Marketing to App Inboxes Outperforms Push Notifications

A new study from independent marketing cloud platform Acoustic has found that sending messages direct to users’ inboxes results in more ad engagement than contact through push notifications.

The 2019 Marketing Benchmark Report analysed email and marketing message data collected from thousands of client use cases. Participating brands were based in over 40 countries.

It found that mobile app inbox messages are opened more than 20% of the time, while this was true of just 5% of push notifications.

Push notifications are often dismissed by users, as it’s often possible to glean all of the necessary information from the short on-screen message.

The percentage of mobile users who opened marketing emails on their device fell from 49% to 44% year-on-year. Transactional emails maintained their effectiveness, however – personalised messages responding to user actions were opened far more often than bulk campaigns.

Acoustic reports that privacy measures like GDPR have helped marketers in some ways, as many have been forced to clean their contact lists and focus on only retaining data for actively interested parties. Engagement rates have climbed as a result.

Loren McDonald, program director of market research at Acoustic, said in a statement: “In addition to improving permission and data management practices, brands are increasingly using AI to personalize emails, dissect and analyze big data, and detect when campaigns aren’t performing well.”

Incite Group recently published the 2019-20 edition of its State of Marketing Report, a survey of over 900 marketers. The research found that AI, machine learning and automation were expected to shape the industry going forward.

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