Wishing you a very Happy New year-2016

On this auspicious occasion of New Year 2016, Aerizo is heartily thankful to all our clients and well-wishers for providing us the opportunity to serve you and we promise to make your experience a satisfying and enriching one in the coming days. 

Boost App Engagement with Mobile Marketing

Appetite for apps keeps on growing

As consumers we can't get enough of mobile apps. They're now our preferred way of consuming digital content – 85 per cent of us prefer using mobile apps over the corresponding website. And they are often free, or at least fairly inexpensive.

No surprises then, those apps are now big business; with brands of all sizes trying to replicate those must-have apps we download to each new device.  Some brands are starting to drive real value and engagement via their mobile apps and many are investing in a new marketing tool set – mobile CRM (m-CRM) – precisely to track their app data and manage engagement, acquisition or monetisation campaigns.

Realizing the value of mobile apps

The starting point for driving value is to define your objectives. It's not just about creating an app and getting people to install it. Brands need to be clear on what the app is designed to do. It needs to satisfy their users' needs – for easily accessible information, services and entertainment on the go – but also serve the brand's needs. It should enable better understanding by providing data to help build loyalty, drive sales, generate additional revenue or create engagement and brand touch points.

A mobile app can be an incredibly powerful way of serving both these objectives. But, many are yet to understand this and the added value their mobile apps can give them compared to a responsive or mobile website.

Tips for mobile app success

So how do you set yourself up for app success using m-CRM?

1. Know your user – First brands need to really understand how people are using their app. That means looking at their in-app behaviour, such as click through rates, responding to an offer or proceeding to purchase and how they react to push notifications. Together with duration and frequency stats, these measures can also give an indication of tolerance to different interactions and when too much communication can push individual app-users to disengaging.

2. Engage your user – Once you know them and have segmented them, then you can start targeting different user messages and track their engagement level. True customer engagement isn't about reaching a huge audience; it's about reaching the right audience on their terms and driving desired actions from them.

3. Retain and convert them – Specific KPIs are also needed around retention and conversion. Do you want to drive your audience to purchase? Get them to engage more deeply by participating in an activity or registering for further information? Apps are more successful when they deliver personalized touch points and communications with a brand. Using m-CRM to engage app users in real time with rich content, from offers and discounts to service updates, via push notifications is one way of doing this.

4. Acquire new users – Once the first three steps have been mastered, the next is obviously the tried and tested route of acquiring the more of the same. But here again, m-CRM tools can help you to track and manage the results and ROI of your investments. For instance, by telling you which of your apps should you invest in for optimized results and brand safety.

5. Monetize the audience – As your app reaches a certain volume of users, or has a level of users that have been qualified, it's possible with m-CRM to monetize the audience of your app and generate additional revenues by allowing a complementary brand to send a push notification to your users. As ever, setting some KPIs is essential. Going purely for revenue can risk losing an audience because of heavy advertising pressure. Think also about which format, what sort of content and frequency is ideal. What brand partnerships do you accept or refuse? Tempting though it may be to boost turnover, front of mind here must always be whether the monetizing strategy is enriching your brand positioning.

Following these steps will go a long way to setting you up for success, enabling you to properly realize the value of mobile apps using m-CRM. With mobile apps on the rise, the most advanced companies are already connecting their mobile CRM to their other databases or data management platform to generate more ever personalized and multi-channel communications.

Battle for Mobile Payments Guide to Digital Wallets

Mobile wallets are making headlines these days. Paytm and Mobikwik, both of which offer semi-closed wallets, are the leading players in the sector. Telecom operators also offer this facility. Internationally, too, Apple Inc. Has also introduced an iPhone wallet few months back, which has tie-ups with Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc. and American Express Co.

According to many experts, mobile wallets are going to be the next wave of change in the way people make payments.

Simply put, it is a virtual money wallet that can be used to make instant payments, same as with a physical wallet. It is an application stored in smart phones, which enables users to make payments for utility bills, book tickets, transfer money and other such transactions. It can also be used to make instant e-payments while shopping in physical stores or at e-stores.

Entities issuing closed prepaid payment systems do not require authorization from the RBI; they just need to inform the RBI.

Entities issuing semi-closed and open prepaid payment systems are required to take authorization from the RBI.

The Payments and Settlement Systems Act, 2007 is the primary law governing payments systems in India, with the RBI as the body that supervises related matters. Section 18 of the Act empowers the RBI to make such regulations as may be required, from time to time, to regulate payments systems in India. In exercise of the same, the RBI has laid down guidelines for the issuing and operation of Pre-paid Payment Instruments. 

Tips for Planning a Mobile Marketing Strategy

As more and more brands and companies look towards mobile for their ad strategies, many commit the classic mistake of treating mobile like a simple extension of their desktop ad strategy.

When it comes to mobile, it's important to realize how completely separate and unique your ad strategy should be. Today, mobile users expect an experience that fits their mobile lifestyle and defies their expectations.

When creating a mobile ad strategy for your brand or company, here are 3 important things to consider:

In-App is the New Frontier

Despite reports that users spend over 80% of their mobile time within mobile apps, companies still use most of their mobile ad spends on the mobile web.

While advertisers shouldn't cut the mobile web out of their mobile strategy, apps are where the majority of users are. Apps also provide advertisers with a greater opportunity to target their ads to the best users and to take more chances with their mobile ad creative.

Users Don't Want to Pay Attention to You

User experience is by far the most important thing on mobile. When ads aren't properly optimized for mobile nor don't fit it seamlessly with the mobile ecosystem, the user experience gets interrupted and you end up with a frustrated audience instead of an engaged one.

Most of the battle for advertisers on mobile is showing users that you have a worthwhile message that will convince them to interact and engage with your ad instead of skipping it. You can do this through innovative ad creative that capture the user's attention by using the mobile experience to your advantage. Or, you can also convince users to pay attention by offering real value through your ads, such as exclusive coupons or access to in-app goods (if you have a relationship with the app publisher). This will give users an incentive and help convince them that interacting with your brand is worth their time.

Mobile is All about New Experiences

Technology and innovation on mobile is moving an incredible pace, and users expect advertisers to keep up. Relying only on desktop-era banner ads and static interstitial ads to deliver your message may work on a small scale but won't translate into a comprehensive mobile ad strategy in the long term.

Today, advertisers need to start embracing the mobile experience when it comes to their ad creative. Interactive video ads that tie into the mobile interface, 3-dimensional ads that take advantage of the phone's display capabilities, and 360-degree ads that tap into the phone's internal technology all bring traditional ad creative to the next level and offer a unique experience that will leave an impression on users.

When make a mobile ad strategy, don't be afraid to take some risks. Users expect more out of an ad experience on mobile than they did for desktop ads, and advertisers need to step up to the challenge.

Google: Now Tap Mobile Apps without downloading them

We all have experienced times while using our smart phones when we need to get a work done or check some information as small as horoscopes and we need to first download an app for doing so though we will be requiring that app for that particular moment and in doing so we waste some MBs of data, space on our smart phones and some precious time. But now the Mountain View Company Google is all set to change this, soon you will be able to use an app without downloading it.  

The tech giant Google, in an attempt to extend its search and advertising reach on smart phones, it has unveiled a new technology that will enable the users to search inside an app and even use the apps without having to download them.

Here's how it works: If you search for, say, a cheap hotel using Google's app on a smart phone powered by the company's Android software, it will show you search results from around the Web like normal. But there will also be information from apps like Hotel Tonight, the San Francisco-based app for booking last-minute rooms. If you tap a button, Google will open up the app so you can book a room, even if you don't have it installed on your phone.

This new tech might come as a great relief to people who hate installing an app for one particular task and then the app lies on the Smartphone without any specific usage. To get this thing done Google streams a video to your smart phone using the Internet and during this time the app runs many miles away in a computer.

Google is able to stream these apps thanks to technology it acquired last year from a start-up called Agawi. Technically, Google isn't really giving you access to apps. It feels like you're in the program, but the company is actually streaming you a high-resolution video that you can tap and scroll like a normal app.