Push notifications aren’t appreciated enough! Although many apps use them, few apps adapt them or use them creatively. Black Friday push notifications, however, buck the trend. Three times as many mobile push notifications were sent out on Black Friday last year than in the rest of the year, and those push notifications were opened 2.6x more! 

Why is this important? Well, as email campaigns struggle with low open rates and social media campaigns reeling from invasion of privacy debates. Push notifications have a real opportunity to take centre stage this Black Friday. 

Grabbing attention

Attracting the attention of time-poor consumers isn’t easy. With consumers subjected to 5,000 messages a day, cutting through the noise vying for consumers’ attention is challenging. So how can push notifications grab users’ attention this Black Friday? 

One of push notification’s unique features is in being able to deliver messages straight into consumers’ hands. Which they’ll check every 12 minutes! From a marketing perspective, securing a direct line of communication with your customer is vital. With so many other forms of promotional notifications like newsletters suffering from adblockers or junk mail algorithms. Push notifications represent an effective way to reach customers in real time and retain them as regular customers. Not convinced? 

Well, The New York Times has been experiencing so much success with push notifications that they recently created a dedicated team to handle the development and scheduling. Why? Because push notifications: 

  • Direct customers to your app, wherever they are. 
  • Stimulate real time traffic. 
  • And are a great way to get the news out about new products or content.

As Andrew Phelps, the Product Director of Messaging & Push at the New York Times, explains. 

“We used to be standing on a hill and shouting messages at people,” 
Now, by comparison, “There’s a growing number of users who only engage with us when we send a push.”

Building anticipation

How to beat the crowd on Black Friday? Grouper jumped the gun. 

In order to get ahead of the Black Friday competition last year, Grouper sent out push notifications the day before Black Friday. The result? Grouper experienced almost double its average daily users and 3x as many average users over the Black Friday weekend.

In reinforcing its brand’s position in the minds of consumers prior to the event, Grouper was able to use push notification to return users’ attention to the app ahead of the competition. 

Through using push notifications strategically, brands such as Staples, Charlotte Russe, and Walmart have all been able to carry consumers over from Black Friday to Cyber Monday.

Personalised notification 

The flexible nature of push notifications means it’s easy to personalise messages. And better personalisation, delivers better engagement. In fact, even small uses of personalisation has seen push notification open rates increase up to 4x as much. However, having recently completed a guide to Contextual Personalisation, we feel personalised Black Friday push notifications still have room to improve. 

Geolocation Technology 

Here at Sonin, we’re big fans of Geolocation technology. In fact, we’ve even got our own iBeacon app that sends clients visiting Sonin HQ a notification asking their coffee/tea preferences and relays that information to IoT Kettle to brew it remotely.

For those of you who don’t know Geolocation essentially matches a user’s physical location, to the location of a specific place (e.g a shop). This means that come Black Friday if you happen to be walking past a store, distracted by all the Christmas lights around you, through geolocation technology the store you’ve just past can send you a notification. Which is handy for high streets looking to attract more shoppers to brick and mortar stores. 

So, what does it all mean? Cutting through the noise generated on Black Friday is notoriously difficult. With so many promotions on offer finding a reliable way to reach customers directly is the difference between success and failure for businesses. And push notifications can deliver uninterrupted messages directly to consumers, that have been proven to dramatically increase traffic and engagement.

For more information about push notifications or if you’re on the lookout for more information about any other the subjects raised in this article, then please get in touch.