• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, December 8, 2014

The volume of messaging across all channels was simply overwhelming during Thanksgiving week, and it likely will peak again in the coming days before Christmas itself.  I may have gotten as many missives on Thanksgiving Day as I ordinarily get on a business day, except these were all from retailers. Likewise, my phone notification window floweth over. Every retail app I allowed to ping me took full advantage. My lockscreen was a cascade of offers.

Which begs the question of diminishing returns and whether this frenzied competition just adds up to white noise for most consumers. In fact, cross-platform messaging platform Kahuna took stock of its clients over that week and came up with some interesting stats on the kind of noise Black Friday Week generated and what it took for some push notifications to get through the clutter.

According to their data, push message engagement rates over the Black Friday weekend were 14%, considerably lower than the average of 21%. Obviously, clutter and the sheer volume of messages from competing voices were turning people off altogether. Or was it that the filter was just set all the more finely, and otherwise-attractive offers simply did not poke through? Kahuna also found that during that weekend the best-performing messages actually hit record high engagements of over 80%. Lesson: when you poke through under such heated competitive circumstances, you really do break through.

Mere promotions are not going to do it, since 90% of the notices sent via push that weekend had some kind of promotion code discount attached. Start talking early, Kahuna recommends. One retailer saw 5X better engagement rates on its discount offer sent the Tuesday before Thanksgiving than the one sent on Cyber Monday.

Specificity helps. Rather than touting general discounts, which everyone is offering, focus the offer on a single item with a precise saving. When Travelzoo pushed a 40% off Virgin America bookings with a specific deadline, it enjoyed 80% engagement, Kahuna says. When Hotel Tonight personalized a hotel deal in the recipient’s current location via push, it saw considerably higher response than average.

And don’t be afraid to go off the discount bandwagon, because consumers seem to appreciate the alternative messaging. When e-commerce app Spring A/B tested one message that offered a $30 discount and another that simply offered relief from long lines, the latter message performed 35% better.

Which is another way of pointing out that push messaging needs to be constructed as a conversation. Real conversations (or good ones) intuitively grasp the other person’s frame of mind, context of recent experiences. For the umpteenth time, this device is in the end a phone -- not a billboard.

Whispering photo from Shutterstock