Urban Airship adds predictive engagement, email & SMS

Urban Airship announced today that it is boosting its mobile marketing platform by introducing a new level of machine learning that predicts when a mobile user is most likely to engage, as well as two new onboard channels: triggered emails and SMS.

A new Send-Time Optimization machine learning model determines the best day/time a user is most likely to engage with notifications, based on prior app activity.

Previously, the platform could fire messages based on user segments or a trigger, like returning a product or a news alert. Or a marketer could set up an automation rule, such as triggering a message for any user who looked at these product pages.

Now, the company is adding the ability to predict the best time to send a message.

Director of Communications Corey Gault told me this is his company’s second machine learning model, following one released last year that was designed to predict customer churn.

While other marketing platforms also offer predictions of the best time to engage, he said his company’s advantage is the size of its data pool of app interactions.

Although Urban Airship’s Send-Time machine learning model is proprietary, these predictions about the best time to engage can be exported for use in implementation or business intelligence tools, or in call centers. Gault said that even though the predictions are derived from app activity, they can also be extrapolated to best times in other kinds of mobile activity. Here’s the company’s visualization of this prediction-streaming:

The company said it didn’t yet have any stats to share on the effectiveness of these new predictive models.

The Portland, Oregon-based company is also adding two onboard channels to its platform: triggered emails and SMS. This complements the current channels of push notifications, mobile web notifications (for Android), in-app notifications, notifications to message centers and mobile wallet communications. Last year, Urban Airship expanded notifications to outside channels, such as Cheetah Email.

This new email capability is for sending missives that are in response to a trigger, like a user making a purchase, and is not intended to support email campaigns.

Urban Airship is also announcing several new rules-based marketing automation capabilities, such as Priority Channel with Automated Fallback. This allows marketers to choose a top-priority channel for message delivery, along with a secondary channel option.