Appboy simplifies its action-triggered app marketing with Campaign Connector

Mobile marketing platforms are boosting their automation chops. Last week, for instance, Leanplum unveiled its action- and timeline-oriented User Lifecycle Engine for orchestrating multiple campaigns.

Today, app marketing platform Appboy is announcing its Campaign Connector, which it has been testing for several months.

It enables a mobile marketer to more easily create multi-stage, triggered campaigns directed at a single user. They are based around actions like opening an email or failing to install an app, and they include different sequences of communications depending on the sequence of actions by that user.

Appboy has allowed triggered campaigns based on actions, location, or time since April, chief revenue officer Myles Kleeger pointed out, but it required more steps.

Above: A flowchart of an Appboy triggered campaign.

Image Credit: Appboy

This new addition is designed to make the workflow easier and faster for creating multi-stage campaigns with sequences of messages — and to keep messages out of the stream if the user responds in a given way.

A marketer might, for instance, create a personalized message that provides a 20 percent off coupon for some app-based product once the user has registered in that app, with a higher-discount coupon sent after a week if the user hasn’t started using the app. Other messages could be triggered by subsequent actions or inactions.

Kleeger said Campaign Connector is the latest step in the evolution of Appboy’s Action-Based Delivery sequences. It began with Triggered Campaigns in April that are automatically spurred by an action. That was followed by Event Properties that added properties to triggers, such as the amount of time allowed for a user to complete a level in an app before sending a message.

Mobile marketing platforms are getting increasingly sophisticated about the automation to drive their campaigns — moving in the direction of capabilities found in their older and bigger cousins, major marketing automation platforms like Adobe. In March, for instance, Urban Airship unveiled Lifecycle Lists for automating messaging and other mobile marketing based on action triggers.

Kleeger told me that Appboy’s approach is unified “around individual profiles,” with user-level profile data for its push notifications, in-app messages, and email. This focus on first-party personalization instead of anonymous device ID, he said, is a key differentiator.