Is Your Marketing Abusing the Notification Channel?

Many marketers can’t help but abuse the notification channel, on desktop and mobile, by sending countless irrelevant or purely promotional notifications. The misuse of the channel has critical negative consequences:

• It breaks the trust between the user and the brand sending the notifications.
• It trains the user to ignore all notifications from that source, even the most critical.

This behavior can seriously damage the relationship between the user and your brand or app.

Tell your marketing people to stop. Now!

A simple example from my bank website

Here is a simple snapshot from my bank website presenting an example of notification abuse by the marketing department.

This snapshot illustrates the issue of notification abuse. Notifications are designed to capture the user’s attention on matters that require immediate, urgent action. This website combines into one single pulldown menu 3 different issues (too many for a single pulldown):

• Per my settings, the user interface is set to English, but I keep receiving notification messages in Italian, resulting in a two-language user interface.
• The navigation menu item has a tooltip that overlaps and conflicts with the pulldown menu.
• Most importantly, the notification is irrelevant to me or my profile and history! It’s a plain promotional marketing message advertising a specific type of mortgage. I don’t have a mortgage, never asked my bank for one, and don’t plan to ask for this kind of product in the future.

Notifications should never be used for promotional marketing!

This is clearly a poorly designed notification system that pushes irrelevant and borderline irritating information to the bank’s users, all in one sub-menu.
The bank’s marketing department is clearly shooting in the dark, hoping to capture the attention of a few clients. In the meantime, it trains its customers to ignore its notifications, even the most critical, and pollutes the user interface with irrelevant information.

Conclusions

I was expecting better from a big bank. They have all the data needed for better, more effective, and more enjoyable marketing. Why go for the cheapest and least productive option?
What about segmentation? Laser focus notifications? Personalized communications? User profiling?