Attend â€œDigital Engagement Benchmarks for 2026” to learn how new innovations and strategies are re-imagining the way we engage audiences and drive revenue, including:

• New ways to personalize digital experiences
• Live vs. on-demand audience trends
• Webinar and digital event metrics
• AI-generated content creation statistics

2026 can be a year of opportunity if you let the data lead you to success. Register now to learn more.

This webinar airs at 1 PM CT and will be available on-demand for six months after airing.

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We’ve reached a moment rich with transformative opportunities — a chance to reimagine engagement, elevate creative output, and drive growth like never before.

Agentic AI, at its core, is a new kind of collaborator. And it’s redefining how work gets done. AI agents act autonomously, learn from real-time feedback, and work alongside teams to ignite entirely new levels of productivity and creativity. Just as important, agentic AI connects the dots across people, content, and tools, creating a comprehensive ecosystem that powers business growth at scale.

Imagine a marketing team launches a new campaign. Instead of combing through dashboards, they can ask an AI agent to surface customer insights, flag performance anomalies, and recommend optimizations, all in real time. That’s something AI agents, like , make possible.

The true impact of these agents is still unfolding, but I believe they’re poised to help teams move from repetitive execution to meaningful innovation. They have the potential to accelerate outcomes and deliver experiences that feel more tailored and relevant.

It’s especially encouraging to see marketing and IT aligning their operating models as agentic AI emerges as a cross-functional initiative. For CMOs, this convergence of disciplines and teams around agentic AI, spanning data science, customer experience, product, and creative, opens new possibilities for orchestrating more precise customer journeys. With clearer visibility across touchpoints, marketing leaders can easily map how engagement drives outcome, enabling smarter segmentation and real-time optimization that delivers measurable results.

Planning for this next phase of marketing demands more than just curiosity. It requires a clear vision for agent integration, a resilient data foundation, a strong ethical AI approach, and a commitment to clarity amid complexities.

Take agents from tools to teammates.

As a marketer, what excites me most about agentic AI is its ability to act as a true collaborator. Agents aren’t just executing tasks. They’re learning, adapting, and contributing to outcomes. They can analyze vast data sets, personalize content, optimize performance, and even anticipate customer behavior. By handling manual tasks and surfacing actionable insights, agents free up time and mental space for marketers and creatives to focus on what they do best — ideation, storytelling, and innovation. Agents can help develop messaging and campaign concepts for testing, produce asset variations, and tailor experiences to individual customers, all while preserving brand integrity and emotional impact. The real magic happens when agents move from being helpful to being intuitive. When agents identify insights to help marketers understand a customer’s preferences, it creates a sense of connection.

That’s the kind of transformation we’re beginning to explore at Adobe. Agentic AI has the potential to empower marketing teams to deliver more personalized experiences at scale, doing so faster and more effectively. As these capabilities develop, I’m optimistic about their potential to amplify talent, accelerate workflows, and deepen customer connections.

Of course, with greater personalization comes greater oversight. The systems behind these experiences must be built with integrity and accountability.

Embed responsibility into every AI decision.

People care deeply about how their data is used. According to the , 45% of consumers say visibility and control over their data is a top priority when engaging with brands — a clear mandate for transparency.

After talking with CMOs and CIOs, it’s clear that governance needs to be front and center as we bring agentic AI into our organizations. Building strong governance frameworks, ones with clear accountability, ethical guidelines, and impact monitoring, leads to faster adoption and smoother implementation.

It starts with giving teams the tools and structure to manage AI with care, including:

• Reviewing AI use to ensure it aligns with values and avoids bias.
• Using risk models to gauge impact and guide oversight.
• Monitoring performance to maintain fairness and compliance.

Ethical AI fosters trust with our customers, our teams, and our stakeholders. And when trust is strong, innovation follows.

To make this kind of governance actionable, organizations need systems that support transparency, agility, and intelligent decision-making, and that starts with how we manage and connect our data.

Build a resilient data foundation.

Data infrastructure is central to how marketers understand customers and deliver meaningful experiences. Yet most organizations still face a major challenge. According to a recent survey conducted by Adobe and Incisiv, about 95% struggle with disconnected or incomplete customer data.

Typically, marketers have to manually piece together customer information from different sources. But with modern data pipelines and agentic AI, sources such as website visits, campaign responses, and customer service logs can be connected automatically. This lets marketers build real-time customer segments, run campaign analytics, and customize creative without relying too heavily on analytics teams. Additionally, it gives analytics teams more time to focus on strategy instead of pulling together customer data sets.

This shift — from fragmented data to connected insights — is an imperative many CMOs and CIOs are prioritizing when implementing agentic AI. Instead of sending a one-size-fits-all message to everyone, brands can personalize campaigns based on region, industry, or even buying group. For instance, for four products across eight channels, four languages, and three variations, requiring more than 300 different assets. With the help of , they were able to scale content creation and personalization, meeting each customer in the moment.

Reaching this deep level of personalization requires platforms that unify data, keep it accurate, and support fast decisions. Flexibility matters too. As marketing leaders, we need AI and data platforms that let us plug into the tools and agents that work best for our teams and goals. That means avoiding rigid platforms that limit how we work or who we work with.

When our data and tools are connected, we can move faster, test more, and deliver experiences that feel personal and relevant, no matter the market or audience.

Navigate complexity with clarity.

Agentic AI is moving fast, but many teams and organizations are still figuring out how to deploy solutions that deliver meaningful ROI. Teams face challenges around integration, governance, and proving business value. With so much conversation happening, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s actionable.

Here at Adobe, we believe clarity makes progress possible. That’s why we’re integrating agentic AI capabilities into our solutions, to help our marketers and creatives focus on what matters most and drive the greatest impact. We’re connecting innovation to practical needs, building tools for better collaboration, and identifying high-value opportunities.

Agentic AI has the potential to unlock smarter workflows, better discoverability, deeper personalization, and increased creative deliverables. Realizing that potential means it must be applied with purpose and integrated into business processes and marketing workflows. That starts with real use cases, setting clear goals, and working together toward the same outcome.

We’re seeing more companies take smart steps forward. They’re testing ideas through pilots and scaling to production, building cross-functional teams, and defining what success looks like. It’s a thoughtful approach, and it shows a vote of confidence in where the technology is headed. These early agentic marketing adopters are already proving what’s possible and creating paths others can follow.

Turning towards what’s next.

Agentic AI is not a distant concept. It’s here and already changing how we work. For CMOs, the imperative is clear. We must integrate agents strategically, invest in the right foundations, commit to ethical AI practices, and lead with intention.

Our upcoming report, The State of Customer Experience in an AI-Driven World, helps support this transformation. It offers powerful insights into the ways customer journeys are changing, the role AI plays in brand visibility, how marketing is becoming a growth engine, and more.

The opportunities are more energizing than ever. As AI continues to reshape our day-to-day, the real power lies in combining technology with human insight. In the next blog in this series, I’ll dive into how marketing, creativity, and AI can work together, with people at the center, to build smarter, more authentic experiences. And you can catch up on part one and part two in the series where I explore how AI is transforming marketing fundamentals — from strategy and personalization to brand search and discovery.

Article by: Rachel Thornton

Rachel Thornton is Adobe’s chief marketing officer for the enterprise business, helping organizations deliver exceptional customer experiences at the intersection of marketing, creativity, and AI. She leads strategies and activations that position Adobe as the leading marketing and AI platform, while energizing and empowering CMOs and experience makers worldwide.

With more than 25 years in B2B technology marketing, Rachel has held leadership roles at Amazon/AWS, Salesforce, Cisco, and Microsoft. She has built and scaled enterprise marketing, driven customer acquisition and revenue growth, and led go-to-market strategies across field marketing, advertising, sports marketing, and events, including marquee experiences like re:Invent and Dreamforce.

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As nonprofit marketers and fundraisers begin their , quickly creating personalized, data-driven content has never been more important. The from Salesforce.org is designed to help nonprofits of all sizes build constituent-first communications fast.

Building effective marketing campaigns is especially critical for smaller nonprofits, which have unfortunately been hit the hardest by the pandemic and experienced a decline in annual donations. As nonprofits look to make up for revenue lost, as well as take their engagement and giving to new heights, digital tools present new opportunities to reach new audiences and deepen relationships with existing supporters.

To learn how nonprofits of all sizes are approaching this end-of-year giving season, we asked leaders at, , , , and to share their tips and tools for engaging constituents.

The newly-launched Marketing Cloud for Nonprofits is designed to help nonprofits of all sizes build constituent-first communications fast.

1. Say Goodbye to Batch and Blast

As more and more nonprofits are making the full switch to digital, personalized outreach to both current and prospective donors is increasingly imperative. One of the biggest keys to maximizing fundraising efforts is understanding each person’s propensity to give, what moves them to donate, and what their capacity is for giving. In fact, using the recipient’s name in an email can result in an average increase of . Now more than ever, nonprofits have a wealth of knowledge just waiting to be used to make constituents feel seen, known, and engaged on a whole new level.

“Our goal is to help as many children born with clefts as possible by retaining our supporters year over year, recapturing lapsed donors, and growing our universe of new supporters,” said Kevin Scally, senior director of marketing infrastructure at SmileTrain. “Our donors are on a journey with us, that’s why personalization is so important. Salesforce Marketing Cloud has helped us say goodbye to ‘batch & blast’ and say ‘hello’ to personalized supporter journeys.”

2. Provide Consistent Updates to All Stakeholders

If we’ve learned anything from this past year and a half, it’s that strategic communication is the key to driving impact. Having a consistent line of communication with supporters, partners, and stakeholders keeps everyone connected to your mission and ensures that you stay top of mind. Organizing those many lines of communication and keeping everything up-to-date in one place keeps information streamlined and ensures that your team is functioning efficiently.

“(RED) is in constant communication with our constituents, including partners, prospects and consumers,” said Meaghan Condon, vice president of partnerships. “Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to share new information, collaborate effectively, and streamline our workload, which is essential for us. The more efficient we are, the greater our capacity for new partners, and the more partners we have, the more money we’re generating for the Global Fund.”

3. Make the Right Ask at the Right Time

The heart and soul of nonprofit work will always be relationships, authentic connections between missions and donor values, and the desire to make long-lasting change. But the fundamentals of making the right ask at the right time in the right way hold true through change, challenges, and progress. Now is the time to take steps — however small or grand — to improve your capabilities and improve the donor experience. And speaking of the right time, where would we be without our phones? App-based technology puts all this critical donor info at your fingertips, so that you can have an “always on” presence.

Sam Rye, manager of marketing and communications at Conservation Volunteers Australia, explained how his team is innovating to connect with supporters where and when they want to be engaged. “At Conservation Volunteers Australia, we’re on a mission to help all Australians take action for nature. We’ve been using Salesforce to make it easier to tailor communications to groups and individuals based on what they want to hear about, from our growing array of different ways people can do their bit for the living world. We’re exploring new and innovative ways to present an ‘always on’ presence so that people can take action where they want, when they want, and keep in touch with the outcomes of their efforts.”

Having a consistent line of communication with supporters, partners, and stakeholders keeps everyone connected to your mission and ensures that you stay top of mind.

4. Create Better Supporter Journeys

Top-knotch donor experiences are no longer limited to the private sector alone. In 2021, donors increasingly expect to receive communications and experiences that are tailored to their needs, situations, and preferences.

In today’s digital-first world, you’re always just a click away from unique communities with a wide range of interests and motivations for engaging with your organization. From new and prospective donors to long-time constituents, creating better and more personalized supporter journeys that are relevant to each group is important for building strong relationships. The first step to achieving this is having well-organized data that can provide a single view of supporters, enabling personalized outreach to each unique donor group.

“Listen. Learn. Salesforce makes it possible to welcome new patrons, while still thoughtfully encouraging existing ones to discover new programs and enjoy the content they’ve come to love,” said Kent Davidson, the managing director at the 92nd Street Y. “This is a unique opportunity to collect data and use it responsibly to honor our patrons and our mission.”

5. Create Unified Systems for Insights Across Your Organization

Siloed data is never a good thing. Having mission-critical information spread out across disparate systems not only makes marketing strategies less effective, it eats up important hours for employees whose time is better spent on engaging donors. Ultimately, the most effective organizations start with great data.

And having great data that’s clean, updated, and unified across systems will roll over into every aspect of your work. Most importantly, it’ll ensure that your fundraising campaigns, volunteer engagements, and marketing efforts will reach the right supporters with the right message at the right time.

The team at Pittsburgh-based nonprofit 412 Food Rescue uses both Salesforce and Google Analytics in their work to close the gap between food surplus and food scarcity. Sara Swaney, 412 Food Rescue’s director of advancement, said that unifying her organization’s data “allows us to look at our data across platforms — web and app — to understand the full journey of our users. We’ve been able to cut our reporting time by 50%.”

Now is the time when nonprofits of all sizes are strategizing, preparing, and implementing strategies to maximize the biggest and most important season of the year for nonprofit giving. As you brainstorm #GivingTuesday ideas or prepare for your first in-person fundraisers in nearly two years, don’t overlook the importance of ensuring your communications strategies, data, systems, and marketing campaigns are set up correctly to best set your team up for end-of-year fundraising success.

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This is it: The moment you and your fans have been waiting for. It’s officially time to launch your show! 

You’ve probably spent a ton of time, money, and effort creating your show—but you’re not quite done yet. Before you go live, you need to have a plan in place for your show’s launch and promotion. A huge part of that plan is making sure to target the specific audience who will be most interested in your series and what it covers.

Let’s break down the work that goes into promoting a video series or podcast, from launch and beyond. This topic is pretty top of mind for us as we’ve been through this entire checklist quite recently with the launch of our latest series, .

Alert! Want access to our shareable checklist? Register for to access over two hours of video content and several free show planning resources!

Plan the scale and initial goal of your launch

On a scale of pencil dive to cannonball, how big of a splash are you trying to make with your show’s launch?

Poolside analogies aside, the scale of your launch is the first thing you’ll want to nail down before you get into the specifics of your show’s promotion strategy. Here you’ll want to consider things like budget, resources, and bandwidth and how each of those will impact your launch goals.

Speaking of goals—what exactly are you trying to achieve right out of the gate? A large launch designed to reach as many relevant eyeballs as possible in order to drive leads will require a different approach than a soft launch intended to test the waters and gather feedback. Knowing what your primary initial goal is will help you as you plan.

Here are a few major things to keep in mind:

“Your release cadence will impact how you promote your show. If you launch your entire series at once for your audience to binge, then you’re going to want to promote the entire series. Think about the broad messages and what you’ll be talking about to get people excited to watch all of it. If you’re doing a release cadence that’s ongoing, you’ll want to promote the series as a whole—but also the specific episode that’s available now, as well as a teaser for what’s coming next.”

Dan Mills, Head of Wistia Studios

Tip: Planning your show’s release can be tricky—but we’ve got you covered. Check out our guide to to set your strategy.

Promote your show across owned properties

Once you launch your series, it’s time to flip on all the switches, set the phasers to blast, and go all-in on your show. So, how are you going to do that? Start with your owned properties.

Website

When someone visits your website, they should know immediately that you’ve launched a show. You should give your show top-level placement, marquee billing across your website. This might include a banner or pop-up on the homepage, launching a dedicated webpage for your content, and adding the show to your navigation menu so folks can easily find it. 

Blog

Next up is your blog. If you run an active blog, you should create posts that support the launch of your series. Introduce the series with an announcement post, interview guests about their experience, go behind the scenes, and share content that will spark conversations with your audience. And don’t forget to ! This can be a great place to repurpose existing clips and snippets to introduce readers to your show.

Email

Finally, we can’t forget about email as a promotional tool. You’ve got to let your existing customers and fans know that your show exists. Send an announcement to relevant email lists; many times, this is a warm audience who will be excited to learn about what you’ve got going on.

You should also continue building a dedicated list of subscribers. One cool way to do this is by collecting emails using teaser content for your series. You can reach out to this new list when you have new episodes or even sweeten the pot with exclusive content. Whatever you do, and no matter who you’re emailing, make sure you provide value and put a smile on their face with the content you’re sending them.

Maintain ongoing show promotion

Now that your show is out into the world, it’s time to focus on ongoing promotion and audience engagement. Here are a few of our favorite channels to consistently promote show content.

Social Media

Social media is a natural place to promote your show. Social platforms are highly engaging, which pairs nicely with video and audio content. And many platforms offer advanced targeting capabilities, which make it easy to get in front of a niche audience.

However, you’ll want to be mindful of how much you give away on social. Take a note from the Netflix promotion playbook; the company generally leverages social only to create initial awareness and drives people back to the company website to learn more and watch the full trailers.

“The way to get the best of both worlds and really leverage your social media accounts is to use platforms like YouTube and Instagram for your clips and trailers and then drive your audience to your website where your audience lives. This way, the shorter content, your clips and trailers, do all the hard work for you. By not requiring a huge attention span on social media, you’re not losing audiences who might otherwise drop off, but you’re getting the full value of a long engagement in an environment that you control on your website.”

Phil Nottingham, Brand Strategist

On your actual launch day, be sure to go BIG on social media. We recommend making your channels all about your new show on launch day—and even for a few days after to keep the momentum going! This lets your audience know how excited you are about the launch and keeps your new show on their radar.

Email Marketing

After your initial email announcement, focus on building and nurturing a dedicated subscriber list. As we said earlier, you can reach out to these people when you have new episodes. Just make sure that the content you’re sending is always relevant and of interest to them.

“Behavior-based drip campaigns are especially helpful if you drop all of your episodes at once. Automation helps you to keep track of where viewers are in the series to ensure you’re sending relevant and timely content.”

If you have a marketing automation solution, you can take promotion a step further by . This will allow you to set up behavior-based drip campaigns to encourage viewers to finish your show. For example, you could set up a workflow that emails people to complete an episode if they watched less than 75%. Or you could set up a workflow that nudges people to watch the next episode if they finished an episode and dropped off.

Sales Enablement

Set your team up for success with dedicated sales enablement materials. This could be as simple as a one-pager with high-level messaging, top takeaways, and sample copy for folks to easily share the show across their own channels.

To prepare for , we held a virtual training session with our entire sales team to walk everyone through our full promotion plan. This helped them understand the customer journey and better understand what their prospects and customers would be experiencing. We also answered questions they had upfront to better prepare them for conversations.

Paid Advertising

If you’ve got a little bit of budget to play with, experiment with paid campaigns to drive folks into your show experience. Advertising can be a great way to reach net-new audiences or to .

“One of the best ways to do this is through display ads that are hyper-targeted to the folks that you’re trying to get to watch your show. We did this when we developed our show Rev Ops and Hops, whose audience we didn’t have in our email database. By using display and social ads, we were able to track an audience to a piece of content and start targeting a very specific niche.

As a result of these efforts, we were able to pick up an entirely new audience that we could sell our products to but also who could consume our content, and we never would have been able to do that without a show that was specifically targeted for them.”

Guest Promo

Guest promo kits are a surefire way to expand your reach beyond your own audiences. We created custom promo kits for each guest on . The kit contained custom artwork, pull quotes, and sample copy for social media. The hope is that your guests feel like part of your team and will be motivated to use that copy on their own channels. If they do: Voila! There’s a whole new audience for you.

Here’s an example of a promo asset we created for our podcast .

Track show promotion success

While the heaviest of the lifting may now be done, show promotion doesn’t stop after launch! Measure the success of your show promotion over time with these handy tips.

Track links with UTM codes

Urchin tracking module codes (or UTM for short) are custom strings of text that you can add to the end of a link to track things like source, medium, campaign name, and more.

Here’s an example of a UTM code for this post:

For, we created custom links for different promotional channels including social media, email, our internal sales team, external show talent, and public relations.

If you’re sharing your show on multiple channels and through multiple campaigns, UTM codes can help you easily segment your data in Google Analytics to track show performance. The key to making the most of UTM codes is to be consistent. You’ll want your entire team to use the same naming convention and letter case for the various fields.

Show launch dashboard

We highly recommend building a dedicated analytics dashboard to track show performance starting with your launch. This can be a dashboard in a free solution like Google Analytics or something more robust like Databox that pulls in data from multiple sources. Talk to the teams involved with the launch and figure out what metrics are important. Then, figure out which tool will pull all of that data together into one place for easy monitoring and greater transparency.

Consistency is key for show promotion

The best marketing campaigns include multiple touchpoints to keep your content top of mind. Think through all of your available marketing channels and take the time to plan meaningful and engaging communications that will bring people in starting on launch day and continue afterward.

“People have to hear something over and over again before they actually pay attention to it, so don’t be afraid to cross-promote things. Your content should really be 20% creation, 80% promotion. 80% of your energy should be on how you promote it. How do you promote it the first time, how do you promote it to different audiences, how do you get people to care about it inside your company as well as outside of your company, and how do you keep doing that over time?”

There you have it—our complete guide to show promotion! Hungry for more? Be sure to watch for access to our free, standalone show promotion checklist.

CTA: Watch

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“Getting a new user to download the app isn’t the finish line—it’s the starting line.” While downloading the app is obviously a required initial step, app engagement is what determines your app’s success with users.

With ever-increasing app choices, (184 billion by 2024, to be exact) it’s vital to understand ways to improve app engagement and stickiness to avoid getting your app replaced on home screens.

Here are five of the best ways to keep users consistently engaged with your app.

The Steps for Better App Engagement

1. Reduce Friction in App Onboarding

Let’s start from the beginning. When developing your app, consider the user’s entire experience. What’s the first thing they’ll need to do when they open the app? Most likely, create an account. If there is a complicated onboarding process for users, there’s a higher chance they’ll abandon your app without a single use, diminishing app engagement.

Smashing Magazine uses OKCupid as an example. When trying to login to their app, the author, Suzanne Scacca, was unable to use the “log in with Facebook” feature after multiple attempts (14 clicks).

Retention is the path to increased app engagement. Getting users to download the app without optimizing the account creation experience cuts that retention short almost immediately. Brands should strive to retain users versus aiming to constantly get new ones. Simplifying onboarding is the first step in customer retention, but ensuring your app is useful to the user will increase retention as well.

2. Increase App Utility

Once the friction has been removed from the onboarding process, another ingredient for improving app engagement is simplifying the user’s life. Going back to the tool belt analogy, if there’s a tool that’s not helping to solve a problem or provide the user value, they’re going to remove it from their tool belt so it doesn’t weigh them down.

In an interview with Forbes regarding app use during the pandemic, AJ Wang, Head of Acquisitions and Performance Marketing for GCash, a fintech app, said marketers need to become “lifestyle enablers.”

An app should improve the customer’s life in some way. Whether it’s a stress-relieving game or making depositing checks a breeze, for consistent app engagement there needs to be a utility aspect to the app.

3. Optimize Push Notifications

Now that the user was able to easily sign up and your app is helping simplify their life, how do you continue to engage with the user to remind them of your app’s benefits? Enter: push notifications. Personalized push notifications with the right messaging at the right time can improve app engagement. In fact, push notifications have a click-through rate 7x that of email.

If your app is a tool for the user, push notifications should remind the user that they have that tool when they need it. One way to do this is by sending push notifications based on a user’s location.

With geo-targeting, the user gets a personalized experience and is more likely to engage with the app if the message is helpful to them at that moment.

As helpful as the notifications may be, the user experience, once customers are taken to your app, needs to be consistent to retain and engage users.

4. Create a Consistent In-App Experience

The user is logged in, finds your app useful and gets personalized push notifications. As the user navigates your app, however, it’s important to create a consistent experience within the app itself.

A consistent in-app experience means that as a customer uses your app, they shouldn’t be confused by the user interface and app functionality. In fact, as part of the onboarding experience, many apps include a quick training on how to use the app, to improve the customer’s experience and increase app engagement.

UsabilityGeek highlights the importance of mental models when thinking about an app’s user interface. They noted, “Developing an understanding of a user’s mental model, that is, what a user will need to use during certain situations, be it mobile or desktop, will ensure a positive user experience through consistency.”

In-app consistency is an integral part of the customer experience. But, when a customer leaves your app, how do you guide them back? Consistency should be applied to the entire customer journey, for a seamless experience.

5. Develop a Seamless Cross-Channel Experience

Once the in-app experience is consistent, brands need to look at their customer experience as a whole, including their app. In Liftoff’s 2020 Mobile Report, Skye Featherstone, Product Marketing Manager at Snapchat, said, “Apps are the connective fiber of your business, providing seamless, personalized experiences across both physical and digital contexts.”

Because apps have the ability to bridge the physical and the digital, like in our geo-targeting example, the experience for users needs to be seamless and undoubtedly on-brand.

Let’s say your customer is in your mobile app but later clicks a link to your mobile site. If the mobile site and mobile app look different, just from a basic branding perspective, it may create confusion for the user. You want the user to develop a familiarity with your brand and, through doing that, you’ll likely increase app engagement in addition to engagement on other channels.

Another example of a seamless experience could be if a user is shopping on your desktop site and abandons their cart. You could send the customer a push notification with messaging about the products in their cart or products related to what’s in their cart. Then, when clicked, the notification could take them to their cart in your mobile app, which has the items they added via the desktop.

Building a seamless experience for the customer will ultimately improve app engagement because the app is a piece of the puzzle. The user can bounce back-and-forth between the physical locations, desktop and your app and feel as though it’s one singular, personalized experience.

Improve Engagement by Improving the Customer Experience

The key to improving app engagement is understanding the customer experience, both within your app and as a whole. From first download to becoming regularly used, the focus for your app needs to be on what the customer is experiencing and what value they can get from your app at each moment in the customer journey.

At the end of the day, we’ve all used an app. Even though we’re marketers, we’re people too, so think about your experience with your favorite apps and put yourself in the customers’ shoes. What makes you go back time and again to your favorite apps?

Looking to kick your mobile marketing up a notch? Learn more about .

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Listen to the authors present their findings (source: September 2020 JM Webinar)

“Enjoy the moment. Put down your phone.” “Put down your phone! An exercise in happiness.” The media is full of headlines telling consumers that to truly enjoy themselves and their experiences, the first step is to ditch their cellphones. Yet this advice often appears to fall on deaf ears. Major events routinely coincide with huge surges in social media posts as millions tweet during experiences like the Super Bowl and World Cup. This poses something of a conundrum. People clearly generate large amounts of content—remarking on what they are currently doing, hearing, and seeing—as experiences unfold, but is this behavior helpful or harmful? 
 
The popular media and advice columns extolling the virtues of keeping one’s phone away clearly imply that generating content could be harmful. However, the frequency and persistence of content generation also suggest that this behavior may be beneficial in some way. Otherwise, people should learn that generating content by texting, writing notes, and posting to social media detracts from experiences and eventually engage in this behavior less. A new study in the Journal of Marketing explores the phenomenon of user-generated content during experiences to unravel this puzzle. To do so, our research team systematically examined the effect of generating content on people’s feelings of immersion in their experiences and discovered that this common behavior can actually improve experiences.
 
Across a series of nine studies, we find that when people create content about unfolding experiences, they ultimately enjoy the experience more because creating content increases engagement and makes time feel like it is “flying.” Thus, in contrast to popular press advice, as well as prior research outlining the detriments of technology use (particularly when used to multitask), we uncover one important benefit of technology’s role in our daily lives … by generating content relevant to ongoing experiences, people can use technology in a way that complements, rather than interferes with, their experiences.  
 
We tested the potential benefits of generating content across a variety of experiences including the Super Bowl halftime show, holiday celebrations, a dance performance, virtual safaris and bus tours, and a horror film. During all these experiences, which differed in their pleasantness and duration (from a few minutes to multiple hours), we consistently found that generating content led people to feel more immersed in their experiences and to feel as though time was passing more quickly. Interestingly, this occurred whether people tended to say positive or negative things about the experience. Moreover, generating content increased people’s enjoyment of positive experiences, though this effect did not occur for negative experiences. 
 
Importantly, just because a consumer is on her phone does not mean that she’s distracted or unable to become absorbed in her experience. We also found that when people choose to generate content, they tend to do so in a constructive way. On average, people create content that is directly relevant to their current experience, with positive effects on their evaluations of the experience. However, when people use their technology to generate irrelevant content, this behavior is no longer beneficial. That is, only when people communicate about the unfolding experience itself does content creation increase immersion and enjoyment. 
 
Interestingly, marketers often encourage consumers to communicate about their events and experiences. For example, companies may use branded hashtags, offer discounts and rewards tied to posting on social media, or use sharing platforms customized for individual events. We tested two potential strategies for firms to encourage content creation: 1) an incentive (i.e., reward) for generating content; and 2) a norm nudge, where consumers are informed of how common this behavior is among other consumers. As expected, both strategies effectively increased content creation. Even more importantly, we found that consumers who were incentivized or motivated by social norms to generate content reaped the same experiential benefits as those who created content organically. That is, content generation in response to a firm’s encouragement can still lead consumers to feel more immersed in the experience and to enjoy it more. These findings illustrate how leveraging consumer content creation can mutually benefit marketers and consumers alike by improving experiences. 
 
So, the next time you’re advised to put down your phone in order to truly live “in the moment,” remember that this depends on how you’re using your phone. If you’re posting about the last movie you saw while ignoring the person across the dinner table from you, then this could potentially detract from your current experience. But if you’re using your device to comment, joke, or even complain about your current experience, then our research indicates you may be more engaged and enjoy that experience more than if you kept your phone in your pocket.

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Read the authors’ slides for sharing this material in your classroom.

From: Gabriela Tonietto and Alixandra Barasch, “,” Journal of Marketing.

Go to the Journal of Marketing

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Today, with millions of apps available, making sure that yours stands out from the crowd is a tall order. What distinguishes your app from others is how well you can keep your customers engaged and optimize their overall experience.

Customer experience (CX) has gone down to become the next big thing in app development. A predicted that customer experience will be more important than the price of the product, as well as product itself in the near future.

This simply implies that your mobile application should have each and every element in the right proportion to keep up with the customer’s expectations and stay on the top of the game.

In this piece, we will look at five features app developers need to incorporate within their mobile app in order to upswing customer experience and boost engagement.

Accessibility

Accessibility is the practice of making your app usable for as many people as possible. For most mobile app users today, nothing quite matches the frustration of accidentally tapping ‘Cancel’ when wanting to tap ‘Save’ or vice versa. Keep the buttons close to each other on your mobile app, and you’ve easily scored one huge mess!

When , first ensure that you understand key accessibility components pertinent to your target audience. For instance, most people use their thumb to tap on a mobile screen. Those who opt for two-handed usage use one or another finger for tapping. Therefore, try to contemplate the accessibility zones that these two styles create, their overlaps and make sure the action options and call-to-action buttons are placed within these overlap areas. The overall accessibility of an app is judged by how it improves the ease of use for all people, regardless of ability level.

In 2018, iTaxi, a platform (similar to FreeNow, Lyft, Uber or Bolt) that connects users and licensed cab drivers, optimized its mobile app for the visually impaired and blind. The company aimed at making the app more accessible for these users.

“The most crucial element in designing for accessibility is an understanding of the end-user’s perspective. We had to learn how the blind or visually impaired use our mobile application, and we were quite surprised by how fast they managed it with assistive technologies,” said Katarzyna Małecka, UX designer and researcher, in a 2018 interview with . “We had assumed that the more descriptive the application was, the easier it would be to use by those less able to see. We thought that these people use the app studiously, carefully going from one element to another. How wrong we were! A blind person can hail a taxi almost instantaneously, provided that the app—meaning us, the designers, developers, managers— doesn’t stop them from doing so.”

Interactivity

Better interactions capture the user’s attention, engage them and give you a strong thread to develop while guiding the customer toward your business’s end goal. Mobile app developers are increasingly aligning with the idea of developing web interfaces on the basis of anticipated user behaviors and thought-out actions.

Businesses that comprehend interaction contexts, user profiles and buyer personas deliver memorable customer experiences.

Now is a great time to determine if you have the answers to these crucial questions:

• Who are the target customers for whom the mobile interaction is being designed?
• Are these customers experienced mobile users or just beginners?
• What activates this mobile interaction for the customer?
• What information is needed for them to complete their goal of using the mobile interaction mechanism?

Answers to these questions will help you design the customer journey for your mobile apps. This “journey” will then act as the input for the wireframe of the mobile application, after which comes the design.

Interactive elements in your mobile app can also play a vital role in keeping your customers engaged, especially when targeting younger generations. Exceptional customer experiences can be delivered on mobile apps by leveraging principles of good communication. For Instance, MailChimp’s mobile app uses images of hand gestures to signify completion of desirable actions on the user side.

Deep Linking

Deep links have become a vital part of the mobile marketer’s toolkit. Mobile users have high expectations. It isn’t enough for mobile apps to be reliable, fast and secure anymore—users demand a more personalized experience. That is precisely what deep links help you deliver.

Instead of merely launching an app and leaving users at the home screen, takes users to a specific screen within your app. Think product profiles, pages, new content or shopping carts. Deep links can take users to in-app content directly from:

• Web links
• Ads
• Push notifications
• SMS texts
• Emails
• Social media posts
• App to app
• Search result listing (using app indexing)

Now, rendering seamless user experiences across a mobile ecosystem that has been cracked open can be very challenging, with marketers often not knowing where to pause.

A few years ago, the team at Adobe Spark faced a similar challenge as it sought to drive more downloads of its mobile app. Difficulty linking across channels and devices made it challenging for customers to find the specific information they were looking for within their mobile app.

“The new customer would download the app, only to be perplexed when they were dropped onto the app’s home screen and expected to find and pull in their own design manually,” says Thibault Imbert, former head of growth for Adobe Spark. “Obviously, this wasn’t just a bad experience, but terrible for conversion because the customer was lost. Many of us considered it a broken experience.” 

Using Branch, a mobile deep-linking platform, the Adobe Spark team was able to use the same links across channels, while simultaneously tracking insight for all its marketing activities—which was just what Imbert’s team needed.

Deep linking enables app developers and marketers to polish the way users interact with their app. With deep links, mobile marketers can design personalized campaigns. It’s the perfect tool for marketers to drive engagement and retain users within the mobile app by bringing them to specific conversion points within it, tailored by their stated interests and past behavior.

Segmented Targeting

Segmenting app users results in higher conversion rates, engagement and, eventually, revenue. Today, 55% of marketers are to deliver on their customer experience management goals.

Segmenting allows you to send targeted in-app messages, which increases:

• Personalization of your messages
• Likelihood your customers will buy from you
• How well customers feel you understand them

Marne Litfin, product content strategist of Audience Builder (a digital segmentation tool), presented an excellent example of how segmentation can be leveraged within a mobile app to improve its customer experience and boost engagement.

In a with Adjust, Litfin said, “Let’s say that you have a flagship app where users can review local businesses and restaurants, and you want to push them into a food delivery service app. It’s a perfect fit—users can review and read about places they’d like to eat, then go directly into the new app and order from those same restaurants with a seamless user experience.

“By pairing up your flagship app to a segmentation tool, you can get a list of device IDs known to it. This will then create individualized segments, with which you could build a segment of known users who are very active in this case. Your segment could contain only users with long session times, or users who have recently triggered a search or left a review. You can have your network target those users with ads for your new app. You can even skip the network altogether and create a push notification campaign that sends pushes containing deep links, for example, 10 minutes after a user has searched for a restaurant, encouraging them to download the new app and place an order.”

Constant Innovation

An average U.S. adult spends approximately . The huge surge in adoption and popularity of mobile apps is not just owed to the unmatched convenience they offer, but also to their potential to unleash innovation that transforms the way people look at mobile phones.

The secret to the success of a mobile app isn’t just good user flow, that it might have solved a problem or made users’ lives easier. It’s about innovation! It’s that the creators are always thinking about how they can add to the customer’s experience and enhance their lives. And in the fast-moving world of mobile applications, it’s the customer that matters.

One excellent example of constant innovation to enhance customer experience in the mobile app realm is that of Coachella’s mobile app. 

Coachella’s audience is tech-savvy, young and hard to impress, which left the popular music festival’s organizers with a real challenge when looking to amplify the festival experience and boost engagement. Yet the Coachella mobile app has become central to maximizing the enjoyment of the event that most visitors instantly fall in love once they try it.

That’s because the app allows users to personalize everything. They can use it to navigate the sprawling venue and discover activities; find food and beverage vendors and amenities; look at a real-time virtual lost and found; and purchase merchandise online. And, they can do all of it while listening to their personally curated playlist.

This year’s mobile app also included an innovative new augmented reality (AR) feature. Users gained exclusive access to AR art installations across the venue. Want a picture of you cutting up the dance floor with a disco shark? The app makes that and much more possible as part of its commitment to creating a better experience for customers.

Get to Work!

As the marketing realm becomes hyper-competitive, more businesses are finding value in mobile apps to revolutionize customer experience and boost engagement. Apps enable marketer to forge a solid mobile presence, with custom-made interfaces designed specifically to tailor the best possible experience for customers. Apps automate many routine tasks, streamline the customer’s buying process and enable new possibilities to drive engagement.

With brands now progressing toward a high-stakes game, carefully designed mobile apps have become a precious tool to gain a competitive edge. Building a mobile application requires the right mix of technology, design, usability and foresight. Marketers who can correctly identify their customers’ path to purchasing and engagement, and optimize their mobile apps accordingly, stand to come out on top.

Illustration by Bill Murphy.

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Just as some customers walk directly to the back of a store, knowing this is where the retailer displays sale items, many shoppers quickly scroll down a web page to seek product reviews. Checking reviews has become second nature to consumers. Looking for a new taco joint? See what’s rated well on Yelp. Torn between two vacuum cleaners? See which has the better star rating.

The age of ratings and reviews was arguably ushered in by Amazon. The company has perfected the art, implementing a standard five-star rating system that allows customers to post photos and videos of products, and even making reviews searchable for those with a specific question or concern. But they’ve also opened themselves up to abuse, spawning fake reviews and manipulated ratings.

Customers still rely on these systems to guide their purchasing decisions. Ethical brands shouldn’t directly guide or censor customer feedback, but they can help build robust, trustworthy review systems that can help answer shopper questions.

Why Ratings and Reviews Matter

According to Pew Research Center, 82% of U.S. adults say they at least sometimes read online ratings or reviews before buying items for the first time, including 40% who say they always or almost always look at ratings or reviews. According to , the typical next step after reading a positive review is for the consumer to visit the company website (50%) or search for more reviews to validate their choice (19%). This marked a notable shift from 2017, when visiting the website as a next step was chosen by 37% of survey respondents and 26% said they searched elsewhere for validation.

The robots are also looking at reviews: Moz’s 2018 research found that review signals—defined as review quality, velocity and diversity—in local search-ranking factors.

Cheryl Sullivan, president of price and promotion at DemandTec and previously CMO of PowerReviews, says that customer reviews—also referred to as user-generated content (UGC)—went from “nice to have” to “need to have.”

“Shoppers have lost a lot of faith and trust in retailers and brands today, and they’re really starting to turn more toward other shoppers,” Sullivan says. “Brands and retailers are starting to realize that [UGC] has to be part of their overall marketing strategy.”

How to Get Customers to Post (Helpful) Reviews

Sullivan says that encouraging shoppers to review a product can be difficult, so it’s incumbent upon marketers to guide them to take action and provide robust content. For example, she recommends directing post-purchase consumers to a display they can fill out with their review, one that asks questions that are customized to their buy.

“We’ll try to get images, we’ll try to get video, things like that up front because that’s more compelling content,” she says.

Many companies compel customers to review their products or services by offering something in return. Perhaps you’ve been to a dentist that offers a free tube of lip balm if you review them on Yelp, or maybe you’ve received email offers to be entered to win a gift card if you review a clothing purchase online. Incentivizing reviews is absolutely a strategy, but it should be done cautiously.

“There is a debate in the industry right now specifically on that question [of ethical incentivizing],” says Jared Watson, assistant professor of marketing at New York University. “There are some who suggest that it creates a biased account of the product when you incentivize reviews. And therefore, when companies choose to incentivize reviews, they’re actually sort of misleading their potential customers. My personal take on it is that [it’s acceptable] as long as you’re forthright about, ‘You’re entered into this contest, regardless of what kind of review you write for the product.’ But anything that helps encourage more reviews is better for the ecosystem.”

If you do plan to use a specific review in marketing collateral, be sure to make that clear to the reviewer. Either explicitly mention that their reviews may be used in advertising upon submission, or contact the reviewer before using it in an ad.

Highlighting Your Reviews

The best reviews go beyond a simple, “Product xyz was good,” and provide details—especially as it relates to use.

“Anything that helps the consumer visualize usage helps,” Watson says. “Obviously, pictures and videos help consumers visualize how it might be used, where it might be placed, how it might fit with other things. You can also do the same thing with text: Descriptive text describing the flavors and the contrast of everything at that restaurant might be more impactful than simply, say, ‘This was good’ or ‘It had a fair price.’ Take some of those descriptive words that might be sort of emotionally laden—beyond ‘I was satisfied with things,’ use ‘I was thrilled, I was exuberant, etc.’ Everything that can evoke emotion and invoke the ability to visualize the experience or the usage of that product helps.”

Watson says consumers often place more weight on the actual text of the review, relative to aggregate metrics. Think of the ability to search reviews for keywords on Amazon, or the way some clothing retailers allow review filters by item size.

“Advertising specific lines or sentiment that comes from other people could help you overcome some of those deficits that you might have in the aggregate categories of ratings or the number of reviews,” Watson says.

Highlighting specific use cases via UGC can help potential buyers imagine themselves using the product or service as well. It’s similar to brands migrating to microinfluencers: It’s easier for a consumer to relate.

“What shoppers really want to see is people like them, that they know—not a Kim Kardashian that’s going to have a makeup crew behind them to make the product work,” Sullivan says. “They want to know what somebody like me, like you [thinks] and how their experience was around this product.”

Be Honest ÂÜŔňÉçšŮÍřt Ratings

Consumers want to trust other consumers, but brands need to do some work to make the whole process more honest and transparent.

Because of the issues surrounding fake and paid reviews on Amazon, some other review companies have instituted systems to check the validity of reviews. For example, Sullivan says PowerReviews combines artificial intelligence and human moderators to ensure content is authentic.

The reviewers aren’t the only ones who need to be honest: Brands need to let all reviews live, not just the best ones. Killing a one-star or angry review won’t win you any new fans—and it can even hurt a brand’s authenticity. It would be akin to saying you don’t have any shortcomings in a job interview. “A lot of people try to prevent the bad ones from going through,” Sullivan says. “There is a misnomer that five stars is good. In reality, what’s good is 4.5 and 4.6. People don’t even trust five stars anymore.”

Brands also have to work against a simple reality: Research by Watson and his co-authors shows that consumers are more willing to trust a product that has more reviews with a lower average rating than a product with fewer reviews and a higher average rating. But the product with more reviews may simply have been on the market longer—it isn’t necessarily the superior item. Watson suggests pointing this out to consumers, or running a promotion seeking reviews and explaining why.

Watson also suggests promoting velocity metrics over absolute numbers of ratings in volume. “[This is] being able to say that over the last week the number of reviews has increased by 10% or the change in ratings has changed by 10% up or 10% down,” he says. “That gives consumers some insight into that time dimension. … Knowing how many people are buying it today or this past week or this past month might be better than knowing how many people bought it over the lifecycle of the product. That’s something that I think managers and retailers from the brand and the retail perspective aren’t emphasizing enough, the philosophy when it comes to word of mouth, because that would be a more accurate picture to the consumers.”

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For future-forward brands interested in seizing tomorrow’s market share, the time to act is now. The modern path to purchase calls for unprecedented speed and convenience across digital experiences, and a strategic approach to meeting those needs is necessary. 

In this eBook, we share the critical things every brand should consider as they work to future-proof their marketing, including actionable insight around:

• The New Path to Purchase
• Delivering Stellar Onboarding and Activation
• Driving Valuable Engagement and Retention
• Amplifying Monetization and Cross-Selling
• Driving Acquisition and Boosting Retention
• Standing Out in Today’s Experience Economy

Enjoy a foreword by Swrve CMO Tara Ryan detailing our current landscape, and gain key strategies that have been proven to help leading global enterprises drive revenue and growth across digital channels.

*App Annie

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Today, it’s a truism that the world has gotten more complex, especially for consumers and brands. On the one hand, consumers have more options than ever. Amazon and other large online retailers have expanded product availability to previously unimaginable levels. And it’s not just the range of products available; consumers also have more access than ever to information about your brand and your competitors.

At the same time, brands have more data about consumers. For online direct-to-consumer brands, this data can be tracked at individual levels, following consumers among various touchpoints on the path to purchase, and measuring the effectiveness of these channels through analytics. Similarly, large online retailers may know more about your brand’s sales than you do, as they’re able to track user behavior, related products and other metrics.

For many CPG companies that still rely heavily on brick-and-mortar sales that might be several distribution steps away from the brand, this puts them at a serious disadvantage, without access to the individualized consumer data that fuels many leading-edge analytic approaches.

So what’s a large, established CPG brand to do?

Demographic Segmentation and Psychographics

In order to better understand customers, CPG brands must find ways to look at consumers in the aggregate while still finding ways to address them personally. Brands need segments that serve as useful stand-ins for the consumers whose data they’re missing. Category-level segmentation provides a critical tool for delivering this point of view on consumer habits.

Different approaches to segmentation vary in complexity and effectiveness. Perhaps the most basic level is demographic segmentation, relying on basic demographic metrics (e.g., Midwestern moms, ages 18-49) to create an addressable audience. More complexly, segmentation can also be built on psychographics, creating clusters of attitudes that describe the lifestyles and habits of potential marketing audiences.

Both of these approaches result in insights that are fairly crude, providing broad segments with a somewhat higher propensity to purchase. This might provide guidance to the creative team, but it’s limited as a map of the consumer landscape. Within these demographic or lifestyle segments, some consumers will like your brand, while others will never touch it.

Behavioral Segmentation

A better approach grounds the analysis in consumer behavior. Such behavioral segmentation starts from consumers in your category, and builds a model of how different consumers purchase. Rather than lifestyle attributes that may softly correlate with sales, a behavioral approach begins with the consumer and attempts to provide something akin to the personalized marketing available to digital-native brands. While any segmentation is obviously built on some amount of generalization, generalizing from behavior rather than attitudes helps to ground segments in your category.

Segmentations also need to be dynamic. As mentioned, the world has changed for both consumers and brands, and that process is ongoing. If you’re a grocery store or a food and beverage brand, you see this in real time, as food and diet trends shift and new products replace old ones. If the goal is to track consumer behavior, a segmentation from up to five years ago may no longer accurately represent the category landscape the brand inhabits. When segmentations grow stale, they can become ossified and restrictive. A more dynamic approach ensures that segments are current and relevant to consumers in the category.

Make It Specific

Finally, segmentations need to be specific. Many syndicated products exist on the market, whether driven by demographics, psychographics or behavior. However, these can often be generic and focused on a broad audience that may not necessarily represent your brand’s consumers. While purchasing an off-the-shelf solution can be cost-effective, its utility will be lesser to consumer segmentation that bridges the gap between consumers in the category and the specifics of your brand.

Segmentation provides a valuable method for understanding consumers in offline contexts where individual-level, digitally tracked data is impossible to obtain. It’s important to avoid the potential pitfalls by ensuring your segmentation is:

• Behavioral: Focusing on behavior over psychographics and demographics helps to ground the segments in real consumer behavior and avoids broad generalizations that may not help to convert consumers to customers.
• Dynamic: Segmentations can grow stale when they sit on the shelf for too long. Regular updates ensure that insights don’t become dated or restrictive.
• Specific: Grounding your segmentation in behaviors that drive consumption of your brand ensures that the segments will provide insights that can impact bottom-line sale.

Segmentation is a powerful tool, but it needs to be built correctly from the ground up to get the most actionable insights for your brand. Especially when consumer-level data is unavailable, segmentation can generate lessons about your consumers that can be impossible to uncover otherwise.

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on .

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