Introduction
Even today, we still see mobile marketing platforms that advocate sending out mass broadcast messages to customers with little regard to the demography, location, timezone and context of these customers. With utility usage being the primary charging mechanism that most of our competitors use, is it any coincidence that they suggest firing out as many messages as possible? Increasingly users are starting to fight back, and are becoming more impatient than ever.
Pulsate helps you deepen the relationship
Generic broadcasts damage your brand, and may result in your App being totally deleted from the customers device. It doesn't have to be this way though, executed correctly, in-app messaging can be an excellent opportunity to deepen the relationship between brand and customer. With Pulsate we've made it easy for brands to understand and communicate with their customers like never before. We believe that the world doesn't need another analytics platform with pie charts, and bar graphs. So instead of showing you what happened, we've decided to show you who did what.
By understanding the who, it is our hope that your communication will become more personalised and ultimately more relevant. Once the Pulsate plugin is implemented inside your mobile application, we will begin tracking your customers. At that point when you login to Pulsate you will be able to vividly see your customers for the first time.
You will be able to see customers actual names, avatar, social data, location, and interaction behavior. This is a revelation, now that we are in a better position to truly understand our customers, we can communicate with them in more meaningful, personalised ways, in context of who and where they are.
Here's how it works
At a high level, we track customers that use your mobile app and combine this with data about your customers directly from your CRM. Pulsate presents this data in an easy to use dashboard that allows you to group users, communicate with them and analyze the results.
Segmentation
From here you can segment users into different groups, for example: you can create a group of 'engaged customers' or 'disengaged customers' or customers who live in 'San Francisco' and purchased in the last 30 days.
By dividing your customer base into different segments we can now send laser targeted communication to specific segments without affecting the entire customer base, resulting in a better response rate for the segment you are communicating with.
Communication
There are two types of communication in Pulsate:
- Campaigns (sent to multiple users)
- Conversations (sent to one individual user)
Campaigns
Lets discuss Campaigns first. the campaign builder allows you to create a push notification text which will appear on the users device, and also a landing screen that is displayed once the user opens the push notification. This is perfect for communicating with many customers at once, when we say many customers though - we don't mean "all off them" - we're talking about sending a campaign to a specific segment.
The campaign builder is perfect for sending rich content to customers as part of the communication such as video, images, coupons, surveys etc.
Note: The campaign builder has three main targeting options: Segment, Geofence or Beacons. Instead of targeting a campaign at a segment of customers (behaviors & demography), you can alternatively specify geofences (virtual perimeters) to serve as the trigger event for a campaign being sent. Meaning that if any customer with the app, walks inside one of these geofences you can send them and appropriately targeted communication or offer.
Conversations
Conversations are different to campaigns in that they are individual text based messages which are sent to a specific customer. The other key difference to campaigns is that conversations are two-way, meaning that the customer can respond to your message and thus a private conversation thread is created between the admin and customer. When the admin sends a direct message to a user, it sends it as a push notification so that the customer is alerted to its presence. When the customer opens the notification it invokes the "in-app inbox" (provided as part of the Pulsate plugin), and the direct message is rendered right inside your mobile application. The customer can then choose to simply read and acknowledge the message or optionally can reply to the admin.
It is worth mentioning at this point that customers do not have to wait to for the admin to message them in order to establish a dialogue. Via the "In-app inbox" customers can choose to compose a new message directly to the admin, we feel that this allows customers to voice any complaints, feedback or feature suggestions in private, rather than going onto social media channels and potentially causing brand damage.
Reporting
The reporting module allows you to analyse the results of campaigns that have been sent out. We track the number of messages sent, opens, unique opens and open rate.