If you want to understand how to make money on mobile, the single best piece of advice has remained the same for the past three years or so: go talk to a game developer. Quite simply no industry has more clearly understood the extent to which mobile changes everything, and has in turn changed themselves to meet the challenge.
So it’s no surprise to see that the games industry are again leading the way when it comes to the latest sea-change in the mobile landscape - propensity analysis and marketing. Today sees the launch of the Swrve Predictive Suite For Games, a product already trialled with real-world customers and ready to take mobile marketing automation to the next level. And not just for the games industry.
Rewind. What IS Propensity Analysis?
Simply put, it is the identification of players who are more likely to take certain actions in the immediate future. Specifically, actions that are of particular importance to those in the mobile games space including:
- Churn (stop playing the game)
- Spend (for the first time, but also at any point)
- Become a VIP (particularly for new players)
If a marketing automation platform can automatically identify these groups, that can mean the delivery of campaigns that are both better targeted and more effective than ever before.
Here’s how it might work in practice:
Your mobile marketing partner (Swrve - on the basis that we’re the only people doing this right now) gives you one-click access to a segment called, for example, ‘potential purchasers’. Note this segment is built of users matching previous patterns observed for players immediately pre-purchase, and is available in real-time. So whenever you go looking for these players, they are accurate up to the second.
Then the fun begins. You build campaigns (push notifications, in-game interactions etc) that ensure those users get over the line. Remember - and this is one of the subtle benefits of propensity analysis - you don’t need to offer huge incentives. They are nearly there already. You can save those incentives precisely for those users who are NOT about to convert!
Those campaigns can take many forms, can be tested, and of course can be targeted only at users in the ‘potential purchasers’ category who meet other filters (which in Swrve can be literally anything relating to either behavior or demographics).
So Why Does It Matter?
The result is two-fold: movement on the metrics that matter to your business, and far less irritation for your players, who only receive the truly relevant offers that - almost like magic - predict their next move before they’ve even figured it out!
Those metrics correspond to the examples above: less churn, more paying players, greater retention of VIPs. Every games company knows why those numbers matter (and every other vertical has a broadly similar challenge). And it’s not just pie-in-the-sky. We’ve been trialling this technology with our partners and seen churn rates, for example, falling by over 10%.
Our Predictive Suite is the first step in a whole new way of thinking about how mobile marketing operates. And what is good for games is of course soon set to spread to other B2C verticals. After all, most mobile app businesses care about changing user behaviors, and that’s what propensity is all about!
If you want to learn more, drop us a line at the usual place: sales@swrve.com
