Localytics introduces ‘Predictions’ to counter the biggest problem for mobile publishers today: Churn

If you’re an app developer, it’s very likely your users can substitute your app with one from a competitor that essentially provides the same value — in seconds, for free. It’s no wonder your users suck. Mobile app users are expensive to acquire and keep getting harder to keep. On top of that, 90 percent of the ones you do keep don’t even end up becoming high-value paying users in your game or app.

But the opportunity in terms of reducing this ‘churn’ and retaining customers is potentially massive. By some accounts, only 0.15 percent of mobile gamers account for nearly 50 percent of all game revenue. If you reduce churn across the board, you’ll undoubtedly catch at least a few of those whales.

To fight this problem and tap it as an opportunity, Localytics, the marketing automation and app analytics platform, today announced Localytics Predictions, which helps companies predict and proactively influence users at every stage of the app life cycle. Localytics is uniquely positioned to combine both best-in-class analytics and app marketing (the company scored highly in our research on mobile marketing automation and mobile app analytics). This means marketers can quickly understand user behaviors most tightly linked to churn or conversion, and then use those insights to re-engage users across multiple marketing channels — or even personalize the app content itself.

But how big of a problem is app churn?

In a word, huge.

As you can see, only the very best of the best apps wind up sticking around for more than a few weeks. After 90 days, around 90 percent of users from even a very good app will have churned.

So how does Predictions work to slow this immovable force?

Onefootball, one of the top mobile soccer platforms, was able to identify user behavior patterns that were indicative of churn and use that data to achieve a 7.4 percent reduction in churn during a beta trial of Localytics Predictions. While Onefootball has always used Localytics to send personalized push notifications to users — based on their favorite teams, location or language — using Predictions helped Onefootball identify thousands of users with the highest risk of churning and proactively target those users with personalized messages to keep them active and engaged in the off-season.

Essentially, the solution batches users by their propensity to churn, then gives you, the marketer, suggestions on how to bring them back into your app’s ‘loyalty loop.’

Localytics is capitalizing on a few trends, and in doing so, bring a desperately needed capability to the market.

• Proliferation of devices and channels means marketers have opportunities to personalize content like never before
• Machine learning is actually making this possible at scale — even the massive scale of the mobile ecosystem
• This has been done successfully in B2B as a sales acceleration tool, but Localytics’ execution across mobile platforms and devices for B2C apps is impressive

Instead of reacting to your audience’s disengagement by hoping they’ll re-engage, Localytics customers will now use predictive behavioral analytics to intervene with those users in a meaningful and targeted way before they leave, and put them back on a path to loyalty.

The launch of Localytics Predictions was previewed back in March as part of the company’s $35M funding news.