Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve (Part 2)

Christopher Dean: That gets to the next level of the platform, which is really all about automation and integration. How do we automate some of these experiences when you have millions and millions of users using your application? You need to treat them in segments. You can treat them on an individual basis but we believe that it’s better to actually treat them from a segment perspective and then take action in an automated way.

What we’re seeing is that many marketers and people who are running apps are very much in an overwhelmed mode today around data. There’s so much data coming at them. We help them simplify that. We have a predictive marketing suite and we have machine learning capabilities built into our platform to help find the signal from the noise, and to take actions.

A perfect example of that is we have something called Optimal Push Timing. Every user, by default, has Optimal Push Timing turned on. All we literally do is we look at every user and we look at when they use the application. It turns out I might use the application in the afternoon. You may, more likely, use the application in the morning.

If we send notifications to you that are not time-sensitive in the window that you are more likely to use the app, you’re two to three times more likely to open with that notification. Predictive models and machine learning is important to help simplify the user experience for our marketers. The last piece that we have is a very important one. We have a broad data automation layer that allows us to connect with all the other systems. A hypothetical customer, for example, has an email, web, and CRM system. They may have loyalty and POS systems as well.

What we believe we deliver a mobile-first experience, but that experience needs to be orchestrated with all of the other systems and all of the other user journeys that exist. We have a broad data automation layer with many adapters that work with existing email service providers and existing marketing automation providers. That’s the platform in its entirety.

Sramana Mitra: I’d like to ask a few how questions. If you look at tracking, what do you track? How do you track that, and how has tracking evolved in the past 10 years, starting from 2007?

Christopher Dean: That’s a very good question. It’s hard to take that question alone because what our philosophy and strategy at Swrve is, we provide analytics and tracking, but not just for analytics’ sake. The whole goal over here is to actually take action. To answer your question first, we drop tracking codes into the application, very similar to a Google Analytics tracking code, which a lot of people might be familiar with.

Every time there’s an action taken in the application, we get a signal back which we, in our nomenclature, call an event. We track all of those events in real time. When Macy’s, for example, comes in and instruments our Software Development Kit, and they start using the Swrve service, they set custom events and they drop tracking codes throughout the application. Then we can trigger applications based on the users going through those events. One of the key things that fundamentally changed since 2007 is the ability to do all that in real time. That is a very important attribute and capability of what Swrve does because we exist in mobile moments to use some of the concepts from Forester.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve
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