The new study provides guidance for marketers, brands, and developers to meet key retention and engagement milestones amidst rapid omnichannel transformation 

OneSignal, the world's leading customer engagement platform, today released its annual State of Customer Engagement Report which illustrates the benefits of incorporating various messaging channels, content, and engagement strategies for marketers to achieve their overarching goals in 2024. The insights for mobile marketers are based on key engagement statistics informed by over a million businesses that use OneSignal as their customer engagement platform to send over 12 billion messages daily.

The report comes at a time when user behavior and the app industry continue to evolve amid rapid technological transformation. With the collective number of apps now available to consumers and consumer retention spans continuing to shrink, benchmarking app success is a growing challenge for companies competing in the mobile landscape.

“Through our work in helping companies navigate omnichannel challenges, we’re finding that providing value, relevance, and utility to customers from a messaging and engagement standpoint are now equal non-negotiables and that companies can’t sacrifice if they want to succeed,” says Josh Wetzel, Chief Revenue Officer at OneSignal. “The insights we’ve compiled in this report serve as a barometer for companies seeking clarity in the dynamic mobile landscape and provide essential guidance to help them achieve their goals.”

Key findings uncovered within the report include the following:

• Multichannel engagement is necessary for success. Companies that leverage more than one messaging channel to engage users increase average engagement by 35.8%. OneSignal also found that apps that use an automated multichannel messaging automation workflow see 13.6% higher average 30-day retention rates.

• Effective onboarding messages are critical to driving retention. OneSignal’s data revealed apps that implement onboarding messages have 24% higher install-to-purchase conversion rates. Those that leverage more than one channel to send them have higher 1-day, 7-day, and 30-day retention rates.

• Email is having a resurgence as a revenue driver. Apps that use email as part of their omnichannel engagement strategy report the highest install-to-purchase conversion rates. When used with push notifications, email can help balance brevity and depth in ongoing messaging strategy. Simply put, it’s not something mobile apps can ignore in their growth plans.

• Apple’s Live Activities are an effective engagement tool. Apps using Live Activities have 23.7% higher average 30-day retention rates, solidifying the value of using the lock screen’s real estate for providing real-time updates.

• Personalized notifications are a must for optimal app engagement. Notifications that use personalized content have a 344% higher engagement rate than notifications that don't. Additionally, apps that use localization, such as adapting messaging for language, time zone, and cultural differences, have a 160% higher engagement rate than notifications that don't.

Based on the insights provided, the 2024 State of Customer Engagement report serves as a guide for marketers and brands seeking more clarity in evaluating their engagement solutions. As diversification in communication becomes more crucial and data-driven marketing becomes even more vital to success, the report provides a roadmap for achieving omnichannel success in both these areas.

New capabilities offer enhanced personalization and precision for marketing and advertising campaigns

GrowthLoop, a leading composable customer data platform (CDP) provider, today announced its expanded partnership with Google Cloud to continue transforming marketing with generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. The solution is built leveraging Google Cloud's BigQuery and Gemini models and GrowthLoop's composable CDP. 

With generative marketing, marketing teams can quickly segment and activate their customer data in BigQuery based on generative AI suggestions. This helps marketers increase campaign launch velocity, experimentation, and personalized cross-channel content delivery by as much as 10x — and reach their full potential as drivers of business. Key capabilities include:

1.  Audience Studio: Users can instantly generate a recommended list of precise audience targets, powered by Gemini models. These suggestions are based on customer data in BigQuery and by describing campaign goals (i.e. acquisition, cross-sell, churn winback, etc.) in natural language.
   
   
2. Audience Discovery: GrowthLoop proactively generates audience suggestions based on the user's most active, engaged audiences. This capability allows marketers to more quickly and accurately experiment with new concepts, measure results, and drive outcomes for KPIs (i.e. return on ad spend (ROAS), customer lifetime value, etc.)
   
   
3. Audience Builder with Generative AI Context: GrowthLoop uses Gemini models to generate descriptions of connected data fields in BigQuery, making segmentation and audience building even easier for marketers.
   
   
4. Continuous Improvement and Optimization (Upcoming): Marketers will be able to increase time-to-launch for cross-channel experiments and measurement. Using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), they can enable generative models to automatically optimize based on historical results. The more a team uses generative marketing on GrowthLoop, the more informed its generative assets will become.

"With the combined power of GrowthLoop withBigQuery, and Gemini models, generative marketing will transform the way marketers use data to drive revenue," said Chris Sell, co-founder and co-CEO of GrowthLoop. "Generative marketing will empower marketers to increase their audience and journey launch velocity, experimentation, and campaign optimization by 10x above even the most advanced composable CDP deployments."

Audience Orchestration on BigQuery and Generative AI Audiences powered by Gemini models are both available now. You can learn more about generative marketing with GrowthLoop, BigQuery, and Gemini models at Google Cloud Next '24 from April 9 - 11 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. GrowthLoop is located at Booth #1350, as well as in the Generative AI Pavilion. GrowthLoop is also participating in the panel discussion "How leading software companies are innovating with BigQuery and generative AI" (Tuesday, April 9 from 04:45 PM - 05:30 PM local time in ANA109).

Revenue Lifecycle Management solutions leader adds experienced marketing executive to help accelerate growth, awareness, and expansion

Stock media leader answers customer demand with AI-driven innovations to improve creative workflows 

Storyblocks, an unlimited, subscription-based stock media platform with video creation and workflow functionality, has unveiled new search enhancements powered by AI. These improvements aim to deliver an elevated user experience and streamlined creative workflows for Storyblocks' customers.

• Learn more about Storyblocks' AI-enhanced search experience at storyblocks.com.

In the recently released 10th Annual Survey of Creative Pros, Leslie Hughes, founder of iSPY Technologies and president of the Digital Media Licensing Association, said, "This year's survey confirmed what creators truly value when licensing stock media – high content quality and relevance. However, finding the perfect assets through search remains their biggest hurdle. Encouragingly, many creators are optimistic that AI can lend a hand in streamlining asset discovery going forward."

"Our team has relied on Storyblocks for several years now to create video content at a rapid pace," said Nolan Nichols, manager of video production at the U.S. Travel Association. "We're excited that Storyblocks is leveraging AI more to help customers like us find the content we need even quicker than before. We're a lean team and are always looking for ways to work smarter, faster, and more efficiently, so I've been actively looking for ways that AI can help us do that at every step of the creative process."

Cutting-edge data, AI and machine learning technologies drive Storyblocks' platform. The company uses advanced AI models to deliver the most relevant content to its users. However, Storyblocks is not just about technological prowess; it is equally committed to curating a diverse and representative library that meets changing customer demands.

Recent improvements include:

• Delivering faster, more relevant and more representative results in search queries
  • Storyblocks prioritizes fresher content in its search results through a proprietary algorithm that evaluates the performance of new content every four hours. Early testing indicates that including recently uploaded content can boost download rates by up to 60% compared to searches without this prioritization.
  • Storyblocks employs an in-house machine learning model based on the BERT framework, allowing the platform to rapidly analyze how users engage with content and refine search result rankings in near real-time.
  • Storyblocks aims to provide representative search results. On average, 24% of videos on the first page feature Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) models. This aligns with the company's goal of proactively surfacing the quarter of its library content featuring models from underrepresented backgrounds.
  • Furthermore, Storyblocks stands out in the stock media industry by routinely pulling underperforming assets to maintain a top-tier library quality. Despite expanding its collection by 40% in 2023, the company prioritized removing nearly 200,000 assets, ensuring customers can discover relevant content more efficiently.
• Identifying compelling thumbnails for video content 
  • First impressions are critical in a medium like video, particularly for content creators juggling multiple projects. This reality prompted Storyblocks to use AI technology to identify the most pertinent thumbnail in video search results. Recent Storyblocks A/B testing revealed that videos showcasing AI-curated thumbnails experienced heightened engagement levels, suggesting these visuals better aligned with users' interests.
• Providing insightful and accurate content suggestions 
  • Storyblocks employs OpenAI's large language model to enhance search capabilities, delivering comprehensive results that transcend users' initial queries. This innovative approach aims to return relevant content even for specific or flawed search parameters. In addition, by harnessing the power of metadata enhancements and Storyblocks' computer vision technology, the company can aggregate pertinent search results, recommend alternative scenes and surface additional clips featuring specific individuals.
• Making cross-asset recommendations 
  • Since 2022, Storyblocks has leveraged user behavior data to suggest complementary pairings between different types of creative assets, such as videos, images and audio tracks. Through its computer vision technology, the platform can analyze music tracks by rendering songs as spectrograms in order to identify and recommend tracks that are significantly similar.

Today's announcement of Storyblocks' search enhancements complements its ongoing commitment to collaborating with artists on new collections and commissioning content to address emerging gaps identified through search data analysis. These improvements not only facilitate the discovery of Storyblocks' ever-expanding library but also increase the likelihood of users downloading both existing and newly added content.

"At Storyblocks, we're harnessing the power of AI to revolutionize the way creators discover and use content," said Lucy Huang, senior vice president of product and engineering at Storyblocks. "By delivering faster, more relevant and more representative search results, we're not just streamlining creative workflows – we're empowering our global community of artists and customers to create inclusive and impactful work. Our commitment to curating a diverse and top-quality library, combined with cutting-edge technology, sets us apart in the stock media industry."

AdPlayer.Pro adds new real-time auction features to its video ad serving & ad management platform.

AdPlayer.Pro, a global provider of SaaS video ad technology has released new real-time auction capabilities, extending ad waterfalling opportunities for its customers.

According to the official announcement, the newly-introduced features, known as "Performance-based Waterfall" enable configuring a parallel ad waterfall, based on the stepping rise of the bidding price, hence ensuring the optimal price-value balance for parties on the Supply and Demand side.

As Natalie Romankina, CEO of AdPlayer.Pro explained, this new type of waterfall bidding allows extending revenue opportunities for digital ad businesses beyond the header bidding niche, hence ensuring they achieve maximum results overall.

"As our partners' interest in programmatic advertising is increasingly growing, we strive to deliver as many helpful tools as possible to help them optimize and improve video ad performance across all programmatic channels," she claimed.

Namely, according to the preliminary testing results, the implementation of the Performance-based Waterfall functionality allows increasing the efficiency of programmatic ad sales in real-time auctions by the avg. 15%. More importantly, the beta-testing rounds among AdPlayer.Pro partners are also showing positive dynamics in terms of the efficiency of ad inventory sales outside the Prebid-focused vertical.

According to Ms. Romankina, the demonstrated results can't but evoke optimism on how the newly-released ad waterfalling capabilities will benefit ad-ops specialists' business endeavors in 2024.

"In challenging times like today, it's essential to have a full scope of methods and mediums at one's hand to test out their implementation in various manners. And in this respect, the choice of video header bidding in combination with Performance-based Waterfall auction variations can potentially bring exceptional revenue outcomes for ad-ops teams," she added.

Powered by Google Cloud's Gemini Pro, Felix AI leads the company's latest release, offering quantified real-time session summarization.

Quantum Metric, the customer-driven digital analytics platform, is proud to share its latest suite of product offerings designed to enhance digital understanding across the customer lifecycle. Focused on simplifying how digital organizations listen to and act on the needs of their customers, the latest release includes the availability of Felix AI, Quantum Metric's new Gen AI-powered session summarization, powered by Google Cloud's Gemini Pro. 

"We are very excited about the launch of Felix AI, harnessing the power of Google Gemini to provide clarity to the areas of the digital experience that have the greatest impact,"  said Paul Tepfenhart, Global Director of Retail Industries at Google Cloud. "Quantum Metric has built a Gen AI-powered product that takes their deep customer-centric data set and helps their customers accelerate their AI strategy.  In the hands of digital leaders, Felix AI enables customers to transform the way teams analyze and empathize with the customer opportunities."

Session replays, regularly used by digital organizations, provide needed visibility into the customer experience but are inherently complex and time-consuming. In fact, in 2023, Quantum Metric customers spent over 320K hours reviewing session data.

Powered by Google Cloud's Gemini Pro model, Felix AI summarizes a session in seconds, capturing the exact experience the visitor went through. Breaking away from the traditional session replay tools, Felix AI offers a simplified approach to digital customer listening that can be instantly quantified to understand the scale of each issue and its impact on key business metrics. Users can also dig into the details of an individual's experience through Felix's prompt, which enables users to ask clarifying questions, such as which campaign a customer came from.

With a flexible API, Felix AI can be extended to the channels and use cases where digital teams need it most including:

• Direct integrations into VoC feedback received via text, email or even Slack, giving immediate context on customer feedback.
• Role-based summaries, including support for the call center, where agents can now  instantly understand the customer's issue before they've explained it.

Outside of the introduction of Felix AI, Quantum Metric's spring release includes three new products designed to support the entire customer lifecycle and further democratize data across teams including product and marketing.

• Interactions—reimagined to include heatmaps and zoning that make it simple for marketers and UX professionals to quickly optimize the layout and content of their top pages. Also offering improved capabilities when it comes to saving, sharing and collaborating on projects.
• User Analytics—enabling digital organizations to go beyond individual sessions to understand how users behave over time to build long-term customer retention and loyalty. With new data visualizations, like retention and churn analysis, digital teams can dig deeper into what is attracting and detracting repeat visits across web and mobile apps.
• Lightning Analytics—a unique and powerful solution built to enable customers to monitor, diagnose, and optimize the critical workflows and operational apps built on Salesforce Lightning.

"In the past, our focus was transactional—how do we help the customer to make a purchase, book a flight, or open an account?" said Mario Ciabarra, CEO and founder of Quantum Metric. "The relationships we build with customers today are much more complex and span an entire lifecycle. To succeed, digital organizations need tools like Felix AI to simplify how they listen to their customers, and tools like Interactions and User Analytics to listen at scale and across their entire customer lifecycle. This is the beginning of a new generation of digital analytics tools, and we can't wait to see what our digital organizations can do to further the standards for a great digital customer experience."

Darwinium, a leader in next-generation digital security and fraud prevention, today announces a strategic partnership with IPinfo to fight advanced threats on a global scale. Darwinium’s industry-leading continuous customer protection platform is now bolstered by IPinfo’s sophisticated IP address data sets. Access to this critical information supports enhanced user analytics, geolocation data, fraud risk models, and malicious traffic detection, reinforcing Darwinium’s delivery of real-time, holistic customer intelligence across the entire digital estate.

These enhancements are now accessible to Darwinium’s customer base via its Evolution Ecosystem of Partners, which offers advanced intelligence via pre-integrated solutions. As a member of this ecosystem, IPinfo’s accurate, low-latency IP geolocation lookup is available and optimized through its journey orchestration layer.

Today’s ever-evolving landscape of wide-reaching threats requires businesses to have a keen understanding of customer and user behaviors. Data coverage, speed and accuracy are increasingly important to defend against modern cyberattacks and fraud attempts. IP and Geolocation intelligence are critical elements of Darwinium’s Digital DNA, the most advanced understanding of digital users on the market. In collaborating with IPinfo, Darwinium harnesses its ability to provide actionable insights by gathering the most precise and up-to-date proprietary data via IPinfo’s worldwide network of probe servers and multi-step data validation process.

“Cybersecurity threats continue to advance in every aspect of our lives, which is why it’s more important than ever for Darwinium to partner with leaders across the industry to generate the very best intelligence for our customers,” said Jim Seymour, Darwinium’s global head of strategic alliances. “IPinfo has the most comprehensive and advanced IP data set, enabling us with worldwide geolocation intelligence to support all our customer's security needs.”

“IPinfo partners with industry-leading companies, delivering insights to power their most innovative solutions. We are excited to work with Darwinium, a company taking on the most demanding fraud and cybersecurity challenges,” said Ross Lewis, Head of Partnerships and Ecosystem at IPinfo.

Portfoliobox is excited to announce a major update for 2024, bringing a bunch of new features to help artists, photographers, and designers manage their online business all in one spot. This update makes it simple to build a website, sell work, and handle business tasks like making invoices, getting paid through mobile, and setting up bookings.

Easy and Professional Branding
Creating a professional look online is key for creatives but can be tricky. With the new update, Portfoliobox makes this easy. "We noticed the cost of owning a domain and professional email was going up, making it harder for creatives," says Hamid Abouei, CEO of Portfoliobox. "So, we decided to include a custom domain and email for free in our premium plan. We believe everyone should have the chance to look professional online without it costing a lot."

This change is a big deal because it helps creatives look polished and professional without extra costs or hassle. Everything, from the website to the email, works together smoothly, helping artists focus on their work instead of worrying about their online presence.

New Business Tools for Selling and Booking
Portfoliobox isn't stopping at just making websites look good. The 2024 update also brings tools that make it super easy for creatives to sell their work and services. "We want to help creatives make money from their passion, whether they're selling artwork, photography sessions, or design services," explains Hamid.

With these new features, creatives can:

• Easily send invoices and quotes and get paid online.
• Sell their products and services effortlessly…
• Schedule appointments or sell tickets to events without any stress.

And the best part? All this comes at a very affordable price of $12.50 per month, making Portfoliobox a great choice for creatives at all stages of their careers.