What OtherLevels Says Can Boost Engagement and Retention of Your Software

Marketers across virtually every industry in 2016 understand that multichannel messaging is important. But not all solutions are created equal... and neither are the needs of various sectors.

The more closely a brand or platform interacts with its end user, the more targeted, intelligent, and data-driven the functionalities of its marketing solutions should be. OtherLevels, an international leader in cross-channel marketing and engagement with offices in Australia, the US and the UK, delivers one of the most intelligent digital messaging automation solutions on the market. 

In the Q&A below, Derek Strong explains how OtherLevels serves its niche clientele in the retail, wagering, and travel sectors with a three-tiered approach to personalization: right time, right message, right channel.

Strong: OtherLevels is a leading provider of software and services, and our primary solution is the most sophisticated second-generation digital marketing platform available today: The newly deployed 'OtherLevels 2' version of our platform supports 8 different messaging formats – enabling marketers to deliver rich, relevant and personalized message experiences to their audiences across mobile, tablet and PC devices. Our software leverages big data to optimize the delivery of content to end users’ preferred channel and more effectively acquire and convert traffic from both known and anonymous site or app visitors.

Strong: Anonymous visitors are the individuals who visit a desktop or mobile site (or mobile app) without supplying any identifying information (or who check out or browse as “guests”). In the absence of their email addresses, social sign-in info, or even just their names, marketers can't personalize offers for, and cannot reach, their anonymous visitors – even those who frequently revisit their sites or apps.

Given that between 57 and 98 percent of a given brand's audience is like anonymous, unknown users are highly important to most brand's revenue. Knowing this, most invest heavily in acquiring and reacquiring those anonymous visitors who either do not convert upon initial visit, do not sign up for their email list, or do not download their app.

Strong: The key is to find ways they can attract and convert anonymous visitors without requiring a call-to-action signup or other 'hard sell' approaches to acquiring the user's information. With a second generation digital messaging strategy backed by browser push functionality, brands can more easily recognize their anonymous visitors' individual preferences and behaviors and turn them into known, engaged customers.

Strong: Browser push messaging is a non-aggressive way to gain permission from anonymous visitors to engage more with retail brands. Unlike social sign-in, newsletter sign-up, or other call-to-action driven approaches to acquiring visitor/customer data, browser push notification functionality does not require site visitors to register, supply their email addresses, or otherwise submit personal data.

Rather, browser push (via desktop or mobile web) is spurred by the soft opt-in approach: Following a page visit, basket add, purchase or other interaction with a brand, the visitor can be prompted with a context specific request to opt-in to promotions via a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ click.

Strong: Rich inbox is one. Rich inboxes are essentially ‘email-like’ inboxes, within a mobile browser or desktop browser, that are available to all users – with no user “opt-in” involved. Because they’re on every user’s interface, rich inboxes are a high-value avenue for driving interactions with users who are already active on a brand's site (and ripe for engagement).

Beyond that, it's less about "channels" and more about the right channel. It's vital for brands to leverage a toolset that enables them to leverage machine learning and other data-driven tactics to reach each individual end user on the channel he or she is most likely to engage with – email, SMS, browser push, interstitial, or otherwise.

Strong: Automated machine learning models allow for the discovery of patterns and interconnections between certain parameters of a user's decision and the outcome.OtherLevels uses machine learning based on users’ interactions with multiple channels – taking into account various parameters such as time of message sent, channel per customer, average response time and many more – to drive predictive analytics: Pre-calculated prediction models that allow us to support marketers’ decisions about the specifics of campaigns in near real-time during the selection of specific parameters.

Essentially, the predictive models allow us to learn behavioral patterns in users’ interaction with marketing campaigns while the usage of machine learning techniques allows the models to maintain high accuracy over time as behaviors change.

Strong: We specialize in the mobile and online gaming and wagering sectors, the digital publishing space, retail, customer loyalty (especially in travel and hospitality), and a few other areas of e-commerce. We find those are the industries where meeting customers' unique cross-channel preferences is most important.

Strong: We see a lot of gaps in most automation solutions, but the biggest is likely the limited segmentation functionality of most platforms. With an intelligent messaging toolset, brands can segment their user groups in a highly granular targeted way – enabling users to receive messages based on criteria such as the depth of engagement with highly specific content or product categories. That not only increases the potential for individual end users to interact with the material, it also provides greater insight into which messages created the most clicks, or drive the best revenue outcomes. That intelligence delivers unparalleled insight that can be leveraged for pricing, retention, and loyalty while helping marketers better measure (and improve) the value of their campaigns over time.