Dublin and San Francisco-based Swrve, which offers an in-app direct marketing platform aimed at mobile games developers or anybody making or responsible for marketing an app, has launched SwrveTalk to enable in-app marketing messages to be sent to users on a targeted and measurable basis. It can be employed to do things like cross-promote other titles in a portfolio or to improve conversion of time-limited in-app purchase offers, and so on.
The problem Swrve is setting out to solve is that in-app messages traditionally involve broadcasting in bulk to a large group of users and therefore don’t discriminate and aren’t targeted on the basis of their likelihood to convert. This, it’s claimed, creates wasted inventory, low response rates, and “increased customer churn due to the over-promotion of irrelevant offers”. In contrast, SwrveTalk messages use behavioural and demographic targeting in an attempt to ensure that only relevant messages are delivered to users, thus improving click-through rates, ROI on cross-promotional campaigns, and in-app purchase conversions.
SwrveTalk enables campaigns to be defined across multiple games/apps in a portfolio, specifying when messages are shown, frequency, and exactly which player types they’ll be sent to. How this functionality might be utilised in practice, Swrve gives the example of a player who has monetized well in the past, but is now less engaged, who could be encouraged to try another title/app. Or for users yet to be monetized, they might be shown a time-limited in-app purchase offer to encourage conversion.
Of course, in-app messaging for marketing purposes isn’t anything new — they are just another kind of ad format, after all. However, it’s the way SwrveTalk is integrated with the broader Swrve app analytics platform, enabling the effectiveness of in-app messaging campaigns to be measured and refined, that potentially sets the feature apart. This includes the ability to A/B test those marketing messages so that they can be further optimized for better ROI.
In November last year, Swrve announced that it had raised $6.25m in funding, led by Atlantic Bridge Partners and Intel Capital.
It claims to be used by some of the world’s “leading app and games developers”, including major games publisher Activision.