In-app messaging strategies and best practices to drive delight

Increased customer expectations are driving companies to adopt an omnichannel communication strategy, with in-app messaging playing a crucial role. In-app messaging embeds chat, notifications, video, and other forms of communication directly inside a mobile or web application, offering benefits such as responding to context, delivering consistent brand experience, improving retention, expanding the reach of messages, increasing engagement, enabling innovation, and reducing delivery costs. It differs from push notifications in terms of delivery mechanism and when and how they connect with users. In-app messaging can be used for various purposes including customer support, multi-sided marketplace, user onboarding, encouraging social sharing, and cross-selling/upselling. To develop a strategy for in-app messaging, companies should define the outcomes they need to achieve, select personas that can be impacted the most, identify inflection points in the customer journey, create content and timing to address each customer journey, and measure the impact and iterate. Some best practices include treating messaging like a credit/debit account, using context to deliver better service, focusing on reliability, going beyond text, and ensuring technical requirements such as low latency, reliability, scalability, easy integration, and flexibility are met.