The customer journey has changed.

It’s not about encouraging a single purchase anymore, and you can’t chart it as a straight line or a funnel. Long-term success in today’s mobile-focused world means finding ways to engage, retain, and build durable, mutually beneficial relationships with your customers. That doesn’t just happen. To get there, brands need to pivot away from blast emails or push notifications targeting their whole audience and embrace a customer engagement strategy that focuses on sending targeted, responsive outreach that speaks to the people receiving it, demonstrating relevance and providing real value day by day and message by message.

At Appboy, making that kind of engagement easier for our clients has been a major focus since the beginning. And we’ve rolled out a lot of features over the years to support stronger customer/brand relationships, including audience segmentation, send-time optimization, advanced personalization, and triggered campaigns.

Today, we take it a step further.

Visualize and build your customers’ journeys with Appboy Canvas

Instead of having to manually create and monitor a complex array of triggered campaigns in order to influence customer behavior, brands who use Appboy Canvas have a better option. By taking advantage of this tool’s simple graphic interface, marketers can visualize paths in each customer’s journey and then create dynamic messaging flows that take advantage of multiple outreach channels, including email and push notifications.

By supporting the creation and management of responsive, holistic messaging campaigns that fits every step of the customer journey, Appboy Canvas makes it easy for marketers to take steps that effectively support higher engagement, stronger retention, and deeper customer/brand relationships. That’s a big deal.

What is Appboy Canvas?

It’s a simple, visual way for marketers to build, test, and optimize messaging that influences their audience’s customer journeys in an effective, holistic way.

How does Appboy Canvas work?

This tool is a visual marketing workspace within the larger Appboy Dashboard. Each Canvas is made up of up to four different Journeys, which are a series of connected user actions and campaigns. Within a Journey, marketers can create multiple campaign variants (known as Paths) to test the effectiveness of their messaging campaigns and optimize their outreach over time. These Paths contain Steps, which include messages connected to the larger user journey.

In essence, Appboy Canvas makes it possible for marketers to plan ahead for a wide variety of customer actions and create a comprehensive messaging strategy that fits each situation and encourages desired actions and deeper brand engagement. Even better, marketers can easily test the content of specific messages, audience targeting, message cadences and more, all within Canvas’s visual interface. The tool also includes robust collaborative features, allowing team members to work together to build and manage customer experiences.

What can marketers do with Appboy Canvas?

So much. Appboy Canvas’s agile functionality and support for multiple message types and customer actions means that marketers have unprecedented control and flexibility over how they guide their audience through the customer journey. That being said, here are three great ways to use Appboy Canvas:

1. New user onboarding

Appboy Canvas allows you to test different messaging cadences for your onboarding messages. That makes it simple to determine when to reach out to new customers in order to educate them about your brand and the value that it can provide, bolstering your long-term retention.

2. Discounting in-app purchases

With Appboy Canvas, marketers can easily create and manage in-app purchase discounting campaigns that target members of your audience with personalized content and offers based on their individual actions, interests, and more. And because Appboy Canvas includes webhook support, you can even automatically provide those discounts to customer accounts without leaving the interface.

3. Shopping cart abandonment campaigns

Messaging customers who leave items in their shopping cart and convincing them to return and make a purchase is a great way to drive additional revenue. And Appboy Canvas can make those messages even more effective by allowing you to easily build and test campaign variants to determine what the ideal time is to send those follow-up messages.

The gist

Appboy Canvas automates customer journey workflows and connects individual messages into powerful, responsive outreach streams, improving the user experience and making it easier for brands to engage, retain, and build strong relationships with their customers.

It’s not just convenient—it’s the future of customer lifecycle management.