Flurry has announced its new AppCircle Re-Engagement service for iOS applications with the aim of helping publishers improve their traffic acquisition through promotion via their previously published apps.

A further aim of the project is to reduce publisher dependence on costly 'shotgun' methods which rely on burst campaigns.

Discovery not the problem

"The industry has long believed it has a discovery problem, but it doesn't. It has a traffic acquisition problem," said Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf.

"Month after month, consumers are downloading record numbers of applications. This tells us that they're discovering apps just fine. What the industry has been missing is the ability to control its own audience growth destiny, by reaching back out to the right users - their best users - and bringing them back to their apps."

Choose your targets

The service comes as veep marketing, Peter Farago completed research emphasising the need for re-engagement marketing tools.

"Regarding diminishing returns, an app can only appeal to first-time-users each time it ranks," wrote Farago in a Flurry blog post.

"It's a pure first-time acquisition tool. App users don't re-launch apps when seeing them in the top rankings. They need to go to their app icon and launch from there. So as an app's installed based grows over months, even years, the relative number of incremental users that can be added from ranking in the charts continues becomes relatively smaller.

"In other words, over time, an app is better off targeting its much larger installed base of users to increase usage. This is the equivalent of traffic acquisition."

[source: Flurry 1/2]