Introducing Announcements for Sendbird Chat for increased in-app customer engagement
We’re excited to announce the launch of Announcements for Sendbird Chat – a new engagement channel in the Sendbird Chat platform. With Announcements, brands and marketers can reach customers by sending relevant and memorable messages to their existing chat streams and forge real human connections with their customers.
Customer engagement for business success
Announcements enable you to engage with your customers directly. Whether you’re a marketplace aiming to drive higher conversions, an on-demand business trying to grow adoption of a new service, a healthcare business trying to proactively engage patients, or an online community trying to nudge user participation — engaging customers in the moments that matter to your business is the foundation for business success.
In-app chat deepens customer relationships by connecting your brand to your app users and consumers directly. With COVID-19 defining a “new normal,” where high-quality digital connections increasingly matter, brands must adopt new ways to build engagement and connections with customers. In-app chat has already built connections among app users globally and now Sendbird Chat Announcements can help keep customers connected with brands.
Sendbird Chat Announcements
The Sendbird Chat Announcements feature is built for engaging today’s customers, who are always connected and expect service on-demand. With Announcements, marketers can leverage relevant context in promotional messages and reach customers through in-app chat.
Marketers, administrators, and developers can use Sendbird Chat Announcements to deliver targeted messages to large numbers of users directly in the context of their chat stream, giving brands the opportunity to directly engage with key segments of customers. Use it to increase engagement in key chats or increase conversion on key transactions that occur within the app’s chat stream. Sendbird Chat Announcements support app success in the following use scenarios:
- on-boarding users to a new service
- promoting revenue generating in-app behaviors
- promoting new services and products
- increasing retention across cohorts
- increasing transaction speed and volume
- decreasing abandoned transactions, among others
This high context engagement channel enjoys higher direct responses than standalone push notifications by many multiples, and helps you to increase app engagement and grow revenue.
Sendbird Chat Announcements
“With Sendbird’s Announcements feature we’ve been able to send marketing and promotional messages to thousands of buyers and sellers concurrently right within their buyer-to-seller chat experience. Announcements have helped SSG successfully bring users back into the conversation and drive buyer and seller engagement in our marketplace.” – Taemi Suk, Chief Partner, SSG
Sendbird Chat Announcements are contextual, easy to manage, and built for scale
Sendbird Announcements reaches users directly in the chat thread, engaging them when they’re already in your app. There, they can convert on transactions or receive relevant information according to how they behave in the app – creating a highly contextual, relevant and non-intrusive user experience.
Creating campaigns with Announcements is easy. An app administrator can create an announcement campaign manually through the Sendbird dashboard. Or a developer can create announcements programmatically through the Sendbird Chat API.
Reach users at scale
Announcements target chat channels instead of individual users, so you can send announcements to public or private group chat channels with any number of users, whether it contains one user or thousands. Announcements specialize in targeted messaging at scale: you can send announcements in batches to up to 10,000 channels at once. By creating a new announcement with the same message, you can send it to the next 10,000 channels and so on. There’s no limit on the reach of your campaigns.
“Sendbird Chat Announcements helps KeepTruckin fleet managers proactively reach out to thousands of drivers concurrently, and deliver essential updates and notices in their individual chat threads in a timely manner. Announcements has helped us stay a step ahead by providing a seamless way for fleet managers to communicate with drivers and help keep their operations running smoothly.” – Jason Pesek, Product Manager, KeepTruckin
You can also schedule drip campaigns to be run in a specific time window. Once the campaign ends, marketers can track open-rates in the Sendbird dashboard and measure the impact of campaigns.
Combine engagement channels to optimize engagement
Combining announcements with push notifications is a powerful engagement strategy. But Sendbird Announcements is a powerful engagement channel in its own right, designed for in-app conversion and engagement. Instead of drawing users into the app from the home screen or notification center, Sendbird Announcements reaches users directly in the chat thread. Announcements can persist within the chat thread, even as other messages typically scroll out of view. This persistence allows the user to engage with the announcement on their own time without it intruding on the app experience.
When combined with other engagement channels, like push notifications, you can create engagement campaigns that convert users on the transactions that matter to your app.
Sendbird Chat Announcements top use-cases
Announcements is a vertical agnostic engagement channel and can be used in any vertical to help with promotions and conversions, to send proactively important messages to users, to maximize conversion on key in-app transactions.
Our customers already use Announcements for:
- Marketplaces: To send promotional messages, coupons, and offers to engage buyers and accelerate conversions during in-app transactions
- On-demand: To send coupons to increase or continue engagement, to promote the upsell or cross-sell of other on-demand services, and to communicate with driver fleets or encourage the adoption of other services
- Communities: To broadcast important announcements, changes in community guidelines, so that all members of the community are informed at once
- Live-streaming: To inform users during live-streaming at key moments in the content about important promotions that can increase engagement in the application
- Healthcare: To proactively send advisory messages to patients during conversations in order to keep them more informed and engaged in the healthcare service
The Sendbird Chat Announcements feature is available in Sendbird Chat API and SDKs.
Announcements: New channel for increasing engagement
Engagement is the foundation for many key indicators of app success: successful on-boarding, the frequency of an app’s key actions, user retention, transaction volume, conversion rates, among others. With Announcements, Sendbird adds a new customer engagement channel that will help you build campaigns and combine engagement strategies to drive success across all these KPIs.
To start using Sendbird Chat Announcements, visit the docs or get started with a free trial. If you already use Sendbird, you can enable the feature on your Sendbird Dashboard.
As always, please let us know if you have any questions or feedback – we’d love to hear from you.
