A recent study performed by Urban Airship found that when marketers who use push notifications to send out their message use geo-targeting, they get 293% better response. This is, obviously, a huge number, and while geo-targeting does not necessarily apply to every company or brand, it is still something that should be considered by all marketers.
The study was done by analyzing nearly 4 billion push notifications, which were sent out across 1000 apps. The apps were from a wide range of different industries and brands. The study defined their terms saying that a ‘broadcast message’ is any push notification that is sent out without any specific targeting, and the ‘response’ they measured is a customer opening the desired app and engaging with it.
The point of their study, they say, was to show that while the vast majority of brands send out the same message to all devices with their app, this is a major mistake. In order to improve conversions and interactions with the app, it makes much more sense to attempt to use geo-targeting to send messages. Of course, geo-targeting requires that the app get permission from the user to use their location.
The study also found that this was not as much of a deterrent as many marketers feared. An average of 62% of people give apps permission to use their location when prompted. With all the talk of privacy concerns, many people likely believe that this number would be significantly lower.
Once the app has that permission, app owners would be very wise to tailor their push marketing messages to their specific location. While each industry is different, almost all of markets benefit from the highly targeted messages. Retail, for example, had a 17.67% open rate with broadcast messages, compared to a 23.82% open rate for geo-targeted messages. Not bad to be sure, but nothing compared to the entertainment industry, which had a 15.49% open rate for broadcast, and an impressive 99.87% open rate for highly targeted messages.
Interestingly, however, sports focused apps did not benefit from the highly targeted messages. They have a 14.98% open rate for general broadcast messages, and a dismal 9.29% open rate for targeted messages. No theory is given as to why sports apps have the opposite results as all other niches.
You can read the full study HERE.
