Mobile App Push Notifications: The Holy Grail of Marketing

Digital marketing isn’t an emerging trend any longer and hasn’t been for some time. The digital marketing global spend is estimated to be worth as much as $200 billion in 2017 up by over $25 billion on 2016. It’s a highly competitive and challenging place to compete for the attention of your desired audience and requires finesse and in-depth knowledge of all the channel in order to ensure your efforts in digital advertising yield a positive ROI.

The millennial audience and emerging generation Z are proving extremely resistant to direct advertising and many brands are taking to content marketing, influencer adoption and other creative social media tactics to earn a share of the top online spender audience. The trouble is that with such a significant volume of digital advertising exposure, it’s hard to provide timely, personal and direct to an individual style of advertising.

This is where the often-overlooked power of mobile app based push notifications come in. Mobile is already a very personal platform and it’s not new news to be told that ensuring your digital marketing efforts all cater for mobile consumption is crucial. But push notifications are an inherently mobile only proposition. Modern day consumers are never without at least one of their mobile devices. They carry them everywhere and often have the device within an arm’s length even when sleeping. It’s the most personal device on the planet and with push notifications you have the power to communicate with your consumers directly in a way they simply can’t ignore.

If you can create a desirable app which users download to their device and allow push notification to operate on, then you now have the ability to contact this user directly when over you like. In a way, push notifications are similar to text messaging except with a few big differences which present it in a more positive light for marketing purposes.

Non-Intrusive yet direct – Mobile app push notifications unlike text message advertising, isn’t considered to be intrusive as text messaging. Consumers often find themselves wondering how their number was obtained and whether or not they consented to being marketed to. With push notifications originating from a mobile app the user themselves has downloaded, there is no question of consent and it doesn’t require the users mobile number

No ned to acquire a user’s phone number – Mobile numbers for users matched with a user’s information are hard to obtain. Hence why it’s considered intrusive to use text message marketing, no one likes to give out their number for marketing purposes. Push notification don’t require knowledge of the users mobile number.

Variety of actionable options – Text messaging only has the power to link to the web. For a push n otification originating from a mobile app, you can offer a far wider variety of actions connected to the functionality of the mobile app itself. Whether that is an in-app purchase or sending the user directly to a booking system or other service, you can be far more creative with your chosen conversion route.

Geo Location Linking for perfect timing – With the vast majority of modern smartphones boasting geo location hardware, it’s possible to be extra creative with your push notification action plan. You’re not limited to sending our audience wide messaging at a set time of day. A push notification strategy can take advantage of the geo location hardware to action a notification when the users device enters a given geographical area. Imagine being able to alert users of your special offers or events when they are within a given range of one of your stores or locations. Triggers like this add an element of perfect timing and usability to what push notifications can offer.

In an increasingly difficult and challenging digital advertising market place with an audience who are becoming numb to typical advertising formats they are over exposed to, push notifications offer a direct, personal and timely way to interact with your audience.