• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, August 30, 2017

While we have all had bad experiences with overly aggressive sales pitches, it can pay to be pushy. Case in point: I recently attended a wedding, which would never have happened had the groom not asked the bride for a first date about 50 times.

The power of pushiness also applies to mobile marketing, according to new research. It shows that promotional push notifications drive nearly 10 times as many users to make a purchase compared to customers who didn’t receive a message.   

The findings come from Leanplum, and are based on more than 56 million mobile marketing activities.

After analyzing this ocean of data, the marketing firm also found that promotional push notifications increase in-app spend by 16%.

Translation? Pushes offer an effective tool for up-selling and cross-selling in-app purchases, according to Leanplum cofounder and CEO Momchil Kyurkchiev.

“The data validates that push notifications are essential to growing mobile app revenue,” Kyurkchiev states. Of course, there are many factors that contribute to an effective push campaign, including time of day and day of the week.

For instance, promotional push notifications sent on a Saturday result in more than two times the purchases compared to those sent on Thursday. Why? People may have more time for distractions on their days off.

Promotional push notifications sent during late afternoon lead to nearly thee times more purchases, Leanplum found.

Push notifications are nothing new. Along with value exchange ad integrations and in-app events, push notifications are already a top engagement tool, according to recent research from AdColony.

As research from Localytics suggests, more developers are becoming aware of the power of the push.

Among all push messages, in 2016, 75% were segmented to specific users, while 25% were “broadcast” -- i.e., blindly blasted to everyone. That represented an improvement over 2015’s split, when 65% of push notifications were blasted, and 35% were broadcast.

Showing the value of segmentation, Localytics found an average of 6.4 sessions for segmented messages, compared to 2.8 sessions for broadcast messages, while click-through conversion rates averaged 3% for segmented messages and just 0.6% for broadcast messages.

Yet segmented or not, more than half of consumers surveyed at the beginning of the year found push messages to be “an annoying distraction.”

In other words, there is such a thing as being too pushy.