ReachOut In-Application Messaging – New Updated Workflow

Revulytics is pleased to announce that the new ReachOut In-Application messaging workflow is now available. This update simplifies the management of ReachOut campaigns so you can easily distinguish between automatic and manual campaigns, and introduces the new ReachOut Variables and additional filtering capabilities.

What is ReachOut?

ReachOut In-App messaging is a powerful marketing tool that allows you to interact with your users while they are engaged with your application. By using ReachOut you can take advantage of the analytics data that you collect from your clients to create personalized campaigns and target your audience based on product, licensing, platform, and usage properties. There are two types of ReachOut campaigns:

Manual Campaigns

In manual ReachOut campaigns you can deliver a plain text message or a URL to your application whenever it makes a request for it from the Revulytics server. When using this method of delivery your application has complete control on when and how to display the message, it can be used for any kind of content and it is great for news feeds and built-in notification systems.

Automatic Campaigns

When you create an automatic ReachOut campaign, a popup window is shown to your users when they run your application or when the application syncs with the Revulytics server. You can display a web page of your choice, or else upload your own image and provide us with a URL to deliver a linkable image to your user. You can also choose the size of the window that will be displayed and the position on the screen. Displaying your message to the user is completely handled by the Usage Intelligence SDK, so no code changes are required in your application! This is great for delivering company and product news, whitepapers or asking your users to participate in surveys. This method of delivery is currently supported in our Windows and Mac Usage Intelligence SDKs. For the Linux SDK, a ReachOut handler must be specified to display automatic ReachOut campaigns. More information can be found in the documentation.

To discover more about In-App messaging and see how easy it is to create a ReachOut campaign, check out this blog post: In-App Messaging and In-App Marketing using ReachOut

New ReachOut Features

ReachOut Variables

With the introduction of ReachOut Variables, you can now deliver dynamic content to your users based on product or environment properties and product usage. Variables can be used in manual campaigns as part of the plain text message or URL, and in automatic campaigns as part of the URL that will be displayed to the user, or if an image is used as part of the target URL when the image is clicked.

The possibilities of what you can achieve with ReachOut Variables is limited only by your creativity, but here are some basic examples where dynamic content can be useful:

• You would like to collect feedback from your users and to do this you have created an automatic ReachOut campaign which delivers a URL to your online feedback form. To make it easier for your users and make sure that you collect accurate data, your form can now pre-fill fields such as the version, edition and build they are using by passing these values as parameters in the URL from your campaign.
• Your product has a built-in notification system and you use manual ReachOut campaigns to deliver two URLs to your users, one which points to a promotional banner and another which is used as the target URL for the banner that when clicked will take the user to the shopping cart. With ReachOut Variables you can now deliver localized URLs which point to a banner and shopping cart according to the product language, without having to create multiple campaigns for each language you support!

Including ReachOut Variables in your message is easy, simply follow these steps:

1. Log in to the Revulytics Usage Intelligence Dashboard
2. From the menu on the left-hand side, click on ReachOut
3. Once on the ReachOut page click on the Add Auto Campaign or Add Manual Campaign button
4. In the Message Content section, click on the available categories and select the property you’d like to include

5. The variable will be inserted in the message or URL at the cursor position
6. Alternatively, you may also type ‘_-‘ to see a list of all the variables available

A complete list of available ReachOut Variables can be found in this Helpdesk article.

Filtering by Custom Properties

If you make use of custom properties of any type, you can now target your ReachOut campaign recipients based on these properties as well. Whether you’re creating a new campaign or editing an old one, you can find the custom properties in the Recipient Profile Filter section. Start typing the property name or scroll to Custom Properties to view your custom properties. In the screenshot below you can see an example for a custom property that has been named “Reseller”.

Once you select the values that you would like to include, it will be added as a filter just like the rest of the product and environment properties. Any user which has registered a value for the custom property which matches with your filter will receive the message

You can find more information on custom properties in this Helpdesk article.

Filtering by Event Usage

ReachOut now gives you the ability to target your users based on how many times they generated an event. This allows you to create highly targeted campaigns which ensure that your customers are getting the most of your product as well as providing you with opportunities to upsell your product.

For example, let’s say that from your analytics data you have discovered that a lot of your users never use a particular feature and you would like to promote this feature with such users. You can now easily create a campaign to specifically target users which never logged any of the events related to that feature, or which have logged the events less than X amount of times. To make your campaign more meaningful, you can combine this filter with other product usage filters and make sure that your application has been installed for a specified number of days before they receive the message, or even that they ran the application for a specific amount of times or minutes.

Adding an event usage filter works just like adding any other filter:

1. From the Revulytics Usage Intelligence Dashboard, click on ReachOut from the menu on the left-hand side
2. Once on the ReachOut page open an existing campaign or click on the button to create a new one
3. In the Product Usage Filter section select Lifetime Event Usage
   

4. Select a category or event from the list or start typing to search for categories/events

5. Once you select the events you would like to filter your users by, enter the minimum and maximum times that the events must be generated for a user to receive the campaign message. In the screenshot below the events “Policy Data” or “User Profiles” with category “Settings” must be generated for a combined maximum of 10 times. This means that a user which generated “Policy Data” for 5 times and did not generate “User Profiles” at all would receive the campaign. On the other hand a user which generated “Policy Data” 6 times and “Usage Profiles” 5 times would not receive the campaign.

6. You can also create an event usage filter with multiple event groups by clicking the + button next to the event filter. For example, in the screenshot below the user must have generated “Policy Data” or “User Profiles” for 0 to 10 times, AND any event with the “Feature Usage” category a minimum of 20 times to receive the campaign. You may add as many event groups as you need.

Event usage filters apply for the entire lifetime of a user since the first day they installed your software and can be combined with other usage properties to create more specific campaigns, like combining an event filter with the days since installation. You can find more information about the rest of the product usage filters in this Helpdesk article.