Push notifications make the most of mobile marketing’s unique attributes: intimacy, immediacy, and context. When consumers opt in to receive push notifications, it means they trust you to the point of giving you permission to contact them on their most personal devices. If your messages are not relevant, you will lose your best customers.

Our research shows that consumers who receive push notifications are also the heaviest app users. However, to avoid being spammed with irrelevant messages, consumers increasingly want to be in control, setting preferences on the types of messages they want to receive and when they want to receive them.

While push notifications enable better engagement, the challenge for marketers will be to think beyond just push notifications for smartphone apps. Push notifications already extend messaging to other connected devices. How will push notifications complement email, SMS, and in-app messaging? How will performance from various direct marketing channels evolve?

To differentiate, marketers will have to integrate push into cross-channel and CRM platforms and integrate mobile as a variable of their customer base. Marketing vendors will have to add new messaging platforms, like push notifications, into their core offerings, pushing for another wave of consolidation highlighted by the recent acquisition of Xtify by IBM.

In the next five to 10 years, apps connected to physical objects from thermostats, cars, or fridges will send you reminders about your energy consumption, your next repair, or your grocery list. You will be able to select the kinds of offerings you want to receive on your mobile wallet when, and only when, you go shopping on a Saturday afternoon. You will decide if you’re ready to receive notifications during evenings to see what your friends are saying on social media about this stupid show you’re watching. You will be able to ban forever any communication from a brand that did not respect your privacy, thanks to your privacy monitoring app. Does this look futuristic and not realistic? Well, it really depends on how marketers use mobile messaging in the coming years to engage with customers on their most intimate devices. It may never happen if bad push kills contextual marketing.

In the age of hyperpersonalized media, consumers will define the way brands interact with them. Mobile CRM can become the Holy Grail of one-to-one marketing, but only for marketers who will let consumers take control. The ability to know a user’s context, thanks to sensors embedded or linked to smartphones, will increase already-high privacy and identity concerns.

Moving forward, consumers will design the communication environment in which brands interact with them.

Clients interested to know more can click here to download our brand new report, “Push Mobile Engagement To The Next Level.”