Amazon Pinpoint: Your Ultimate Cost-effective Customer Engagement Tool (Part 1)

By Qazeem Adeniyi

Introduction

Customer retention is crucial for any business as studies have shown that the cost of acquiring new customers is five times higher than the cost of retaining existing customers. Studies by Bain & Company, along with Earl Sasser of the Harvard Business School,?have shown that a 5 percent increase in customer retention can lead to an increase in profits of between 25 and 95per cent. To retain customers, businesses need to focus on customer engagement, which involves building trust and creating seamless experiences. Ninety-five percent of customers say their trust in a company makes them more likely to remain loyal to that brand.

Customer engagement refers to the interactions that occur between a business and its customers. In today's digital age, customer engagement has become more important than ever before, as customers have more options than ever when it comes to choosing where to shop and who to do business with. Engaged customers are more likely to make purchases, provide feedback, and recommend the business to others.

To effectively engage customers, businesses must ensure that they are sending the appropriate message, via the appropriate channel, at the right time. This can be a complex task as the average customer interacts with multiple channels on various devices. The top priority for marketers is to engage customers in real-time, but it can be a difficult challenge to achieve. To overcome this challenge, Amazon Pinpoint provides a comprehensive solution.

What Is Amazon Pinpoint

Amazon Pinpoint is an AWS service that you can use to engage with your customers across multiple messaging channels. You can use Amazon Pinpoint to send push notifications, in-app notifications, emails, text messages, voice messages, and messages over custom channels. It includes segmentation, campaign, and journey features that help you send the right message to the right customer at the right time over the right channel.

Amazon Pinpoint allows you to have a positive reinforcing flywheel of improving user engagement with your applications to drive improved business outcomes and key performance indicators

Features of Amazon Pinpoint

Define audience segments

To ensure your messages reach the intended audience, it's important to define audience segments. This involves assigning a segment to specific users who will receive messages from a campaign or journey. Amazon Pinpoint allows you to create dynamic segments that are based on data reported by your application, such as the type of mobile device or operating system being used. Additionally, you can also import static segments that you have defined outside of Amazon Pinpoint.

Engage your audience with messaging campaigns

To effectively interact with your audience, you can create a messaging campaign that sends personalized messages according to a schedule that you set. This campaign can be designed to send push notifications, emails, SMS text messages, and voice messages. If you want to try out different campaign strategies, you can create an A/B test, which allows you to compare and analyze the results using Amazon Pinpoint analytics.

Create user journeys

To provide your customers with personalized experiences, you can use journeys to create custom, multi-step workflows. With journeys, messages can be sent to customers based on their attributes, behaviours, and activities. These workflows consist of a series of automated actions, such as sending an email message to participants, waiting for a specific period, or segmenting participants based on actions they take, like clicking a link in a message. When designing a journey, you can customize these actions to create a tailored experience for your customers

Provide consistent messaging with templates

To ensure your messages are consistent and make better use of your content, you can create message templates in Amazon Pinpoint. These templates contain the content and settings that you want to reuse in messages sent across any of your Amazon Pinpoint projects. You can create templates for various types of messages, including email, push notifications, in-app messages, SMS messages, and voice messages. This allows you to easily reuse content and streamline the process of creating messages, resulting in a more efficient and consistent messaging strategy.

Deliver personalized content

You can send customized content to each recipient of a message using message variables and attributes in Amazon Pinpoint. This allows you to deliver personalized and dynamic content in messages sent from campaigns and journeys. Additionally, message variables and attributes can also be used to add personalized content to message templates, which can streamline the development process. By creating attributes directly in Amazon Pinpoint or using a machine learning model in Amazon Personalize, content can be tailored to each recipient of a message. By connecting message templates to models in Amazon Personalize, you can leverage machine learning to send relevant promotions or recommendations to each recipient of a message.

Analyze user behavior

Amazon Pinpoint offers analytics that enables you to gain insights into your audience and assess the effectiveness of your campaigns and messaging activities. These analytics allow you to track trends in user engagement, purchase behavior, demographics, and other relevant metrics. Additionally, you can monitor message traffic and view metrics such as the total number of messages sent for a campaign or project. Through the use of the Amazon Pinpoint API, your application can also report custom data, which Amazon Pinpoint makes available for analysis. By utilizing the analytics provided by Amazon Pinpoint, you can gain valuable insights that can inform and improve your messaging strategies.?

Benefits of Amazon Pinpoint

Personalization: With Amazon Pinpoint, businesses can send personalized messages to their customers based on their behavior, preferences, and other factors. This level of personalization can help businesses build stronger relationships with their customers and increase customer loyalty.

Multi-Channel Support: Amazon Pinpoint supports multiple channels, including email, SMS, push notifications, and voice messages. This allows businesses to reach their customers through their preferred channels, increasing the likelihood that they will engage with the message.

Analytics: Amazon Pinpoint provides detailed analytics that allows businesses to track customer engagement, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. This data can help businesses make data-driven decisions about their messaging strategy and improve their campaigns over time.

Scalability: Amazon Pinpoint is a highly scalable service that can send messages to millions of customers with ease. This makes it an ideal solution for businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises.

Integration with Other AWS Services: Amazon Pinpoint integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3 and AWS Lambda, making it easy to create and manage messaging campaigns. This integration also allows businesses to leverage the power of other AWS services to enhance their messaging strategy.

Cost-Effective: Amazon Pinpoint is a cost-effective solution for businesses, with pricing based on the number of messages sent. This means businesses only pay for what they use, making it a cost-effective solution for businesses of all sizes.

Pricing

Amazon Pinpoint pricing is based on a pay-as-you-go model, which means that you only pay for the services you use.

Amazon Pinpoint offers a free tier that includes 5,000 targeted endpoints per month for campaigns, journeys, and in-app messaging. Beyond the free tier, Amazon Pinpoint charges a Monthly Targeted Audience (MTA) fee of $0.0012 per unique endpoint targeted in a campaign, journey, or in-app messaging API request. You are only charged for each endpoint once per month.

Amazon Pinpoint defines an endpoint as a customer's single contact destination, such as an email address or phone number. Endpoints can be categorized into segments, which can either be imported (a static list of endpoints) or dynamic (endpoints that are automatically populated based on your specified criteria). When creating a campaign or journey, you select the segment that you want to target.

For example, if you send a message to 10,000 unique endpoints in a given month, you will be charged for 5,000 endpoints (since the first 5,000 are free) at a rate of $0.0012 per endpoint, resulting in a total charge of $6 for that month.

Below is an overview of the pricing detail as it pertains to the muti-channels we have on Amazon Pinpoint.

Conclusion

Overall, Amazon Pinpoint is a powerful messaging service that enables businesses to engage with their customers through targeted, personalized messages across multiple channels. By leveraging the benefits of Amazon Pinpoint, businesses can improve customer engagement, increase customer loyalty, and drive conversions, ultimately leading to increased revenue and growth.

In the second part of this article, we would be looking at how to get started on Amazon Pinpoint.