New Airship Preference Center Gives Marketers Full Control to Retain Consumer Opt-ins Without Ongoing Developer Support Ahead of Changes to iOS 15 Notifications

Brands can now quickly adapt to customer interests and preferences with optimal opt-in strategies for maximum relevance, retention and reach

Apple’s newly introduced iOS 15 gives consumers greater control over how, when and where notifications arrive on their phone. If these new features are broadly adopted, current practices for notifications may not light up smartphone screens to immediately alert users. Since most iPhones will soon be running on iOS 15, it’s imperative that brands optimize their mobile engagement strategies to better serve their valuable app audiences with individualized preferences and exceptional, real-time experiences.

“The Forrester Wave™: Mobile Engagement Automation, Q3 2020”

In order to accelerate brands’ efforts, customer engagement company Airship announced the availability of Airship Preference Center — the industry’s first marketer-friendly preference center that makes it simple to create, manage and optimize customers’ opt-in choices without ongoing developer support or requisite app updates for the App Store or Google Play.

In addition to Airship Preference Center, the company’s day-one support for iOS 15 allows marketers to specify interruption levels for notifications — Passive, Active, Time Sensitive, or Critical — which iOS 15 uses to determine how they will be delivered. For example, a notification can be set to break through a ‘Focus’ mode to immediately alert a user, or it can be selected to arrive with an audible alert or not. Marketers can also use Airship to set relevance scores for notifications and to add rich media, which alongside user behavior, sets the order and prominence of a brand’s messages within the user-scheduled Notifications Summary.

“Mobile apps have been a lifeline for both businesses and consumers throughout the pandemic, offering faster purchasing, richer content and streamlined conveniences like curbside pickup. However, new user-centric notification controls mean marketers must be much clearer and more precise in the preference choices offered to customers to ensure the communications they receive are relevant and valued,” said Brett Caine, CEO and president, Airship. “Airship Preference Center brings unparalleled speed and flexibility to understand individual customer preferences, and fine-tune the experience with the full power of our platform to reach people when and where it matters most to them.”

Airship Preference Center is seamlessly integrated within Airship’s SaaS Customer Engagement Platform, enabling marketers to easily guide customers to their preference center through contextually triggered in-app messages or any number of cross-channel journeys for onboarding, loyalty enrollment, new subscription content and more. Airship’s easy-to-use composer enables marketers to quickly create multiple subscription lists spanning popular interests, topics or types of messages without the need for developer support.

For example, marketing messages like sales events and flash deals, or transactional messages like monthly statements or delivery/curbside pickup alerts, provide a range of urgency and convenience that expands consumer choice and improves long term opt-in retention as customers get what they want on each mobile channel. Marketers can automate combining opt-in selections with customers’ real-time mobile behaviors for hyper-personalized messaging. It’s also easy to track list opt-ins or review in-depth Performance Analytics reports to continually fine-tune and enhance options offered to customers.

“As pandemic restrictions lift and broad-scale travel resumes it’s absolutely vital that we connect our customers to the best values and broader inspiration to satisfy pent-up wanderlust,” said Dave McCormick, Managing Director – Product & Design, Alaska Airlines. “Airship’s Preference Center will provide an easy and efficient way to ensure marketing messages do not diminish the role our mobile app plays as a real-time travel companion, notifying customers of when they can check-in or if there happens to be a gate change.”

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Airship was recently named a Leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Mobile Engagement Automation, Q3 2020,” receiving the highest score in the Strategy category and the second highest score in the Current Offering category.

Also, for the second consecutive year, Airship was positioned highest in its ability to execute and also furthest for its completeness of vision in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Platforms¹, and received the highest Product Scores across all three Use Cases in Gartner’s 2020 Critical Capabilities for Mobile Marketing Platforms², including the Acquisition, Engagement and Retention Use Cases.

¹Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Platforms” by Mike McGuire, Anna Maria Virzi, Joseph Enever, October 26, 2020

²Gartner “Critical Capabilities for Mobile Marketing Platforms” by Mike McGuire, Anna Maria Virzi, Joseph Enever, October 29, 2020