down. They therefore don’t generally have the manpower available to manage multichannel communication strategies. Additionally, larger teams means more fixed costs, more variable costs and, and invariably less profitability.
Multichannel spreads the focus thin
We have all heard the old adage ‘a jack of all trades, but a master of none’ and this wisdom applies perfectly to the multichannel user engagement platform approach from the perspective of businesses that don’t have the resources available to them that some of the bigger more established ones do. What this means is that for smaller more agile businesses, the resources that the organization do have will be worn extremely thin by trying to manage multiple communication channels. Additionally, a large majority of the current multi channel platform incumbents push the multichannel approach as a veiled mitigation strategy on their part. The reason for this is that they themselves are jacks of all trades, but a master of none. This means that they lack the ability to deliver the required results in one channel, and therefore shift the focus to a multichannel approach in order to hedge against failure in each of the channels that they implement.
Furthermore, from a purely business perspective, doing many things in a mediocre way is the only surefire way to ensure failure and wastage of the finite resources and energy that the business possesses.
It is throttled by iOS16
In iOS16, Apple designed three new ways of displaying push notifications that users can choose from:
- Count view: the device will hide notifications and show the number of pushes received at the bottom of the lock screen. By tapping on this number, the user will see a list of all pushes and their contents.
- Stacked view: A brand new option where all notifications appear at the bottom of the lock screen and do not disturb the user. Push notifications are stacked one above the other with the last message at the top. To see them all, you have to click on this stack.
- Expanded list view: in this mode the entire vertical screen space is utilized and notifications are displayed partly in full, partly as a summary.
The main outcome of these tighter regulations around push notifications is a shift in focus. Where once applications could use a spray and pray method of broadcasting their communication, they are now having to rethink the quality and value-added to each push. Users are no longer willing to accept being inundated by intrusive marketing communications and only give their time and attention to messages that are truly wanted, warranted and add value to their experience. This means that applications are to be relevant, not only in terms of their message, but also the time and place that these messages are delivered.
From the perspective of the multichannel communication approach and the platforms offered by current market incumbents, this creates a major hurdle to efficacy as the current solutions are limited in the functionality they can provide to make the distinctions necessary to be relevant in the way that iOS16 and consumers are demanding. Additionally, Android is following suit on their platform, which means that reaching any part of the market is getting more and more difficult without the relevant knowledge and know-how.
It makes optimizing inefficient and difficult
When it comes to creating efficiency and efficacy within your communication channels, it is evident that the more channels that you have within your channel mix, the more resources that are needed to manage them, and as such it is also true that the more channels that you have in your mix, the more difficult it becomes, especially for smaller teams, to optimize each channel and take advantage of the knowledge and wisdom gained within those channels.
From this perspective, it is far more practical and economical to choose just one channel to focus on, and then to test, tweak and optimize that channel for efficiency. In this regard, A/B testing is a powerful tool that can offer exponential efficiency and growth for marketing teams, as it allows the team to not only focus and learn in one channel, but also to streamline all activities towards success in the chosen channel.
By removing the multichannel approach to communications, marketing teams are able to mitigate the challenges associated with spreading the focus too widely.
It dilutes the return on investment
Finally, it is now truer than ever before, that in the modern business environment, budgets are finite and delivering a return on investment is the most important objective of any marketing team.And the multichannel approach, by its very nature, requires an investment into each channel in order to try to make it successful. This budgetary requirement means that funds available within each channel become very limited and even become ineffectual if the budget was small to begin with. From this perspective, it almost seems logical that success in any one channel, within the multichannel approach, would invariably come by luck and not from intelligence and understanding, and the success achieved would need to be exponentially large in order to justify the investments in each of the unsuccessful channels and show a return on investment.
The solution… Intelligence and focus
What is evident from the discussion held in this article so far, is that the multichannel approach to user communications is an imperfect option for many app businesses, especially those that are in the startup phase, or are running agile teams with the aim of keeping overheads low. The only solution of any consequence is therefore to leverage intelligence and focus on a single channel that can deliver the results the business is not only looking for, but also needs.
nGrow.ai is an artificial intelligence push notifications platform, backed by the famed Y Combinator, that leverages the power of Machine Learning to ensure that the right messages are delivered to the right audiences at the right time. nGrow.ai offers a no SDK / low code implementation that dramatically reduces the integration time to between 1-7 days, thereby reducing the development burden on the client and exponentially speeds up the time to market. Additionally, it seamlessly integrates with most analytical and engagement platforms, allowing to run effective campaigns from the get-go.
Implementing nGrow has been a game changer for many both startups and enterprise-level companies globally. For instance Qure.Finance, a mobile fintech application was able to achieve a daily retention increase of over 26%, an increase of 44%+ in conversion growth, as well as an over 200% uplift in their CTR. Similarly, Brickit — an app that analyzes unstructured Lego pieces via the mobile phone camera, and suggests construction types that can be built with the pieces available, saw similar results in only a few weeks from implementation.
The factor that separates nGrow.ai and the rest of the existing multichannel user platform incumbents is quite simply — intelligence. It is intelligence that delivers added value to the in app user experience, and intelligence that delivers exponential increases to the app revenue, CTR, daily retention rates and conversion growth.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that for the majority of growing mobile businesses a multichannel approach to user communications is not only an inefficient approach, but also irrelevant. The multichannel approach requires large amounts of resources to manage and achieve success. It spreads already lean teams even thinner, it makes optimizing channels extremely difficult and even contributes to diluting return on investment. And if that wasn’t challenging enough, recent updates to the Apple iOS and planned changes to Android, are making push notifications even more difficult to get through to the end user.
The challenges in this space are best addressed by choosing to do one thing, and then doing that one thing to the best of your ability. And from this perspective, nGrow is not only the logical choice when it comes to extracting value from your push notification strategy, it is also the most credible.
Click here to find out more about how nGrow can help your app business grow.