App marketer Localytics adds Roku and email to its repertoire

App marketing and analytics, being a relatively new field, is constantly reinventing what it does.

Today’s reinvention comes from Boston-based Localytics, which is adding some new marketing features — and bringing digital media set-top box Roku into its fold.

In May, Localytics announced a software development kit (SDK) for Apple Watch apps, allowing marketers to target messaging to, and retrieve analytics from, that wearable. Apps on Roku are now similarly part of Localytics marketers’ targets for tracking and messaging.

Localytics provides app-based analytics and communications to boost app usage, through push notifications and in-app messaging. It also maintains user profiles to enable personalized user targeting.

The expansion to Roku, CEO and founder Raj Aggarwal told me, “is far more exciting than the Watch,” because it helps marketers bring connected TVs into the customer’s world of apps.

Both expansions point to the proliferation of apps to a growing range of new platforms, including TVs, set-top boxes, cars, appliances, home automation systems, and more. It seems that everything is becoming a platform.

In addition to adding Roku, Localytics is adding some new tools to its toolkit for addressing these new platforms: email, Automated Scheduling, and Dynamic Messaging.

Email adds that channel to the company’s repertoire, as it had been previously employing partners to provide this function. The idea, Aggarwal said, is to allow app marketers a way to “reach users in different places.”

The platform’s email capability offers the key features of modern emailing, including drip campaigns for initial emails and planned followups.

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Automated Scheduling enables the creation of those drip campaigns. Previously, Aggarwal said, the platform’s default was one message per device, and anything after that was part of a customized effort.

Dynamic Messaging adds a new granularity to Localytics’ communications. Instead of sending the same message to a segment — like “all inactive app users,” for instance — the platform now enables email, in-app messages, or push notifications to have content personalized by location, personal preferences, or language.

Competitors in the app marketing space including AppBoy, which Aggarwal says “does some email but isn’t doing analytics” based on profiles. Kahuna, he noted, also does email but is more focused on after-the-fact stats, like whether an email was opened, than on continual analytics about app performance.

Like its competitors, Localytics is busily launching new features as marketers keep demanding more. VB Insights’ recent report, “Mobile App Analytics: What winning mobile developers use,” rated Localytics as having the “highest overall score of any analytics solution.”

In April, Localytics bought Splitforce, adding automated A/B testing and mobile predictive analytics. The acquisition followed a $35 million investment round in March, which brought the total raised so far to just under $60 million.