Xtify Introduces RETAIN

By Andrew Weinreich

Xtify released a tool today designed to reclaim users from a mobile app’s dead pool.

If you’re running a business through a mobile application on the iPhone or Android you’re probably already paying for downloads.  Millennial or Admob will sell you run of network advertisements where instead of paying per click or impression – you literally pay per download.  They’ll tell you the cost of a download is somewhere between $1 and $2, but the figure can be really misleading. 

Xtify RETAIN Console

If you have a registration process after download, you might see drop-off in excess of 50%. And then there’s what happens after your users download your app.  Localytics just came out with a study saying that 76% of people that install an application use it once and then never touch it again.   When you combine the drop-off with the churn, your real cost for a user you buy at a $1 download is probably upwards of $8 ($1 times 2 divided by .25).

If you want more users on a fixed budget, your options today are pretty limited.  You can buy incentivized downloads for $.15 to $.35, but those users are likely to churn out an even higher rate than users who download your application because they’re generally interested in what you do.

Example Retention
Message

The real way to drive down the cost of acquisition is to keep a higher proportion of the users you acquire from churning out.  Put differently – you should fish out of the dead pool of users that aren’t coming back.  If you can reclaim some subset of these numbers, you’re effective cost of acquisition goes down.

Xtify’s new RETAIN product allows developers to accomplish just this.  By embedding the Xtify SDK in an Android or iPhone application, a developer can set a business rule which specifies that if a certain number of days elapse without a user opening up an application, a push notification is sent to that user asking them to come back.    In a subsequent version, developers will be able to A:B test sending a “come back” message on the 6th day as opposed to the 5th day for example, and whether a message with two lines of copy is more effective than a message with only one short sentence.

This is Xtify’s first foray in to the well-known practice of lifecycle marketing, whereby each user has a natural lifecycle of use and disuse and messages are triggered to the user based on where they are in the evolution of that usage.