Urban Airship buys EU counterpart Accengage to extend reach further into Europe

Multichannel notifications provider Urban Airship has purchased Accengage, a company that offers parallel services (and mobile CRM) in multiple countries in continental Europe. The purchase price was not disclosed.

90 billion messages across multiple channels. The combined company will now have messaging volume that exceeds 90 billion per month globally. Channels include in-app notifications, browser-based notifications, mobile wallet engagements, SMS, Facebook Messenger and email. Key customer verticals are e-commerce, retail, finance, media and travel. The combined entity will support actions in five languages.

The acquisition also strengthens Urban Airship’s GDPR compliance capabilities, with additional expertise and a EU data center, although the company had already been operating in the UK and says its the mobile notifications leader in that country.

Preventing app churn. In a phone call Monday, Urban Airship’s executives also discussed the company’s machine learning and AI capabilities, which they said are improving engagement rates and helping marketers prevent app uninstalls (and costly re-acquisition of customers). The company offers send-time optimization (based on individualized signals) and predictive churn analytics.

Opt-in Rates for Android and iOS (Urban Airship Analysis)

Opt-in rates growing. Urban Airship’s Corey Gault said that notification opt-in rates continue to climb for iOS but have declined somewhat for Android users, as more users change the default opt-in setting. As of December, 2018 iOS opt-in rates were 45 percent, compared with 64 percent for Android.

Gault added, “Notification engagement rates have also held steady with our data showing 6.7 percent average engagement rate in 2015 and a 6.9 percent average engagement rate in 2018.” He also provided some more anecdotal customer data:

• For some brands, the number of Android users who have opted into receive web notifications on their mobile browser is set to be a larger number than their entire Android app audience.
• Engagement rates (a tap or click on web notifications) range between 4 percent and 7 percent.
• By adding web notifications, retailers have grown the total number of customers opted-in to receive notifications by 2X (counting both app and web notification opt-ins)
• Of the total number of opted-in web notification users, roughly 50 percent are opting in on their Android’s mobile web browser (the rest are opting-in on desktop browsers)

Why you should care. Mobile is becoming the primary channel for retail and younger audiences. According to Adobe, smartphones drove half of holiday shopping traffic for the first time. Notifications are a key engagement tool and can build brand loyalty if thoughtfully used. But marketers must not see notifications purely as a marketing or commerce opportunity and instead think about delivering real value to customers.

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