Push Notification Marketing, Good or Bad?

With the onslaught of mobile technology developing quicker and faster each day, it is hard to keep up with all the new innovations, both from the marketer’s standpoint as well as the consumer’s standpoint. Among these new innovations, one has become particularly intriguing because of its uses for the consumer for news updates, weather updates, app updates, requests, and calls-to-action, as well as its uses for advertisers as a marketing tool. This new innovation we’re talking about is push notifications.

Push notifications are a way for app developers to share general news with their clients along with presenting new apps and new features. However, push notifications can have the tendency to become annoying or irritating to the consumer, because if they’re misused, they can put the user under a barrage of unwanted and invasive material. The fact is, consumers love push notifications when they’re useful, and they usually are if the user knows how to implement them, but if they’re being used to spam consumers or bombard them with advertising, many users do not know how to eliminate them, and eventually become unhappy with their notifications. This results in the consumer automatically disabling all future push notifications, even though they have the option to personalize their notification settings. The problem is a lot of consumers are not aware that they can do this.

The style that push notifications are presented to you in will depend on the type of smartphone you are using. The most prominent one, being the iPhone, allows you to customize your push settings, but you have to do it through the iOS settings, not within the actual app. iPhone users have the ability to go to the Settings on their phone, click on Notifications, and they will be shown a Notification Center with all the apps they’re receiving notifications from, as well as a separate list underneath it that shows the apps they aren’t receiving notifications from. Oftentimes, iPhone users attempt to adjust notification settings within the actual app, but depending on the app, this can be difficult to find sometimes or difficult to adjust, so customers grow frustrated, delete the entire app, and either re-upload it or simply never mess with it again.

The Android and Blackberry run off Android’s program, so their setup is similar. On both phones you can adjust the notification settings within the actual app pretty easily (much easier than the iPhone). You do not have to go to the actual phone settings to adjust notifications.

Knowing all this, there is still the debate whether or not push notifications are good or bad. It seems the value of the notification to the consumer depends on what it is. Consumers love push notifications when they are used for breaking news events, breaking weather events, sports events, and game notifications, such as notifying the user that it is their turn in the game. However, they become extremely turned off towards notifications when they turn into spam or are overzealous in their notifications. A user only wants a certain number of notifications, so when companies cross the line and use push notifications to advertise, or even simply send too many notifications for something that could’ve been sent in one notification, consumers become distraught and will probably eliminate either the notifications from the app, or the app altogether.

The truth is that there is a fine line between prompting the consumer with useful push notifications and bombarding them with spam. If you choose to use push notifications to advertise for your company, you have to be careful not to cross the line, or you will probably be more detrimental to your cause than helpful. The jury is still out on push notifications because consumers are still learning how to adjust the settings for their own personal use, and marketers are still learning how to advertise to consumers without going overboard. You can choose to use push notifications to promote your company or business, but your success will depend entirely on how well you toe the line between being useful to the consumer, and being annoying.