A new way to create personalized brand stories with InStory

Over the years, our dependence on mobile devices has grown manifold and mobile shopping now accounts for 50% of global commerce. Forrester says that smartphones made an impact of 36% of total U.S. retail sales in 2018, which is more than $1 trillion. And they forecast this to reach 45% in 2024. Forrester also forecasts that European retail sales via mobile will more than double by 2021, growing at a CAGR of 22%. 

In our recently released Q3 Global Digital Growth Benchmarks Report, the percentage of desktop sessions decreased by 10% compared to Q3 2018, while mobile web session percentage increased by 5%. However, the conversions have not kept in pace with this increase in traffic with the mobile conversion rates decreasing by 9%. Only less than 20% of conversions take place via mobile—which is indeed an untapped opportunity for marketers to innovate and improve.

Tapping into this mobile web conversion potential can help you lead the market to engage customers and create more conversions. The conversion rates on the desktop web are 100% more compared to the mobile web—so it’s important not to ignore this revenue-generating channel as well. For this, you’ll have to rethink how you can optimize mobile web experiences and still not compromise on the desktop-web experiences.

To help marketers across industries deliver more immersive and human experiences on the mobile and desktop web, we have built InStory. InStory is a social-media inspired feature, that allows you to engage and convert with your customers with Instagram and Snapchat-esque stories. 

Stories have grown multi-fold from its inception in the early days of Snapchat. It became a platform on its own after Instagram rolled their take on stories. Brands leveraging stories to share their own journeys have only increased then after. The following stats from Instagram and Facebook proves this point without doubts.

Stories help businesses connect with the shorter attention span audiences in a more human way across various industries as you will learn in detail as you read further.

How can InStory help you tell stories and spice up web experiences?

We’ve built InStory based on industry trends, especially tailoring its capabilities for eCommerce, travel and media industries. Here we discuss the major use cases and how you can use InStory to provide your desktop and mobile web customers with a modern and immersive experience. 

eCommerce: Create a buzz around new arrivals or sales events

InStory enables marketers to create more captivating experiences for young shoppers. You can create visual experiences that portray all your new arrivals, limited time offers, and sales events in a fresh way. You can even promote your recommended products as stories instead of the existing fatigue-prone recommendation formats.  

It allows you to convey stories in a matter of seconds from a single screen rather than deploying separate pages or various homepage sections. With InStory, you can create multiple stories on any page of your mobile website. You can create visually-rich stories including photos and GIFs, with an option to add a call-to-action.

Travel: Promote popular locations, travel packages, and limited-time promotions

While developing InStory, we spoke to travel industry experts and marketing teams to understand their specific needs and challenges when it comes to engaging their web audiences. 

InStory can especially bolster the travel industry as it serves as a window for your customers to reach their dream destinations. It gives you a unique opportunity to grab their attention and keep it. InStory can help you inspire travelers and build loyalty by highlighting travel diaries instead of generic photographs of popular destinations.

You can always ask our local growth experts with years of experience in the travel industry for ideas to share inspiring stories throughout the year.

Media: Break the most important news and highlight top stories 

In our fast-paced world, people love consuming bite-sized content since the majority of us don’t have the time to read detailed coverage of topics that we might be interested in, on the go. Instead, your web users are interested in top stories, whether it’s news or an editorial covering on cars, travel, tech and so on.

InStory does exactly that. It can be immensely helpful in breaking stories for quick consumption by your readers. It can also help you promote your authors and influencers or share a teaser for your exclusive new column and more.

How can InStory add spice to your story-telling?

While designing InStory, we kept the needs and challenges of KPIs front and center. 

DIY Story Editor:

Easy to use marketer-friendly story creator for launching stories in minutes with no IT involvement.

Personalized Stories:

Use the power of AI and predictive segments to create customized stories based on the user’s latent & future needs.  

InStory Recommendations:

Create fatigue-free InStory recommendations to recommend your products and content. Choose from our list of machine-learning algorithms to show those recommendations that work for you. 

Metric-driven Story-telling:

Useful metrics to drive your storytelling—views, exits, duration, swipe ups/downs, tap forwards/backs, etc.

Industry-first Features:

Desktop stories, story shifting effect, swipe-up gestures, active-story identifiers, progress bars, click tracking, etc.   

Ready to create brand stories to start driving engagement and conversions?

InStory opens a new window for marketers: It provides a blank canvas for brands to create powerful stories to connect with their mobile and desktop web audiences in a more human way. We are eager to see how you will get creative with InStory. If you would like to get a quick demo, connect with us here.