A permission marketing channel in the pocket of your users? Yes, please. It is like lifecycle emails on steroids without the spammed-to-death problem. (Well, not yet anyhow.)
This solves a real, pressing need for many sites: maintaining user engagement after they're off your website. The number of people who register and never come back is depressing -- many of them might be enticed to come back, if you only had a way of getting in touch. That is pure profit for the company, since you've already spent whatever form of resources it took to acquire them as a signup in the first place.
> The number of people who register and never come back is depressing
I think that says something about the content as well as about the user.
> many of them might be enticed to come back, if you only had a way of getting in touch.
Or you might push them away even further.
I try to keep notifications down to an absolute minimum on my sites, and to give people genuine reasons to come back in the future.
My feeling is that you need to get a user to invest a bit of time in to your site on the first visit, that's the best predictor they'll be back, especially if you leave them 'wanting more'.
you might push them away -> This is a testable claim about empirical reality.
My feeling is that you need to get a user to invest a bit of time -> This is also a testable claim about empirical reality. I actually come down totally differently on this one: I think getting a user to "success" quickly trumps all other considerations for retention, even if getting them to "success" quickly causes their first use of your service to be much shorter on average than it would otherwise have been.
But, hey, what is the point about making testable claims about empirical reality if you don't actually test the suckers. So I'm going to dig into my data this weekend and figure out which one of us is right, at least for my app/users, and blog about it. Please mock me mercilessly if I don't have this done by Sunday.
> Please mock me mercilessly if I don't have this done by Sunday.
It might not be so quick a thing to test, so no mockery from me.
It took me years to figure out how to increase retention on my sites, little by little tuning it so that the 'pipeline' from users just visiting to users signing up did not get disturbed.
So, yes, they're all testable claims. For me tuning this worked well, it was - at some point - the difference between $5,000 / month and $ 50,000 / month so the pay-off of the time invested can be immense.
I'm conservative by nature though, and it took me a long time to clue in to a/b testing (this was back in 2000 or so), which didn't help at all.
Best of luck with that, I'm curious about the results.
Btw, I agree that getting your users to go from 0 to the breaking point quickly can make you some money, but on the other hand there is no such thing as a 'bad' user, and if you can somehow engage them to generate some buzz for you that's a pay-off as well.
It may not be such a simple relationship between the two, the sales curve might lag quite a bit behind the 'buzz' curve. It's about 'mind share', and that's one of the hardest to quantify variables.
Just about every site I've ever been involved with that's at a large scale has learned that more notifications means more user engagement.
It's silly to think that more notifications is a replacement for a good experience... But it just about always augments it and serves to "pull back" those users who were kinda interested but maybe aren't quite addicted or in the habit of visiting yet.
"This solves a real, pressing need for many sites: maintaining user engagement after they're off your website. The number of people who register and never come back is depressing -- many of them might be enticed to come back, if you only had a way of getting in touch. "
Ok I am probably missing something here, but if people won't give you their email (which is what I assume you meant by "if you only had a way of getting in touch.") why would they give you their notifio id (or whatever it takes to push notifications to their cell phone)? How is email not a "permission marketing channel" but notifo is? (genuine questions, not snark)
I'm thinking of it more as a supplement for email, not a replacement. It has advantages for the business -- the immediacy of a phone notification as compared to email (which is becoming less and less immediate, particularly as it moves from desktops to web clients), the fact it is not yet done to death, and the fact that it is structurally guaranteed to be opt-in only means deliverability should rock as compared to email.
Surely with the rise of the iPhone and push GMail, email is becoming more immediate rather than less.
Where I will agree with you, though, is that I'm more and more happy to leave emails festering in my inbox waiting for actions whereas iPhone notifications get immediate attention. Why? Because I choose exactly what notifications I receive. As notifications become more spammy, we will need a new less-spammy system. Rinse, repeat.
