Urban Airship’s Push Messaging Platform Rolls Out New Functionality for Mobile User Engagement

Urban Airship has announced enhancements to its push messaging platform including cross-platform support for widgets and button-enabled interactive notifications in iOS 8 and rich notifications in Android 4.3 and Amazon Fire OS.

The new enhancements were added to help drive deeper engagement outside of apps, on device lock screens and in the Notification Center, by offering greater interaction and choice through this new push notification format and, in turn, gain more immediate insight into what customers care about to drive higher conversions. 

With Urban Airship, interactive notification buttons can drive users to take specific actions with deep-links to different in-app or mobile web landing pages where every click can assign or remove user attributes for multi-touch automated campaigns and more responsive, relevant and actionable mobile experiences.

"Interactive notifications take push messaging from informative and hopefully targeted alerts, to the primary way users can choose-their-own-adventure with mobile experiences that adapt to their needs," said Brent Hieggelke, CMO, Urban Airship. "These messaging-originated user interactions will soon be more important than organic use of static app content, telling businesses what customers want more or less of within their immediate context and moment of need."

Urban Airship's support for message center-style widgets enable the ability to gain front-and-center visibility in the Today View of the iOS 8 Notification Center or anywhere in the Android experience. Urban Airship's drop-in widgets can be tailored to deliver targeted and dynamic information for at-a-glance access by users, joining landing pages and in-app message centers as methods to get rich content in front of customers.

Other new enhancements to Urban Airship's solution include event analytics for tracking user activities, such as button taps on interactive notifications and in-app conversions. By directly and indirectly attributing a users' goal completions to each campaign, businesses can better understand the impact of push messaging to drive greater engagement and ROI. A new A/B testing capability leverages this event data to help businesses optimize messaging's impact on conversion goals.

Initially available through an API, Urban Airship's support for iOS 8 interactive notifications is now integrated into business user workflows in its UI, including 13 pre-defined action buttons for more rapid adoption and deployment. Publishers can create, target, launch and optimize the complete messaging experience with out-of-the-box capabilities to create deep-linked interactive pushes, capture attributes for user clicks, define automation rules and real-time triggers, optimize messaging performance and track customizable conversion goals across digital channels. 

In addition, Urban Airship now supports native social sharing integration, enabling users to easily share interactive notifications and app content to aid in app acquisition efforts.

Urban Airship's latest solution is available now to select customers through its early access program with general availability in October.