Why Push Notifications are Perfect for Sports Apps – Raman Sidhu, VP Business Development, Beemray

Some say push notifications are intrusive, a bad way to market. Some say push notifications lead to app lead to app removal. Some simply stay away. The facts tell a different story.

A recent study from eMarketer showed app retention rates are more than double for those who are recipients of push notifications, over non recipients. Furthermore, app engagement rates are far higher with push notifications enabled.

However, most brands have not adopted a mobile push strategy. Data from Econsultancy shows only 20% of companies use mobile push notifications. Therein lies the opportunity for marketers to effectively engage consumers.

After all, you spend countless hours planning, and well into six-figure sums building & maintaining your mobile apps. Going the extra mile to maximise their engagement, retention, and ROI is the right thing to do.

And it gets better, Sport apps have the highest user opt-in rates compared to other industries, with over 50% of users deciding they would like to be contacted via push. Passionate fans are hungry for real-time content, with some app developers reporting open rates in excess of 90%.

This dwarfs the ever decreasing effectiveness of email marketing, with the average email open rate said to be 20%, and average click-through rate only 5.4% as stated in Silverpop’s Email Marketing Benchmark study from a few years ago.

Admittedly, as with most tools in the modern marketers playbook, push notifications are a double-edged sword. Get them right and you will drive consistent traffic to your business. Get them wrong and you may annoy fans enough to leave a permanent sour taste in their mouths.

Fear not, most likely your business has adopted a Twitter strategy, in turn, has learnt to produce, deploy & impact the masses with real-time, sharable micro-content using a limited number of characters; which can have a far more publicly irreparable effect when mistakes happen.

If you are a user of, or have experienced Twitter yourself you might have noticed they drive engagement to their platform via a mobile push, particularly on subjects which would be of interest to you, such as trending topics from those you follow, your new followers, and retweets of your posts.

So what makes it perfectly acceptable for Twitter to be using push notifications, sometimes to your fans with content about your club? Agreed, Twitter is a communications platform by design, but there is nothing stopping your brand to drive greater engagement, and build better relationships with your fans via push notifications, opening up a personalised 2-way communication channel and/or content medium.

Twitter teaches us a few lessons, mobile phones are tremendously personal devices, as such, messages need to be timely, contextual and relevant to the app user. Rich media content drives greater engagement, dwell times, and conversions. So how can we use the mobile push opportunity to open personalised, real-time micro-content and experiences in the context of the mobile device, at scale?

We have come a long way since the spray and pray approach. Mobile apps can be further empowered with technology to profile user interests (such as favourite teams/players); understand which pages users are viewing, for how long, and when. This can be combined with the real-time location of the fan, whether watching sport on TV, or at the stadium; along with real life data, such as football stats or the weather on match day. This can be used by your business to trigger relevant push messaging to the right fan, at the right time.

At Beemray, we believe the days of thinking of data as the end game are over. We now are entering the era of the narrative – narratives generated by systems that understand data, narratives that give us information to support the decisions we need to make about tomorrow. Data will always be important, but the story of that data is the last mile.

So we have gone one step further to enable real-time visualisations of the all important smart data we gather, helping us better understand our fans interests, wants, and habits. Imagine knowing which of our fans are going to away games and how they choose to get there, understanding crowdflow in stadia and where we can make improvements, and knowing which new markets have our most passionate fans.

 

Another thing that excites sports rights holders is that we link the data-driven push messaging to interactive micro-content within their existing apps, and the tools to swiftly create it. We provide them with a new content medium empowering creatives to engage fans with competitions, surveys, videos, stats, news and more.

This keeps the commercial teams smiling by improving merchandising sales, getting more bums on seats in the stadium, and offering effective ways for sponsors to reach fans when it matters most. All in the context of the mobile device.

All this from a simple push notification you say? Well YES, but we prefer the term ‘smart push’. Smart in terms of intelligently utilising the data, understanding the fan’s context and having a conversation instead of shouting. Personalised 2-way communication is the foundation of engagement and loyalty, as such, long term revenue growth.

Let’s make this season the best one yet.

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Raman is a tech start-up, business development and marketing entrepreneur. He is a VP at Beemray, based out of their London office. Beemray help rights holders and sponsor brands better understand consumers.