Messaging has reached saturation point. Every day, we are bombarded with hundreds of messages from various companies across multiple platforms and devices.
Taking into consideration that the average consumer is exposed to between three thousand and twenty thousand brand messages a day, it’s not hard to understand that many of these messages go unnoticed. Most people would struggle to absorb and understand three thousand exposures a day, let alone twenty thousand.
Marketers operating within this environment have learnt that the need for a more strategic, targeted, personalised touch is what will ultimately increase sales and impact the bottom line.
Consumers no longer respond to a blanket aim and spray approach; they’ve become too savvy. To cut through the noise, marketers need to focus on ways to secure an emotional connection with the target audience helping them, in turn, to remain front of mind.
Make it personal
For a long time now, marketers have been speaking about the personalisation of brands and ensuring customers receive targeted, timely and relevant content. From retail to travel, and from gaming to health, companies across various industries are all fighting for attention — scrambling to have their products in front of as many eyeballs as possible. However, no matter what the vertical, brands today understand it is the personal touch that will ultimately win over the hearts and minds of consumers.
Working with the rest of the team at the award-winning gaming company Nordeus, we managed to reduce the churn in our football manager game, Top Eleven, by using push notifications. We identified early churners and targeted them with personalised push notifications to increase retention rates.
Through establishing what features users most enjoyed, we targeted them with tailored messages focused on that particular feature. This personalised push notification approach has helped grow Top Eleven to the most popular social sports mobile game in the world with 10 million monthly users.
Numerous examples exist of brands embracing this personalised approach. Companies such as Amazon and Netflix, for example, have had success providing personalised online experiences for customers. Other examples in the FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) space include the Coca-Cola ‘Share a Coke’ campaign, which used consumer data to provide a personalised offering to consumers, as well as similar marketing campaigns from both Marmite and Nutella.
So why are these campaigns so successful? Put simply, consumers appreciate having something that is personal to them, an individual touch. Research by Hanley-Wood Business Media showed that 78 percent of consumers stated that brands that create unique and personalised content are more interested in building a relationship with them.
The mobile push
Thanks to mobile apps and the functionality of push notifications, marketers now have the capability to engage with consumers in a personalised way on a different level. However, competition is fierce. In the mobile industry alone, there are more than a million apps competing for share of voice via the same tactic. With so much noise in the marketplace, brands need to work smart to stand out from the competition.
The personalisation of push notifications has enabled marketers to engage with consumers in a more ‘conversational’ two-way model of communication, as opposed to the one way push that was the traditional norm.
In particular, the rise of push notifications is a game changer for the gaming industry. Opening a new channel of communication, push notifications have changed the way games interact with their users, delivering live updates on progress and notifying the player that their attention is required. Popular mobile games, such as Top Eleven, utilise push notifications as a key tool to provide personal updates to players — and with over 10 million monthly active users, it’s a full time job.
Opportunities in the market
A number of companies have developed their own offerings to take advantage of this trend. Apple and Facebook push via their own platforms. However, until now there had been no open-source and very few free of charge options on the market. Because of that gap, we at Nordeus have created an open-source platform called Pushkin, which is free to use and access by developers and marketers alike.
Pushkin is an example of the next generation of development in the industry. The concept originally came about with the intention of reducing user churn alongside the observation that there was a lack of good free-of-charge solutions in the industry. However, due to the demand for such a platform, the team at Nordeus soon realised its capabilities for wider cross-industry use. The Pushkin platform is significantly faster than most alternatives, protects users from unwanted spam caused by human error and also supports deep linking, which you can use to full extent to maximise user experience. We’d urge you to take it for a spin!
Where to from here
As more opportunities become available, marketers will continue to explore new ways of engaging with consumers via different platforms. Ultimately, developers and marketers want the easiest and most reliable options on the market — after all, a missed opportunity to engage customers can result in financial loss.
Push notifications will continue to play a role here as brands increase the focus on securing customer loyalty through personalised communication. Key to the success of companies in this space will be ensuring that notifications are tailored to the specific audience and to avoid general, catch-all communications, which just get lost in all the noise.
Click here for more information on Pushkin and Top Eleven, click here or check out the Nordeus blog.
By Milos Milosević, Data Scientist at Nordeus, a leading independent mobile games developer and creator of the most popular online sports game, Top Eleven
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