Fighting Churn: Localytics Solves Problem for App Industry

Getting users to download an app is notoriously difficult for San Francisco mobile app developers. Getting them to stick around for the long haul is even trickier. Even an enthusiastic user has dozens of other apps competing for their digital attention span, and the average app loses around 80 percent of signups.

The “churn” in the app market makes keeping users active a delicate balancing act of content, push notifications, email campaigns, and endless other strategies. With iOS developers bumping shoulders with 1.5 million other apps and Android app developers competing with around 1.6 million, users are just a few taps away from deleting your app — or worse, replacing it with a competitor.

Startups have long known that analytics are the key to acquiring users, but many don’t have coherent plans for using analytics to keep them. Platforms for managing churn often fall short of offering automated solutions. Marketing platform Localytics’ launch of Localytics Preditions seeks to solve that problem by building in some compelling automated processes under the hood.

Rather than targeting “generic” user behaviors, Localytics Predictions looks at actual in-app behavior of your users, weighing every factor from subscription type to whether or not they toggled push notifications on download. While the results are fun to look at, it’s the automation that really makes Localytics useful, guiding you through the setup of targeted engagement campaigns that focus only on the users showing behaviors that lead to abandonment within the app.

The idea of using statistics to manage user retention certainly isn’t new, but the trends and available technologies of the current marketplace set the stage for a company like Localytics to take churn management to the next level. With $35 Million in funding raised as of last March we can expect to see churn management become increasingly sophisticated, offering startups with churn problems a better chance at batting in the big leagues.