Mobile Marketer FollowAnalytics Follows The Trend Toward Messaging “Moments”

Everyone, it seems, is having their moments.

Today, mobile marketing firm FollowAnalytics is introducing Contextual Campaigns that can utilize pinpoint “mobile moments” to trigger marketing messages.

Their announcement joins the updated Breakthrough Moments that MediaBrix unveiled in late summer, about the same time that mobile ad network MobileFuse launched its “receptive moments” for video ads.

At a time when users are complaining about ad overload, this momentary trend is part of the effort by mobile and other marketers to deliver a commercial message when you might be most receptive. If you are receptive, like if you’re walking by a store you’ve visited previously and you get a coupon, the messaging is more valuable.

In the case of this San Francisco-based company, the new contextual capability allows the delivery of in-app messages and rich media, push notifications or coupons to native or hybrid apps in smartphones and tablets at what are supposed to be the right times.

That context is determined by triggers that are assembled from locations, user behaviors or profile data from a customer relationship management or marketing platform.

Previously, the company’s Scheduled Campaigns utilized targeted segmentation, which sent the same push notification or in-app message to everyone who met the criteria. All Millennials on the East Coast on a summer evening, for instance.

But FollowAnalytics chairman and founder Samir Addamine told me that his company now offers an extensive level of integrated data and intelligence to determine just the right time.

He emphasized FollowAnalytics’ integration with major marketing automation platforms like Salesforce’s ExactTarget or CRMs like Sugar, to pull profile data into the mix. Additionally, machine learning looks for patterns in your mobile behavior that show, for instance, you are more responsive to accepting an offer to test drive a new Audi on a Saturday morning that you would be at other times.

Other mobile marketers, like Kahuna, LeanPlum and Swrve, similarly offer triggered messaging. Addamine pointed to a deeper analytics in his company’s platform that is closer to mobile analytics firms like Localytics and MixPanel, but “designed for campaigns.”

In other words, FollowAnalytics says it can find better moments than the other guys. A geolocation trigger might deliver a “come back” message to you when you walk by a store where you’ve previously redeemed a coupon, the company said, but not at a time when the store is closed.

“The triggers are more deep seated,” Addamine said, and built to work for the large scale campaigns of its primarily large enterprise customers, like L’Oréal and Renault.