5 Ways Connected Content Makes Marketing More Personal and Responsive [Product Spotlight]

Updated 9/22/16

With the rise of mobile, finding new and innovative ways to engage your customers is more important than ever. To stay competitive, marketers need to ensure that they have the right messaging tools and that they know how to use them to their fullest.

One of the most important of these new tools is dynamically-generated content. Appboy’s Connected Content is a tool that can significantly benefit your marketing efforts by making dynamic content possible.

What is Connected Content?

Quick and easy answer

It’s a simple way to seamlessly insert information drawn from public APIs (such as headlines from the New York Times, event listings from EventBrite or forecasts from OpenWeatherMap; see a full list here) and your organization’s own servers into personalized customer messages.

An example of how a Connected Content message would be created by the marketer, and how the user would receive it.

Diving into detail

Connected Content allows marketers to automatically include dynamic, real-time information from a variety of sources into the push notifications, emails, and in-app messages that they send to their customers, significantly expanding what can be accomplished with individualized messaging. By allowing you to include API calls during the composition of each message and to pre-select under what circumstances a given customer will receive the notification, Connected Content makes it easy to create a responsive, deeply personalized messaging experience for each and every member of your audience, increasing their engagement with your brand.

Personalize customer messages with real-time movie listings using Connected Content

What problems does it solve?

Traditionally, marketers putting together a campaign related to of-the-moment triggers like inclement weather or the release of a new movie had to do so on an ad hoc basis, creating messages one-by-one as the situation emerged. With Connected Content, a promotional campaign that uses an approaching blizzard to highlight the convenience of your online store can be put together weeks or months in advance and automatically deliver the messages only to customers in areas affected by the storm.

What can you do with Connected Content?

Connected Content is designed to allow the use of information from a wide variety of sources, creating a profoundly flexible tool that can be an asset in a wide array of possible use cases. Here are a few to get you thinking:

1. If you’re an events/ticketing app, you could automatically send personalized in-app messages to customers when your internal servers indicate that tickets for a band or event that they’ve expressed interest in go on sale in their area
2. Finance apps could re-engage lapsing customers by sending them push notifications showcasing real-time stock quotes or financial news pulled from their proprietary servers or from financially-focused public APIs
3. By leveraging images from a public API providing brand logos, retailers could automatically include instantly recognizable logos for companies like Nike, Hanes, or Izod when sending emails promoting deals for those brands
4. News aggregation apps could draw from their own servers or from public news APIs to send customers targeted in-app messages featuring headlines that are individually curated based on their most-viewed news topics
5. Media brands (including streaming music or video apps) could draw information from their in-house recommendation engines to send in-app messages or push notifications to customers that include individualized suggestions

Have more questions? Check out our Academy page to start leveraging this feature!