Making Connections: Appboy Connects Brands to the Stack with Three Major Updates [PRODUCT ANNOUNCEMENT]

We admit it—we’re obsessed with marketing technology stacks. That’s because we’re obsessed with humanizing the relationships betweens brands and customers. The connection? A stack designed with your brand’s needs in mind improves ROI and increases 1:1 engagement across the board.

At this year’s LTR conference, we announced three major new features that were made possible by strategic partner integrations, stack-inspired innovations, and a strong dedication to putting our clients (and their customers) first. Let’s dive in:

Supercharge data export with Appboy Currents

We’re making it easy to accommodate all types of strategies and processes by seamlessly linking Appboy with the rest of your marketing tech stack. Appboy Currents is a high volume data export tool that connects directly to other stack properties in real time. It allows you to send your Appboy data to your data warehouse, business intelligence tools, data management platforms, and other technologies—all in an instant.

While, in theory, exporting data should be as simple as flipping a switch, it usually isn’t. But Currents actually makes that possible. This new feature, currently in beta, handles data at any size and makes it instantly available for use throughout your stack—plus, it’s built to easily scale. It ensures that everyone on your team has open access to whatever Appboy data they need, on any platform, at any time. It’ll fit right into your setup, adding speed, ease-of-use, and functionality to your marketing technology stack.

Currents was made possible using our own tech stack (meta, I know). With support from Amazon Redshift, Currents centralizes marketing data, making it available for business intelligence purposes. Then, we used our integration with Amplitude Analytics to ensure that clients could gain insights from large volumes of customer data in real-time. Finally, we integrated Segment, as well as strategic partner and key connector mParticle, to link Appboy to all of the other marketing technologies connected to your data management platform.

Meet customers where they are with the new Location Marketing Suite

A single, unified view of your customer is essential to cross-channel marketing. The Appboy Location Marketing Suite enables you to create real-time contextual experiences that are targeted and personal.

The Suite includes:

• Location Targeting: With the Appboy platform’s polygonal editor, you can create segments that target customers based on their last known location.
• Geofences: With Appboy’s Action-Based Delivery feature, you can trigger messages in real-time when customers enter and exit pre-defined geographical areas of your choice.
• Location data enrichment: You can tailor messaging based on the type of locations customers visit using dynamic audience filters from PlaceIQ. You might remember Urban Outfitters boosting open rates by 100+% and lifting conversions by 75% using this feature.
• Location data detection: We’ve partnered with Foursquare to grant you access to a global crowdsourced data set that can be used to send location-based messaging triggered real-time. By taking advantage of their Pilgrim SDK with Appboy, you can orchestrate campaigns as customers move through their day.
• Beacons: You can use Gimbal beacons in concert with Appboy to message customers that are in close proximity (from a few centimeters up to 50 meters) of a specific location.

Each of these components join together to provide context that drives better segmentation, more sophisticated personalization, and smarter outreach. Our partnerships with PlaceIQ, Gimbal, and Foursquare work to empower our clients and improve the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Predict and optimize with expanded intelligence capabilities in Appboy Canvas

We’ve eliminated a layer of guesswork from your campaigns. We’re amplifying the effectiveness of your marketing efforts by adding new additions to our Intelligence Suite within Canvas. In true stack fashion, these expansions are specially designed to increase engagement and simplify campaign management.

With Intelligent Delivery, it was already possible to predict and automate the ideal time to reach each user. With our latest expansion, Intelligent Delivery will also predict and automate which messaging channel (such as email, push notifications, in-app messages, webhooks, and more) they’re most likely to engage with. Intelligent Selection in Canvas allows you to automatically predict and distribute amongst the most top performing branch in a given Canvas on an ongoing basis. It uses the multi-armed bandit algorithm to determine how to maximize your returns over the long haul.

These updates are built to orchestrate smarter customer/brand communication and ensure greater accuracy throughout your campaign. By pairing the power of AI with Canvas’ intuitive, drag-and-drop interface, the customer journey instantly becomes easier to manage, understand, and control.

Update: Canvas with Intelligence is now available. Interested Appboy clients should please contact their customer success manager for more information.

Final thoughts

Anything is possible with the right stack—and Appboy’s new offerings make it easier to achieve that promise in your own marketing. By adding new functionality to Canvas and updating our personal stack to support Appboy Currents and the new Location Marketing Suite, we’re able to close important gaps in customer/brand communication and implement a true people-first approach to campaign management. We’re not afraid to take a dose of our own medicine. In fact, we swear by it. 😉 Happy stacking!