March 2023 Summaries

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.

The time-to-market of realtime experiences is crucial for businesses as it can significantly impact profitability and market positioning. Building in-house realtime infrastructure can be complex, resource-intensive, and often underestimated. A survey revealed that the typical self-build realtime infrastructure project takes 10.2 person-months, with 46% of respondents experiencing escalating costs during development. The alternative to building in-house is using a realtime platform as a service (PaaS) provider, which allows engineering teams to focus on strategic functionality and reduces the risks associated with bringing realtime functionality to market. Companies that choose Ably, a realtime PaaS, benefit from faster go-to-market times, cost savings, and improved user experiences.

Retail's shift from physical stores to e-commerce has led to the emergence of live stream shopping, a trend that combines elements of teleshopping with modern video streaming platforms like Twitch. This innovative approach is gaining popularity in regions such as North America and Europe, with China leading the way after Alibaba launched live stream shopping on its Taobao platform in 2016. The format offers several benefits to retailers, including improved product discovery, greater audience engagement, increased trust, enhanced loyalty, better retention rates, and real-time validation of techniques or products. Various use cases for live video commerce have emerged since then, such as influencer streaming, live auctions, personal shopping for high-end goods, product tutorials and demonstrations, and augmented reality (AR). Additionally, retailers can upgrade their live shopping experience by incorporating widgets, quizzes, live chat features, and notifications. To deliver a competitive live commerce experience, businesses should ensure that their platform is scalable, has low latency delivery, is reliable, and offers simple integrations with existing systems. Ably, a realtime PaaS, can help retailers build custom solutions for live video shopping by providing predictable low latencies, highly scalable infrastructure, compatibility with various languages and frameworks, and reduced build and maintenance costs.