Airship Acquires Apptimize to Create Industry’s Leading End-to-End Mobile Customer Experience Platform

Digital customer engagement leader adds the industry’s most popular solution for testing and optimizing mobile apps and cross channel user experiences 

PORTLAND, Ore., — August 27, 2019 — Customer engagement company Airship today announced that it has acquired Apptimize, the most adopted solution for testing and innovating user experiences across mobile apps and other digital channels. This move provides marketers and developers with a single solution to optimize the entire user experience across messaging channels and digital properties.

Airship enables businesses to send relevant messages at the time and place that customers will be most responsive —  whether on SMS, push notification, email, mobile wallet or many other channels. Apptimize is the industry’s most advanced solution for testing user experiences across multiple channels including mobile apps, websites and OTT. Now marketers and product owners can confidently iterate digital features, content, recommendation algorithms and user messages to create consistent and compelling cross-channel user experiences that grow customer engagement, loyalty and revenue. 

“Today’s most impactful companies are constantly reinventing customer experience, and a culture of experimentation is a critical part of driving that innovation,” said Brett Caine, CEO and president, Airship. “By combining Apptimize mobile app and web testing with Airship’s deep insight into customer engagement across channels, marketers and developers can focus innovation on the most critical areas while creating the seamless end-to-end experiences customers really want.”

Even a minor change in digital features or messaging can have a major impact on user engagement, retention and lifetime value. Together Airship and Apptimize will unify digital engagement and experimentation, offering businesses a holistic approach to deeply understand and improve customer experiences. Airship will continue to sell, enhance and support the Apptimize platform, as well as enrich the Airship Customer Engagement Platform with new testing capabilities.

According to Forrester Research, Inc., “companies that deliver superior CX grow revenues five times faster on average than their competitors with inferior CX. And this is a global phenomenon.” (1) To view the ROI of CX improvements across 18 industries, read Forrester’s report “How Customer Experience Drives Business Growth, 2018” (access expires 9/27/19). 

More than 100 mobile-first and enterprise brands use Apptimize’s unified cross-platform A/B and multivariate testing solution to optimize and manage feature releases across digital touchpoints and to understand the interplay and impact of experiments across channels. Apptimize automatically integrates with most analytics platforms and offers code-free instrumentation of events for highly targeted experiments. Its Visual Editor enables marketers and product owners to make changes to iOS and Android apps without coding or updating apps, while its programmatic testing offers one-time configuration with dynamic variables that can be changed instantly to add variants. Feature management tools, including feature flags and instant updates, mitigate risk with controlled rollouts for new features and the ability to turn on or off specific features. 

Airship and Apptimize share expertise in many of the same high-growth industry verticals — retail, media, travel & hospitality, and financial services. Both companies were built to deliver the best experience to each individual consumer, whether anonymous or known, leveraging any available data. This not only ensures a consistent experience across platforms, regardless of the number of channels a customer uses, but also enables tracking actual revenue earned anywhere from any message or experiment. 

Recently, among 18 vendors, Airship was positioned highest in its ability to execute and furthest for its completeness of vision in Gartner, Inc.’s 2019 Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Platforms. This followed receiving the highest product scores in three of four Use Cases (as Urban Airship) in Gartner’s 2018 Critical Capabilities for Mobile Marketing Platforms. Apptimize customers can expect to benefit from Airship’s strengths in cross-channel messaging, real-time event triggers, predictive machine learning, martech integrations and customizable user-level analytics.

For additional information on Airship’s solutions download:

Gartner Disclosure

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

(1) Forrester Research Inc., “Transform Customer Process and Systems to Improve Experiences,” April 15, 2019

About Apptimize

Apptimize is an innovation engine that provides A/B testing and feature release management for native mobile, web, mobile web, hybrid mobile, OTT, and server. Industry leaders like HotelTonight, The Wall Street Journal, and Glassdoor have created amazing user experiences with Apptimize.

About Airship

Marketing and digital experience teams at thousands of the world’s most admired companies rely on Airship’s Customer Engagement Platform to create deeper connections with customers by delivering incredibly relevant, coordinated messages across channels. 

Founded in 2009 as a pioneer in push notifications, Airship now gives brands the user-level data, engagement channels, AI orchestration and services they need to deliver push notifications, emails, SMS, in-app messages, mobile wallet cards and more to exactly the right person in exactly the right moment — building trust, boosting engagement, driving action and growing value.

Christian Bennett