• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

I’m probably a little bit OCD, and I’m OK with that.  I try to make sure that every day ends with a clean inbox and no unread notifications on my phone by the time I call it a day.  In doing so, I become hyper-aware of the brands and apps trying to squeeze in one last message.  This week, I was reminded how badly brands overuse email and how much they miss the inherent power of that little app notification badge. 

The notification might be the most underappreciated media unit in our entire business. Almost everything we do in this industry comes down to one difficult thing, which is breaking through the noise and getting someone to pay attention for a few seconds. We spend billions on it. We build attention metrics to measure it, we argue about viewability, and we test creative to death trying to earn it.

Meanwhile, apps have this built-in superpower sitting right there on the home screen, a tiny red badge that basically screams “open me, something is waiting for you.” Nobody bought that placement. It just lives there.

Email open rates tend to hover around 20%, and depending on whose data you trust, push notification open rates can run from 50% to 75%.  You may have subscribed to a brand’s email, but the brand inundates you, annoying you enough to unsubscribe.  On the other hand, you granted permission for app notifications because you installed the app, and you’re okay with that little number popping up.  Some people actually live for that notification. 

Apple introduced push notifications in 2009, and for most of the last two decades we’ve been trained to think the badge means something personal is waiting for us. It can be a text from your friends or your kids.  Maybe it’s a comment on your post. It could be a package at the front door. It’s a social signal as well as a marketing signal, and brands get to borrow that equity every time they light up the corner of their icon. The unread number nags at you in a way email never does, mostly because your inbox has 4,000 unread messages and you stopped caring about that number years ago.

The other part is that the best notifications are about me, not about the brand. When I think about the brand apps I live with on my phone, I value the notifications that tell me my order shipped, my points are about to expire, or the thing I was eyeing is now on sale. Email, on the other hand, is almost always the brand talking about itself. That’s the difference between a service and a sales pitch, and consumers sense it.  They get annoyed, and that annoyance can backfire on the brand’s perception in a way a notification rarely does.

Most brands still think of their app as a store or a utility, and they treat notifications as a product feature rather than a media channel. It sits with the product team, not the media team, and nobody plans it the way they plan a campaign. Email is cheap to send, and marketers can manage it easily.  A notification is just as cheap to send, just as easy to measure, but users see it differently because it feels personalized.

The brands that get this right treat every notification as if it costs them something, because it does. It costs them trust, and trust is the only reason that red number works in the first place.

The inbox is where brands talk at me. The home screen is where I’ve invited them to live, and that little red number is the rent they pay for being useful. Brands that remember that have the most valuable media unit in the business sitting in their pocket -- or, more accurately, in mine.