Mobile push messaging expert Urban Airship unveils new marketing solution with iBeacon targeting

Mobile push messaging specialist Urban Airship took the wraps off a new product today at the Mobile World Congress, which is squarely targeted at marketers.

Urban Airship has made a name for itself by providing push-messaging features for other companies’ apps. Its new solution, which is available this quarter, combines push messaging with real-time mobile marketing automation and iBeacon targeting. Urban Airship says:

For the first time in the industry, every swipe on a push message, tap on a landing page, or proximity to an iBeacon can build richer mobile audience segments for better targeting and deeper personalization over time. For example, a shopper might walk into a children’s clothing department triggering an iBeacon message with seasonal specials, and also become part of a children’s clothing audience segment for a back-to-school campaign later that year.

With this new solution, marketers and product teams can set up their own automated programs for real-time messaging, design and deep-link to landing pages anywhere in their apps or on the mobile Web, manage and analyze these campaigns through message response reports, and have the data connected into existing analytics systems including Google Analytics.

Urban Airship’s new solution intends to help marketers be less reliant on developers to deliver responsive experiences at scale. It means marketers can react more easily to campaign responses and other customer behavior with real-time triggers for push messages, in-app messages and deep-linked landing pages.

In a bid to avoid bombarding customers, Urban Airship’s new solution also features timing delays and frequency limits for subsequent messages beyond customers’ responses or non-responses. For example, a business may trigger a free shipping offer two days after a customer abandons his/her shopping cart, but avoid sending it more than once per month to each customer.

Urban Airship’s new focus on marketing comes after it eyed up Apple Passbook and Google Wallet as the next big growth market, launching a cross-platform digital wallet solution called Wallet Studio, which enables businesses to easily create, launch and manage campaigns that integrate with Passbook and Google Wallet.

By going into marketing, the company is no doubt hoping for a stickier ecosystem that gets customers spending their money at these businesses as well.

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