Street Fight, a media, events and research company, focused on the business of hyperlocal (local community) marketing have release results of a recent poll conducted on their behalf by third-party opinions website Toluna. They found that 50.7 percent of the polled 1,000 anonymous U.S. consumers who own handheld devices, would consent to a smartphone app that followed their every move if they were to receive half off of all store purchases. 61% of the survey respondents were women. Of the total respondents, those inclined to accommodate ambient location tracking included 61% of individuals aged 18-34.
So what does this all mean? It means that if the deal is right, smartphone owners will be willing to participate in your mobile marketing efforts and agree to receiving push notifications.
Why should you care? Push notifications have emerged as a key channel of conversation between brands and their mobile customers because they can be sent even when the consumer is not engaged with the branded app.
However there is a fine line between effective engagement and overuse or misuse of push notification. Businesses must execute their push notification campaign in a way that adds value to end-users or risk customers opting out or uninstalling your app. Remember, it’s not just what you say that counts — but also how you say it.
To progressively build mobile customer engagement in a healthy, long-term relationship the content selection and delivery must be carefully timed and reviewed. The following overview should be considered by mobile marketing managers when deciding how to leverage this unique engagement opportunity:
1. Respect the Customer
Always make sure that your message is worthy of interrupting your audience. Delight them with your offer and remind them why they love your brand, buy your products and services, and downloaded your app in the first place.
2. Benefit Your Brand and Your Customer
Make every push notification count. You can clear out old inventory to make room for new inventory by offering deep discounts. Target the customer who showed interest in an item but did not make the purchase – sweeten the deal to make your sale. Make every effort to entice and please your customers.
3. Use Branded Rich Content
Your message must be easy to read, compelling your customer to take action. Be consistent with your logo and design for immediate association with your brand.
4. Build Deeper Conversations
Drive your customers to Facebook, Twitter, corporate blogs and mobile websites for cross-channel communications to increase their effectiveness. A great campaign strategy is to include a link in the push notification inviting users to your social networking pages to learn more about your company and engage in conversations to contribute to the buzz. Make your message compelling by being thought-provoking, emotional, or funny and make it possible for users to share it with friends and family to promote it going viral.
5. Improve Your Message Relevancy
Remember that every user is different so add a preferences page into your app for users to choose the type of content they want to receive via notification, i.e. if they want to hear about particular category items, new products, or sale offers.
6. Harness Your Customer Knowledge
Leverage what you know about a single customer or your population across all of your marketing channels to target your campaigns based on what you already know about your customer
7. Leverage App Data
Employ the meaningful data you’ve gathered including: sage history, users’ time zones and real-time location to maximize the effectiveness with tailored push messaging campaigns.
8. Respect User Privacy
Allow for the user to opt-out of receiving notifications and ask permission, not forgiveness.
9. Create an App Lifecycle Management Plan
Send reminders to inactive users with a push notification to re-engage them with your app. Create several notifications to keep users coming back into your app to interact with your brand.
10. Don’t Be Too Pushy
Too much of anything is not a good thing and sending too many notifications will hurt your brand. Calculate your deliveries with common sense.
Incorporate the suggestions above for an effective push notification strategy to maximize the likelihood of your message relevancy to benefit your brand and your customers.
Guest Post by Patty :
Patty Whelan is a seasoned copywriter with significant experience producing original content in all facets of online and offline marketing communications, with specialties in all aspects of Search Engine Optimization copy writing. Her work has covered a broad range of topics for varying industries and has been published in print and electronic media. The focus of her current work concentrates on the electronic payment processing industry, small businesses and payfox mobile credit card processing.
