App targeting is really an exercise in audience segmentation.
It’s about splitting your audience into different groups based on behaviour and sending push notifications accordingly.
There are many advantages to this, but we think there are a few worth special mention.
Focused push notifications
How not to do push notifications
Remember when push notifications were the latest and greatest way to engage your audience? Well, it looks like app developers got the memo.
Now it seems like every app that you download cripples your phone with push notifications. The deluge is only heightened with tech like the Apple Watch, with more information ever-closer to your fingertips.
The problem of course is that they turn into white noise. It happens with any marketing or communication tool – television advertising, colour TV, radio jingles – these sorts of technological innovations invariably fail to hold attention for long.
The result is that yes, push notifications capture user attention, but at the same time, unless your pushes are fantastic, most get ignored.
If you can tailor and segment your push notifications based on audience, then you’re far more likely to get the engagement you want. For example, a shopping app might target their users based on geolocation, reminding them of sales or specials in-store when they’re actually in-store.
Stop funnel leakage
Any sales funnel is going to leak a little. People get distracted, people forget what they’re doing, or decide your check out page is too hard.
Whatever the cause, there’s always going to be some funnel leakage.
But app targeting can help you slow the flood to a trickle.
For example, you might change your targeting so that whenever someone who had abandoned a purchase in the last two days automatically gets a pop-up in your interface that would take them back to their shopping cart.
Alternatively, you could offer a push notification or a message within the app reminding them of their abandonment.
For most cart abandonment, it only takes a little ‘push' to get users back on the right track.
Integrate yourself more closely with the user
With targeted app audiences, you create the opportunity to integrate yourself far more closely with the user.
There are many apps out there. Most people access 27 apps a month!
But on the flip-side, only 5 apps are used regularly.
To help make your app indispensable, you need to give the individual exactly what they need, not what your app users as a whole need.
Travel apps are one category that tend to do this really well. For example, they’ll inform users when their specific flight is running late or on time. They also tend to inform users at the right time, not in general.
Delta Airlines Apple Watch App
That should be the model for any app: offer timely, relevant content and notifications, not general notifications.
While information is great, and providing general information is a good way to get people into your app, to really drive deep user engagement you want your app to provide information that’s right for that moment.
Social media apps are one category that tends to be quite bad at this. For example, Facebook notifies you for every single friend’s birthday. That means most days, most people get a Facebook notification about irrelevant birthdays. While it’s a nice gesture, it’s unlikely that you care about all of your Facebook friends’ birthdays.
But there’s no targeting, like friends who you spend the most time on their page, or message the most frequently, or live in the same city as. The result is far too many notifications for anyone to really engage with.
Targeting would help provide less information, but information that’s more relevant to the individual user.
Conclusion
Targeting can help you create a positive and indispensably useful experience for your users. With ample data on board about your users, you can focus on exactly what they need at exactly the right time. And for apps, that timely, relevant information is far more valuable than a general piece of information.
Users see apps as a single function use – for general use, they’ll use the web. Your notifications, your updates, and your app experience needs to reflect that expectation with the information you provide.
The more targeted you are – via in-app behaviour, location, or based on outside app information – the better off your app is going to be, and the more indispensable your app becomes.
