Content Cards – The Secret Weapon in Customer Engagement
With content cards, you can highlight the value of personalised cross-channel messages and gradually introduce additional features, building on each as users adopt them.
Have you ever accidentally swiped away a push notification from your favourite brand? Was it a promo code? Did your favourite product come back in stock? You quickly open the app, but the message is gone. Guess you’ll never know.
Content cards are persistent messages that live natively in your app or website and provide an answer to this problem. They allow customers who accidentally swipe away push notifications to go back into the app and view all their notifications in one place.
But how can you best use content cards, and what should you avoid?
Boost Engagement with Existing Customers
Once you’ve acquired a new customer, it still can take work to get them to make more frequent, larger purchases. Messaging campaigns can use several strategies to nudge customers to spend, from helping users complete the checkout process to highlighting special occasions with targeted outreach.
Content cards are a great way to do this by executing time-sensitive messaging campaigns that highlight short-term discounts, sales, and special offers to customers. You can even segment your audience based on their channel preferences to ensure that users are notified about flash sales on the channels they use most.
This can help drive immediate purchases - in fact, content cards are 38 times more effective than email at driving sales over a 72-hour period.
Keep Customers for Longer
Customer retention is key to business growth – there’s no point spending all your energy bringing in new customers if existing ones are leaving through the back door. And brands that engage customers on a regular, consistent basis tend to see higher retention than ones that don’t.
If users aren’t organically discovering and using key features of your product or service after they’ve onboarded, they may drift away. With content cards, you can highlight the value of personalised cross-channel messages and gradually introduce additional features, building on each as users adopt them.
This works even more effectively if you use segmentation to direct messages specifically to those who haven’t begun using a given feature to ensure your outreach is relevant and helpful.
Another great use for content cards is nudging users who abandon tasks before completing them, hampering your ability to drive revenue or build strong customer relationships.
You can guide them back by creating contextual messaging based on user-specific information about their past actions in connection with the product flow and offering discounts or exclusive content to get them over the finish line.
Content cards provide a visually seamless bridge back to your app or website, especially if combined with other channels like email and push notifications to reach out to users after they’ve left.
By using past behaviour to help drive conversions, you can build strong relationships with customers by showing that you understand them, enabling you to stand out and drive conversions in a distraction-filled marketplace.
Just Another Messaging Channel?
The challenge with adding content cards to your customer engagement mix is that consumers can already find themselves flooded with messages across push, email, and more. While marketers do their best to personalise content and identify when and which channel to send on, customers may still find that it’s hard to keep track of what matters.
It’s causing customers to take steps to gain control of their inboxes and notifications on their mobile devices and browsers. And technology giants are noticing. Apple, for instance, has introduced features this year to give consumers greater control over push notifications.
Content cards can be a great way to tie all of these channels together. For example, retail brands might send a push to alert of a promotion. Maybe the customer hasn’t seen it— that’s when you send an email to highlight the promotion again.
What if customers have unsubscribed or haven’t gone through their inbox yet? If your customers are back in the app, show them a card in their promotions feed to alert and highlight key details about the offer.
Done right, the impact can be significant. Research conducted by Braze has found that customers who receive outreach in multiple messaging channels have engagement rates as much as 844% higher than customers who receive no messages at all. Remember, as a brand, as long as you keep your customers at the heart of everything you do and add value, your consumers will happily engage with your brand.
By pairing core messaging channels like push and email with content cards, brands can seamlessly incorporate this new channel into their cross-channel engagement strategies.
Like in-app messages, content cards are a great compliment to more disruptive channels like email and push notifications, allowing brands to keep the conversation going across different touchpoints and support a coherent, compelling brand experience wherever customers choose to engage.