You have collected a wealth of runtime intelligence via Revulytics Software Usage Analytics which has helped you unearth some interesting trends about your users. Your top concerns are that some of your main features are not being discovered by trial users, you have way too many customers still dragging their feet running older versions of your product and through conversion analytics you discovered that users who do not convert to a purchased license within the first 20 days of evaluation have a big chance of turning into a lost lead.
It is now time to start taking action and fix these problems, but what is the best way to get through to your users? Until today, Email was your only means of communicating with customers, but now you need a more engaging communication channel which offers 100% visibility. Luckily Revulytics can make this easy for you with its ReachOut in-app messaging technology.
In short, in-app messaging is a great way to interact with your users and share important information while they are engaged with your product. By having control on when to deliver the message, you are targeting users at the right time, when their attention is on the product and your brand is at the top of their mind. It also means that you are guaranteed that the user sees your message at the most critical time because they are engaged with your software, as opposed to running into the risks of email campaigns which are blocked by spam filters, lost in an inbox full of unread emails, bounce due to incorrect or inexistent email address, or simply reach the users at the wrong time when they are not interested in what you have to say.
ReachOut in-app marketing is designed to work hand in hand with the runtime intelligence data you collect from Revulytics Usage Intelligence and allows you to create personalized and highly targeted marketing campaigns by leveraging user profile data that is provided by the Revulytics Analytics engine. In order to run an effective marketing campaign, the messages you send out should contain specific benefits for the recipient and thus should be relevant in context. For example, a discount on renewals would be irrelevant to someone who is still evaluating the product and such a user would likely find the message annoying. The same is true if you try to upsell an advanced feature of your software to somebody who has not yet got his head around the basics. By using ReachOut you can create campaigns tailored specifically to match particular recipient profiles and make sure that each of your target users receive a message that resonates. This makes your campaign more personal and thus much more effective.
Marketing automation such as email followups or drip campaigns have been proven to help increase conversions and user engagement if timed well. However one major problem with Email campaigns is that the only metric you can use to determine when to send a followup message is the number of days since download. In reality this metric has nothing to do with how much time the user has spent running your application. One user might run your application 10 times and spend hours experimenting with your software in a single day, whilst another busy user might spend 2 whole weeks without launching your software once. Clearly these 2 scenarios require a very different message when following up, which is practically impossible to achieve with email drip campaigns.
With the Usage Intelligence framework you can easily create customizable drip campaigns that can be pushed to your clients at very specific intervals based on how much time each user has spent engaged with your application and how many days they had it installed. This gives you the potential to create specific messages that resonate in each scenario.
One of the major benefits of using ReachOut campaigns is that you can choose from a huge list of criteria to specifically select your target audience. Do you want to personalize your message and address users based on their primary language or geo location? With ReachOut this is easily achievable by using several filtering options, such as the country, operating system language, or the language your product is installed in if it supports that. You could also target users based on their runtime statistics or machine architecture, for example send out a message to all users who have downloaded your software from a specific landing page, have been running it for more than 30 days in trial mode, are running Windows 7 Pro on a desktop with a dual monitor, have at least 8GB of RAM and resolution of 1280px.
The list of criteria that may be used to target a ReachOut campaign include:
Geographical Region | Country where the product is installed |
Days Installed | Number of days the software has been installed |
Product Usage | Number of hours the software has run since install, number of times the software has been executed |
Feature Usage | The number of times the user engaged with a specific feature or set of features within your product |
Product Details | Edition, version, build, language |
License | License type (evaluation, purchased, freeware etc.), License Status (activated, expired, whitelisted, blacklisted), License Key |
OS Details | Operating system, word length (32 bit / 64 bit), language, .NET Framework version |
Architecture | Computer type (desktop, laptop / mobile), amount of memory, number of CPU cores, CPU type, graphics card vendor and model, virtual machine type and if touch screen is present |
Display | Number of monitors, horizontal resolution, vertical resolution and screen pixels per inch |
Java Environment | Java version, vendor, runtime, AWT graphics environment and VM details |
Custom Properties | Clients matching any custom property value that you collect via the SDK |
ReachOut provides you with two different delivery methods which can be customized for each campaign. These include:
Let’s see how easy it is to create a campaign…
You've been looking at your Conversion Funnel reports and you've learned that most users convert within the first 20 days of the 30 days evaluation, therefore there is a high risk that if the product is not purchased within that time frame you will lose the lead. You decide to monetize on these lost leads by offering these prospects the following discounts:
Now let’s create the first campaign:
To create the second campaign, simply repeat the same steps but provide a new image and specify the range for installed days between 26 and 30 days instead.
You have published a new whitepaper on how customers can benefit from some advanced features in your software. For this reason you want to send it out to all users who have run your software more than 10 times and have spent at least 50 hours of usage. To be able to download the whitepaper, you have a form available online which users need to fill in to access the download.
Let’s create a campaign to display this form to all users who match the above criteria:
You company has decided that as of April 30, it will no longer provide support for version 1.0 of its software product. However the Version Distribution reports provided by Usage Intelligence show that you still have a number of customers using this version and you’d like to let them know. You decide to push out a message to these customers using the notification system implemented in your application, which retrieves messages from ReachOut and displays them in a balloon notification.
Create the campaign as follows:
The following is the C# code used in the application to display the notification:
string message = "";
int msgCount;
int msgType;
//rui is your RUISDK instance
RUIResult result = rui.CheckForReachOut(out message, out msgCount, out
msgType);
if (msgCount > 0)
{
NotifyIcon notifyIcon = new NotifyIcon();
notifyIcon.Visible = true;
notifyIcon.BalloonTipTitle = "MyApp Message";
notifyIcon.BalloonTipText = message;
notifyIcon.Icon = SystemIcons.Application;
notifyIcon.ShowBalloonTip(60 * 1000);
}
Now that you’ve read about the benefits of in-app messaging and seen how easy it is to create a campaign, feel free to give it a try. If you’d like to see ReachOut in action in a test environment without sending out public messages to your users, we suggest you create a specific test version/build number and create a test campaign by filtering for that specific product version/build. This way only users running your test version/build will receive the ReachOut message.
If you don’t have a Revulytics account yet, you may sign up for a free trial and try ReachOut for free.
Software Developer & Technical Writer
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