Audience Alerts

Do you have severe weather, breaking news, or information that your audience needs to know right now? Have a celebrity on the air and you want your audience to know? Have a special feature or contest in your app or on your site that you need to drive traffic to?

Audience Alerts allow stations to create tailored audience messages on the fly or schedule them as part of a robust programming strategy.  Take advantage of all their features to build your alert strategy and customize them to cater to your station’s look and feel.  Watch this video overview or read on to learn more!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Audience Alert Features
• Creating Audience Alerts
  • Required Alert Information:
  • Customize it! (optional):
  • Share your message outside of the app with Push Notifications (optional):
  • Scheduling Audience Alerts:
  • Alert Across Multiple Apps:
  • Multiple Alerts:
• Best Practices with Audience Alerts
  • What does a “good” push notification look like? What does a “bad” push look like?
  • What time of day generally works best for good open rates? What time of day doesn’t?

Audience Alert Features

• Include a Push Notification on any alert.
  Drive your audience into the app
  • Use for first your occasion strategy - Have your audience wake up and engage with your app!
  • Notify your listeners of important breaking news announcements.
  • Share traffic and weather messages for your local audience.
• Include an image
  Give alerts a personalized touch
  • Fortify your station branding with a logo.
  • Give a visual touch to giveaways with sponsor logos or artist photos.
  • Create a connection with jocks and listeners by sharing photos of personalities for a personalized touch.
• Include a call to action
  Drive app engagement by directing users to other in-app features with a curated list of proven Call to Action buttons or create your own personalized user experience
  • "Call Station" for a quick connection to the studio
  • "Open Mic" for easy listener feedback and contesting opportunities allowing app users to get on air!
  • "Listen Now" to immediately engage users with on-air content
  • Link to station website to easily share station information hosted on your site

Creating Audience Alerts

From the Futuri Control Room, click Audience Alerts under the Mobile App section of the menu. Then, choose New Audience Alert. Use the live preview in Control Room to build creative, exciting, and strategic Audience Alerts!

Required Alert Information:

• Alert Text - Quick and captivating, this is the text users will see as the body of the alert
• Alert Destination - How can users get more information or engage with the text of the alert? Send them there!

Customize it! (optional):

• Call to Action Button Custom Text
  • Are you sharing a URL? - “Let’s go!”
  • Want users to call the station? - “Call now!”
  • Special guest in the studio right now? - “Listen live!”
  • Looking for Open Mic submissions? - “Tell us”
• Custom URL - Share the URL you want users to navigate to with the alert
• App Section - Share the in-app destination you want users to navigate to with the alert
• Image Upload - Personalize your Audience Alert with a 200x200 (or larger) 1:1 ratio image shown next to your alert message

Share your message outside of the app with Push Notifications (optional):

• Push Notification - Select yes to drive users to open the app by including a push notification with your most important and exciting Audience Alerts!
• Different Push Text - Tease the audience with exciting and breaking push alerts that drive them to open the app to learn more and engage with your in-app content!

Helpful Hints:

• Once a push notification has been sent to a user’s device, that text cannot be changed.
• Use action verbs ("WATCH", "REACT", "OPEN MIC US") to tell the users what you want them to do with the information in a push notification.
• Send breaking news and exciting promotions and events through push notifications strategically - engaging users outside of the app through push notifications is a big responsibility!

Scheduling Audience Alerts:

• Start Date/Time - Schedule your audience alert strategy for hands-free sending at peak hours! Audience alert content is editable until the scheduled start time.
• End Date/ Time - Keep things fresh by scheduling an end date/time for alerts and keep the audience wanting more!
• By default, the expiration time will be an hour from the setup time. You can also check the Delay Start box if you'd like to schedule the alert to be sent in the future, rather than immediately.
• To modify an Audience Alert after it’s been sent (or expire it immediately), click the title of that Hot Alert from the Control Room and modify any of the text (or expiration date/time) as needed.

Alert Across Multiple Apps:

• Save Time!  Check the boxes to copy the same alert to your company's other apps.
• If you need to edit a copied alert after it has been created, you will need to do so on each station's app individually.
• Make sure that any call-to-action selected is valid across apps.  It may not function if that screen or action is not available in a particular app.
• You will only be able to create alerts for apps for which you have access in Control Room.  If you need access to an additional app belonging to your company, please contact VIP Support.  

Multiple Alerts:

News, weather, traffic, exciting happenings in-studio, and promotions are always occurring. Take advantage of the different alert types to keep your audience informed and engaged. Multiple, active alerts will show as a swipeable and dismissable slideshow at the top of the Now Playing page.

You can add multiple Audience Alerts at a time, and users will be able to swipe left or swipe right to see more Audience Alerts.

Best Practices with Audience Alerts

What does a “good” push notification look like? What does a “bad” push look like?

• Good push content
  • Breaking News content that is pertinent to that station’s location and format. (ie..Local News Stories, Sports, Music Updates and Celebrities)
  • Weather forecasts for Storm Watches (Tornadoes, Hurricanes..etc)
  • Political News
  • Station Updates (teased well)
  • Concert Announcements
  • Sports Update (Playoff / Championship Games)
• Bad/underperforming push content
  • Pushes that give you the whole story and don’t encourage you to open the app
  • Traffic Updates - can easily begin to look repetitious, not much incentive to engage with the app

Some suggestions:

• Craft pushes that make the user want to open the app for more details.
• Set an expiration time so that enough people will be able to open the app and read it before the message expires (at least 1 hour unless you expect to send additional updates sooner than that).
• Strategically time non-urgent push notifications like you would with social media posts. (Try to space them out so listeners get the most from your station).
• Don’t use iOS-specific language. Remember that “sliding” a push notification on Android will dismiss the notification, not open the app, so be careful with call-to-action verbiage.

What time of day generally works best for good open rates? What time of day doesn’t?

• Best Times:
  • 6:45am - 7:10am
  • 10:15am - 10:45am
  • 11:15am - 12:15pm
  • 2:30pm - 3:30pm
  • 4:45pm - 5:15pm
  • 8:00pm - 9:00pm
• Worst Times:
  • 12:00am - 5:30am
  • 7:20am - 8:30am
  • 1:30pm - 2:00pm
  • 5:30pm - 7:00pm
  • 9:30pm - 12:00am