Mobile marketing: Swrve’s new Converser makes your app chattier … and maybe richer

Last month Swrve bought in-app communications startup Converser. Today the mobile marketing automation system is releasing its newly-integrated functionality to the first customers.

Converser, Swrve, says will take apps beyond push messaging.

“Push takes you to the gate of the application,” CEO Christopher Dean told me last week. “We have to take you beyond the front door.”

Converser, as the name suggests, is an interactive real-time way to communicate with users of your mobile app. It adds to the functionality of Swrve, which is a mobile marketing automation (MMA) system — essentially a CRM for your app users — with customers like EA, Activision, Plants vs. Zombies, and more.

Using mobile marketing automation solutions, developers are essentially harnessing a ‘real-time event engine’ as Dean refers to it, in order to deliver personalized experiences to each of their thousands or millions of users.

Adding Converser will allow Swrve to offer five new capabilities, Dean says.

1. provide an in-app messaging center
2. deliver rich special offers
3. drive sales and subscriptions
4. create and deliver user surveys
5. implement video promotions

That’s a fairly significant suite of functionality, and adds to Swrve’s existing capability, which includes cohort analysis, A/B testing, push notifications, in-app messaging, content personalization, app feature personalization, and more. In our recent MMA study, Swrve hit on 12 of 17 MMA feature sets, while leaders such as Adobe and Salesforce hit on 16.

375 mobile developers with over 900 million MAU
told us what’s working in mobile marketing automation

The five new features fill out Swrve’s total offering. They’ll help mobile developers not only better communicate with their apps’ users, but also have the capability of improving monetization as well. And that, the company hopes, should make it easier for app developers to choose Swrve.

“It’s a really simple way to communicate with users, very interactive, real-time on every device, with rich pages,” Dean says. “It goes beyond push … the right time to pop a coupon when a user abandons a shopping cart is right now, not tomorrow.”

Above: Mobile Marketing Automation market share overview

Image Credit: John Koetsier

Swrve, which has raised $21 million so far, has 67 employees and is currently processing six billion events a day. Apps using Swrve are installed on a billion devices globally, the company says.

The grandaddy of in-app interaction with users, Urban Airship, started the push revolution and has added MMA features in the past 18 months. (Interestingly, current Swrve CEO Christopher Dean was the CRO at Urban Airship, starting when the company had about $2 million in revenue, and leaving when it had about $20 million.) With 30,000 app installs, the company has the potential to lead an industry that young upstarts like Kahuna, Leanplum, and Swrve have built.

But big marketing cloud vendors like Adobe and Salesforce have also joined the space.

The entire MMA space is still tiny — only about 1.5 percent of apps currently use a mobile marketing solution. But, according to our VB research report, that is poised to double and potentially even triple in 2015.