Let's talk about the forbidden: how to do push marketing

Kristina alexanderson

Everyone hates spam - and continues to spam. All modern marketing (that is, the whole economy) is built on spam. Really?

Advertising on TV - spam. Spam advertising. A phone call with the proposal to change the Internet provider - spam. Flyer at the subway - spam. Free newspaper in the mailbox - spam.
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Spam is the engine of commerce. It must be said, rather inefficient and capricious in maintenance. Therefore, the progress of mankind is always associated with the search for new, more effective means of spam.

One of the most recent tools that the mobile revolution gave us was push notifications. Many marketers are confident that this communication channel has a great future.

Thanks to the push-technology, you can contact your users directly, at any time, and send a message designed specifically for them.

It is necessary to convince the user only once to install the application, and it is yours forever. You can take cushy. Of course, he can block notifications, but, most likely, he will simply forget to do it.

Spam is demonized, so people prefer not to talk about interesting cases of using push-notifications in the marketing of mobile applications.

Although market professionals have an enormous interest in this topic, as far as we can judge. We decided to take a chance and share our experience using push notifications.

TO EACH HIS OWN

Now on the market there are several ready-made solutions that allow you to fasten a system of push-notifications to any mobile service (for example, Infobip ).

Like many universal solutions, they are far from ideal. For example, they do not make it possible to divide the base of a group on some basis and often require improvements, which are very significant and ultimately cast doubt on the expediency of acquiring a ready-made solution.

At UBANK, we initially wanted to segment the audience and send different messages to different people, so we decided to develop our own system for sending text guns. It took about two months from one of our developers.

When the system was ready, they began to test it on small groups of users. Thus, we identified for ourselves three target segments of users, for each of which we decided to develop our own marketing program.

UBANK is pre-installed on some Android phones (for example, Fly). Not all users immediately understand what it is for.

Therefore, our first target group was those who were registered, but did not use the service. The next group is the users who made one payment and then forgot about UBANK for a long time. The third group - people who used the application, but stopped and did not open it for three months.

In communications with each of these audiences has its own purpose. To people who did not understand how to use, we decided to talk about specific functions and send them to the target screens directly, for example, to pay for mobile communication, utilities or the Internet.

We decided to remind our capabilities to those who have used but stopped. The message for them was: “Once you’ve already paid through UBANK, why not do it again?”

JUDGMENT DAY

To be safe, we, of course, conducted a series of experiments on a test audience for one and a half months, changing the frequency and content of pushing.

25 characters - the length of the usual notice - is negligible, so we realized that the text should be rich, like a bouillon cube.

Nestle

In addition, practice has shown: if the same text is sent to a person at least twice in a row, its effectiveness drops sharply. The user wants the application to communicate with him interesting and meaningful. The texts of the pushes quickly become boring, therefore they need to be changed frequently.

We also finally decided to send notifications once every seven days (a week - just the time during which a person forgets about pushing), but no more than five to one user (if a person hasn’t been able to respond to a push in a month, he is unlikely to this in the future).

But, despite all the training, on April 4, on the day of launch of push-notifications to a wide audience, marketers and technical support staff were in the faint state and were preparing to hold on to defenses.

Nobody knew how users would react to the launch of our system. Of course, everyone was waiting for a flurry of angry letters with demands to immediately disconnect them from the mailing list.

Here it should be noted that it is unusual for our customers to remain silent and endure. If something annoys them - be it too frequent updates, incomprehensible interface or technical failures - they immediately begin to attack the customer support service.

Therefore, it was very scary to run the pushes to a wide audience.

But hours passed, and then days, and even weeks, and we did not wait for negativity. And still have not received any complaints from users in connection with the launch of push-notifications.

PAYMENT HOUR

The results so far are as follows. Conversion in registration and new payments in the first group amounted to about three percent, which is quite comparable with the effectiveness of mailings.

In the second group - among those who have already paid, - notifications made a real sensation - the conversion to new payments was about seventeen percent.

In the third group, it was even higher - approximately twenty percent of the notifications resulted in the fact that customers made new payments.

Honestly, we did not expect such numbers. They exceeded our wildest expectations.


Black zack

What is the reason - the lack of negative on spam, on the one hand, and an unusually high, by the standards of Internet marketing, conversion in some target segments?

Share your hypotheses. The fact is that the push path is shorter than the writing path. In the mail you always need to first interest a person to click to open a message.

Push, on the contrary, opens in the smartphone itself and does not tire the client with its flowery and spacious formulations. Registered users press the push and already fall on the target action - what could be simpler and more effective?

Finally, perhaps most importantly, the push is capable of performing useful work for the addressee. For example, based on the analysis of previous user actions to remind him in time that the time of reckoning has come.

It is not surprising that our most conversion push is both laconic and very utilitarian: “It's time to pay for the Internet!”

Yes, people hate spam. And rightly so. But maybe the whole thing, a well-planned push-notification - this is not any spam, but just a useful service?