What is a Push Message and How can It Help Businesses?

A lot of business owners don’t know what a push message is and how it can help their business which is quite the shame considering the fact that there are now countless of businesses that are taking advantage of this service. As you probably now, most of your customers are now on mobile, especially if you are targeting adults. This is why you have to find a way to reach out to them.

Push Messages to Them

Basically, a push message is a message that you send to a mobile user at a time that this user didn’t specifically request for it. This is a message that is used by businesses, marketers and advertisers to spread the word about their offerings or just announcements. This is the exact opposite of a pull message wherein the mobile user “pulled” the message in or requested for it.

How it All Starts

With the proliferation of smartphones in the market, it’s a smart business move to create an app for your business. This is an app that your prospective customers can download to their smartphones. Let’s say that you’ve just set up a new restaurant and of course, you experience a lot of support from your local community because you’re new and you did a good job launching your business. You were also wise enough to set up an app so they can make reservations or check out the specials. Unfortunately, time will come when they try something else and they forget all about your restaurant and your app.

Remind them About your Business

You can remind them about your business via a push message. It’s a subtle and welcome reminder that your business still exists, and that they should check it out. Going back to the restaurant example, you can let them know about current promotions that can entice them to go back. Remember, they’ve forgotten about your restaurant and/or app so they wouldn’t have known about your current promotions in the first place.

What if your App is your Main Business?

Developing apps is a very lucrative business and this is why more and more people are developing them. Unfortunately for developers, smartphone users get tired easily of apps or they just find something new to use or play. Take Draw Something for example. After it was bought by Zynga from OMGPOP for a reported $200m, the app has lost a reported 5 million users from 10 million when it was bought.

Your app can suffer the same fate if you don’t remind your users to use or play the app. You can send a push message about the latest trade if you have a sports app. You can also send regular push messages (maybe once a week) just to remind them that their “coins” in the game are waiting to be used.

Is it an Abuse?

Obviously, the technology can be abused by spamming users who didn’t agree to receive push messages. This is avoided by making sure that the user agrees to receive push messages when available. They won’t receive a push message if they don’t initially agree to receive them.