Let’s face it, we live on our phones. They’re in our pockets, on our desks, next to our beds and generally with us throughout the day. Case in point, we’re looking at our phones nearly four hours a day, one-sixth of each and every day.
That instant ability to complete tasks, connect with friends, or simply entertain ourselves at a moment’s notice is practically second nature at this point.
As such, mobile marketers need to meet consumer demand with equal speed and agility. At the push of a (user’s) button, real-time campaigns and personalized content experiences should launch.
For marketers to accomplish this, we have to make sure that we’re staying in tune with consumers and the evolution of technologies impacting them. To go even further, we need to learn about the underlying code framework powering our mobile applications.
Today, we’re diving into the implications of app development using the React Native framework.
Introduction to React Native
Your mobile development teams are likely aware of the benefits of developing your brand’s app in React Native, but not all marketers share that same level of insight.
We’re passionate about the relationship between technologies and marketer efficacy, and understanding how Iterable’s own React Native SDK can influence your mobile marketing capabilities is worth exploring.
React Native is a scalable coding framework partially developed by engineers at companies like Facebook. Since its 2015 release, it has continued gaining popularity. Since then, it has been widely adopted across industries by both major brands like Uber, Walmart, and Tesla, as well as high-growth startups.
WIIFM (What’s In It For Marketers)
There are plenty of reasons why dev teams turn to React Native. Most notably, we’re highlighting a key technology strength that applies directly to a common need of all marketers: time-to-market.
As a well-documented, widely-used and reusable framework, it offers agility to marketers facing the daunting “what if” scenarios we encounter:
- What if there’s a bug that needs to be urgently addressed and communicated?
- What if there’s a new market trend we must adapt to quickly?
Success means not only reacting to and addressing these scenarios, but also continuing to grow our businesses. The answers to these questions lie in React Native and its ability to ensure downtime avoidance, minimize customer impact, and continue meeting disturbance-free customer demands even in the face of those dreaded “what if’s.”
And what, exactly, does this framework mean to marketers? Here are two primary advantages.
1. Less Waiting, More Sending
React Native provides the ability to code once and run that code on both iOS and Android.
Meaning, if your team is looking at new solutions, you’ve effectively cut your time-to-value in half, because your engineering team only needs to focus on one set of code.
The sooner your engineering team can react, the sooner your marketing team can respond!
2. Zero Downtime
With React Native, your engineering team can do what’s called an OTA (Over The Air) code push. OTA pushes let your team update your app behind-the-scenes without your users even knowing.
Silently fix errors and roll out new campaigns without missing a beat—we won’t tell!
Native code, on the other hand, requires working through the App Store’s approval processes to changes as minor as updating a single line of code. Instead of awaiting the downstream campaign and experiment impacts while that update is processed, React Native offers marketing data continuity.
Developing With Experience In Mind
When consulting both customers and prospects across retail, e-commerce, finance, streaming, and more, one of the most common bottlenecks we’ve seen when launching new mobile experiences or expanding mobile marketing campaigns is developer bandwidth.
With Iterable’s React Native SDK, your developers can update once and deploy everywhere—and as a marketer, you’re able to easily run campaigns and capitalize on the out-of-the-box benefits React Native has to offer.
Stepping back, we know that every marketing team is different. Organizations vary immensely across objectives, size, capabilities, and so many other variables. The Iterable team recognizes that there are multiple ways to provide amazing customer experiences on mobile—whether that’s over your own native code or our React Native SDK.
React Native is simply another one of our offerings geared toward strengthening the relationship between marketers and developers. We want to empower all teams to work efficiently, quickly, and most importantly, collaboratively. We’re committed to continually developing our mobile technologies so you can up your own customer experience ante.
Not yet part of the Iterable community? Sign up for a custom demo to see how our React Native capabilities can change your mobile marketing experience.
