It’s become really apparent that as customers move to the mobile world, things speed up. And we, as mobile app publishers, developers and marketers, need the tools to understand user actions - and user status - in the moment, so that we can better serve them with great user experienc es. Swrve now makes that possible. Using Swrve, you can now track user events, re-segment users based on those events, and serve new user experiences or marketing campaigns, all in under a minute, - and thus all within the same session.

The implications of that are significant:

• Within a first session, it is possible to learn and react to user behavior, serving unique content to users from particular acquisition channels, or delivering specific in-app campaigns or assistance to users who fail to complete a series of on-boarding screens.
• User segments based on cumulative time or value are updated within the session, meaning at all time the view of the user is fully up-to-date, and personalized experiences and campaigns do not have to wait for the next session to begin (a next session that may of course not happen)

To put this in perspective, most mobile marketing automation tools rely on a batch mode to process user events, define which segments each user now falls into, and then target them with new campaigns or app experiences. Most systems do this overnight, and some have even gotten this time down to four hours or so.

But that’s obviously not fast enough when about 25% of users never return to an app a second time. You typically get one shot at marketing to them with that special message or offer that needs to appear immediately based on their behavior in that same session.

Using Swrve’s real-time segmentation capability, you can define any number of segments that put people into buckets based on their in-app behaviors, events, demographics, device characteristics or just about anything else you can think of. You can then target these segments of users with in-app messages or custom app experiences that can all be A/B tested and optimized.

The key is that these messages or campaigns or segments can be changed on the fly by the marketer or product manager without recoding the app. You can create a message, deploy and test it, tweak the language or graphics, then redeploy it, all without having to waste precious developer time or wait for app store approval. This allows you to create customized campaigns that react to user behavior in very nuanced ways, but with the ability to change them at any time.

A great example is a user in a travel booking app who reserves a hotel room in Paris that costs more than $500/night. The app marketer would like to find people who book hotels in Paris between specific dates at a price of $500/night or more and offer a 20% off for a spa appointment. Previously, if you wanted to respond to that event in real-time, you would have to bake these rules into the app itself. But what happens when you need to tweak the target audience for that offer, or change the wording of the text, or A/B test the offer itself? Without the ability to manage all of these remotely, outside of the app, you would need to re-code the application, QA it, submit it to the app store for approval and wait until everyone upgrades to the next version.

Swrve lets you make these changes immediately, in real-time and without having to bother your development team. And the combination of real-time targeting and re-segmentation based on what the user did in that session, combined with the ability to change it on the fly is what makes this new capability especially powerful.

Swrve is providing this real-time capability for all customers now—all you need is to be using the Swrve dashboard and the 3.0 version of the SDK to take advantage of it.