New Xtify Products and Enhancements

by Josh Rochlin

April has been a great month at Xtify - we've just launched a new service, RETAIN, enhanced our existing service offerings, PUSH and TARGET, enhanced our notification delivery capabilities for iOS, with Rich Push and Notification Inbox, and improved our developer tools and documentation. And, we've MADE PUSH NOTIFICATIONS FREE!

Let's discuss these one by one -

1. Xtify RETAIN - The mobile industry’s FIRST application user retention tool. Developers can use this service to keep users engaged with their applications by messaging users with highly relevant content at pre-configured times (i.e. days since app was installed or days since app was used). Set it and forget it! Xtify RETAIN is available for free to our registered developer community at www.console.xtify.com.

2. Xtify PUSH - A cross-smartphone push notifications service that provides application developers with robust (rich HTML) push notifications, that include customizable calls-to-action and awesome analytics. Xtify PUSH is a free service if you are sending fewer than 300 messages per user per month.

3. Xtify TARGET - Enables delivery of “smart notifications” to mobile customers. Smart notifications can be delivered based on user preferences, user behaviors and even user location. Xtify is the only provider of location-triggered notifications that work even when the application is closed.

4. New API - The Xtify Notification Configuration API provides the ability to create, modify and activate/deactivate notification configurations via a web service, instead of by using the Xtify Console. The API can also be used cross-platform. You can learn more here.

5. Improved developer resources - We wanted to give app developers additional ways to learn about implementing, using and managing Xtify's rich services. To this end, we've deployed the following NEW resources:

• New Support site - You can search our knowledge base articles, browse public discussions, or create a new discussion if you’re having trouble.
• If you take the time to create an account, you’ll be able to post private discussions (that only you and our support team can see) and track your existing discussions. However, if you don’t want to create an account, you can still create a public discussion in our discussion area.
• How to videos - Watch Erica Fox, Xtify's Head of Developer Relations, guide you through the notification configuration process. We'll be adding additional videos over the coming weeks.
• Improved Live Chat with additional support hours.
• Additional sample code and applications.

We've also placed all of our documentation, code and sample applications in front of the developer registration process - You need not Register with Xtify to review our materials. Our implementation overview can be found here.

You can also always email us directly at support@xtify.com.

Keep checking this blog for interesting thought pieces and upcoming posts about Xtify's evolving products and usage.

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.