Today, a life without a smartphone is unimaginable for many of us. In the United States, 81% of the population above the age of 18 owns a smartphone, while in the Netherlands even 87% of all adults are owners of a smartphone (Statista, 2018).
As normal as owning a smartphone is also enabling and receiving push notifications from apps. A push message is an alert, often in the form of a message, that is sent by an application (app) on an electronic device (eMarketer, 2015; ). This also occurs without the app being opened. A famous example are the push notification of the app WhatsApp. If push notifications are activated in the settings of the smartphone, the user receives alerts on his home or lock screen whenever he receives a (text) message.
Push messages recently have become a strong marketing tool in the field of retail e-commerce. For a retailer, sending commercial push messages to (potential) customers can have multiple objectives, e.g. more frequent usage of the app, generating views and creating awareness for a specific product or service or pushing towards a purchase. An important advantage for retailers is that their marketing message is received by an audience that has, through the download of the app, already shown to be interested in the company.
Lee and Gopal (2016) researched how successful push notifications are as a marketing tool for retailers. The authors are using a difference-in-difference approach on a dataset made available by a marketing analytics firm providing an East Asian women’s fashion retailer with recommendation systems and marketing solutions i.e. push notifications (Lee & Gopal, 2016). The authors objective was to research whether customers who received a push notification via the retailer app engaged in more product views and product purchases than their control group using the mobile website and therefore receiving the same user experience except for the push notifications.
Their results show that mobile push notifications are working well as a digital retail marketing tool. For the retailer, views for the product promoted by a push notification increased by 3604% for the period of two hours after the push notification has been sent. Also, within a two hour time frame, sales of the product to the targeted group increased by 250.1% (Lee & Gopal, 2016). Next to promoting the “pushed product”, push notifications have been shown to have positive significant spillover effects on the purchases and views of other recommended products. Lee and Gopal (2016) showed that sales of recommended products increased 61.8% within two hours after sending the push notification for a specific product. The recommended product views increased by 29.4% for the same time frame.
Nevertheless, to end on a critical note, there are also risks with using push notifications as a digital marketing tool. Users of an app can easily get annoyed with too frequent push notifications and be discouraged from engaging with a company or brand. Possible further research could be conducted on the ideal amount of push notifications to optimize sales or views of targeted products, as well as recommended products.
References:
Chadha, R. (2018, November 15). Push Notifications 2018. Retrieved from https://www.emarketer.com/content/push-notifications-2018
eMarkter. 2015. “Push marketing roundup,” eMarketer, New York, NY.
Lee, D., & Gopal, A. (2016). “When Push Comes to Shop”: On Identifying the Effects of Push Notifications on Mobile Retail Sales.
Statista (2019). Smartphone Penetration Rate by Country 2018. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/539395/smartphone-penetration-worldwide-by-country/
