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, with dangerous negative consequences down the road.
This behavior can seriously damage the relationship between the user and your brand or app. There’s a key difference between a service alert and a marketing notification.
Tell your marketing people to stop. Now!
A simple example from my bank website
Here is a simple snapshot from my bank’s website that illustrates the marketing department’s abuse of the notifications system.
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 bank website combines into one single pulldown menu 3 different issues (too many for a single pulldown):
- The navigation menu item has a tooltip that overlaps and conflicts with the pulldown menu. This becomes extremely annoying on a small screen, like my smartphone.
- Most importantly, the notification is irrelevant to me or my profile and history! It’s not a relevant or urgent communication; it’s a plain promotional message advertising a specific type of mortgage. BTW, I don’t currently have a mortgage; I never asked my bank for one and don’t plan to in the future. Their message is not only annoying but also off-target.
- Last note, per my settings, the user interface is set to English, but I keep receiving notifications in Italian, resulting in a confusing two-language interface.
Notifications should never be used for promotional marketing!
This is clearly a poorly designed notification system that pushes irrelevant, borderline-irritating information to the bank’s users, all in one sub-menu. I call them irritating because every time I log in to my bank’s website or app, I see a new notification flag and double-check to see if there is anything serious. What they are doing is training me to ignore the notification flag. The inevitable consequence of marketing abusing the notification system is that, someday, when something critical occurs, the user might ignore the alert and fail to take the necessary action.
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.
The inevitable consequence of marketing abusing the notification system is that, someday, when something critical occurs, the user might ignore the alert and fail to take the necessary action.
Conclusions
I was expecting better from a big bank. They have all the data needed for better, more effective, and more enjoyable marketing. Why choose the cheapest, least productive option?
What about segmentation? Laser focus notifications? Personalized communications? User profiling?
