Urban Airship Ushers in New Era of Actionable, Interactive Push Notifications

PORTLAND, OR--(Marketwired - August 27, 2014) - Urban Airship, the global leader in Mobile Relationship Management, today announced major solution enhancements including the industry's first cross-platform support for widgets and button-enabled interactive notifications in iOS 8 and rich notifications in Android 4.3 and Amazon Fire OS. Brands can deliver more value and drive deeper engagement outside of apps -- on device lock screens and in the Notification Center -- by offering greater interaction and choice through this new push notification format and, in turn, gain more immediate insight into what customers care about to drive higher conversions. With Urban Airship, interactive notification buttons can easily drive users to take specific actions with deep-links to different in-app or mobile web landing pages where every click can assign or remove user attributes for multi-touch automated campaigns and more responsive, relevant and actionable mobile experiences.

"Interactive notifications take push messaging from informative and hopefully targeted alerts, to the primary way users can choose-their-own-adventure with mobile experiences that adapt to their needs," said Brent Hieggelke, CMO, Urban Airship. "These messaging-originated user interactions will soon be more important than organic use of static app content, telling businesses what customers want more or less of within their immediate context and moment of need."

Urban Airship's support for message center-style widgets enable brands to gain front-and-center visibility in the Today View of the iOS 8 Notification Center or anywhere in the Android experience. Urban Airship's drop-in widgets can be easily tailored to deliver extremely targeted and dynamic information for at-a-glance access by users, joining landing pages and in-app message centers as methods to get rich content in front of customers.

Other new enhancements to Urban Airship's solution include event analytics for tracking user activities, such as button taps on interactive notifications and in-app conversions. By directly and indirectly attributing users' goal completions to each campaign, businesses can better understand the impact of push messaging to drive greater engagement and ROI. A new A/B testing capability leverages this event data to help businesses optimize messaging's impact on conversion goals.