How Urban Outfitters Drives Event Attendance Using Cross-Channel Messaging

Sometimes, what makes a campaign great isn’t the messages within it, but the way they work together to give customers a seamless, engaging flow that’s genuinely an experience. After all, a push notification or an email isn’t an end to itself—it’s part of an ongoing back and forth between brand and customer. Provide your customers with a smooth, valuable experience that resonates with them as individuals, and watch your audience relationships grow.

What does that look like? Well, the marketers over at Urban Outfitters recently sent out a campaign that’s basically the platonic ideal of this kind of seamless messaging flow. Let’s take a look:

The Campaign (and what makes it special)

In honor of Pride Month 2017, Urban Outfitters put together a celebratory event at its location in Midtown Manhattan—featuring a live DJ, pride-themed giveaways, and more. To get people in the door, the company put together a cross-channel outreach campaign that included three separate messaging types:

1. Push notifications

The push notifications that Urban Outfitters sent to kick off the campaign has a simple message—come to our event!—but the call-to-action is clear and effective, and there’s no ambiguity about what’s happening or where. The message is personalized based on each recipient’s locations, ensuring that this very-local event is only promoted to people in the New York City area. That makes the outreach particularly relevant and reduces the chances that people are receiving messages that they can’t take action on.

Even better? When you tap the message, Urban Outfitters doesn’t just dump you on the main screen of your app—the brand uses deep linking to bring you right to the app’s News section, where they can gather more information about the event.

1. In-app messages

Once you land in the app’s News section, Urban uses in-app messages to help you find your way. This slider-style message is eye-catching but unobtrusive, making it easy for interested users to find their way to more detailed information about the event, but also allowing customers who decide they’re more interested in buying a pair of pants to do that without much fuss. And when customers DO tap the in-app message, they’re deep linked directly to the News Feed Card associated with the event, making the experience all but seamless.

1. News Feed Cards

In this campaign, Urban Outfitters uses a News Feed Card almost like a landing page, giving users a single location with all the key information about the event, along with rich content like images. And because it’s a News Feed Card and not a static page within the app, the information on this Card can be easily updated or personalized by Urban Outfitters’ marketing team without requiring support from their engineering team. Plus, the card includes a link of its own, making it simple for interested customers to get detailed information about the store in question, including its location (and directions there), phone number, hours, and even the music that’s currently played there.

Anything else?

Urban Outfitters nails it when it comes to this kind of personalized, cross-channel journey—but that’s just one of the marketing tactics they’ve mastered. The brand has long been an innovator and early adopter of up-and-coming marketing technologies and tactics, seeing big success with a range of strategies, including:

• Boosting messaging rates by more than 100% using send-time optimization
• Increasing revenue per customer by 146% using dynamic audience filters powered by PlaceIQ

To learn more, check out our blog post about Urban Outfitters and their forward-looking approach to marketing.