Swrve aims to put an end to annoying push-notification spam on your phone

Mobile-analytics and marketing platform Swrve announced today a new way to personalize push notifications. It’s part of a quest to end “push spam” and improve monetization of mobile games and apps.

Chief executive Christopher Dean said in an interview with VentureBeat that Swrve has all of the pieces in place to make push notifications much more effective. Swrve has a real-time analytics and marketing platform to manage campaigns for companies. It can figure out who you should send push notifications to based on user behavior. Then it tracks how effective those notifications are and reports that data back. So the next time, the push notification can be even more personalized and effective, Dean said.

“Mobile has reached that point where brands and games can’t ignore it,” Dean said. “But mobile has to be integrated into an omnichannel, where it has to be aligned with all of the messages going to the consumer. We want to deliver an integrated story on omnichannel communications.”

The Personalized Push platform is available today as part of Swrve’s larger mobile-marketing automation services. The messages can be sent to individuals based on their behavior within the business channel, both online and in the real world. Notifications can be targeted at an individual based on direct response to consumer activity.

“We are now sending a specific message to you based on what you are doing,” Dean said.

No longer will mobile marketers have to send the same message to millions of people, said Steve Gershik, the chief marketing officer at Swrve in San Francisco. Swrve says it can send push notifications dynamically in response to any event on any channel.

“We don’t want to figure out new ways to annoy people, which was the mistake companies made in online marketing,” Gershik said.

As an example, Dean said a mall owner can target push notifications to someone entering a mall, informing them of discounts on items that they can then add to their wish list while shopping in the store or online later. The act of logging into the shopping center’s Wi-Fi network would trigger the marketing notification opportunity.

Notifications can also be sent to someone during a morning train commute, when they are more likely to be reading online on the smartphone.

And it can reduce the amount of push spam going to phones or emails with the same messages across different channels.

Swrve competes with rivals such as Upsight, and it processes about 5 billion events a day across a billion mobile devices.

Dean said that Swrve differentiates itself by offering its own tools as well as an open platform, Swrve Open Platform, that works with other marketing analytics and automation tools.