A marketing push notification can feel like an invasion of our privacy, yet we constantly set our phones to wake us up, remind us to get groceries, remind us about meetings, and notify us when someone wants to chat with us. Why shouldn't we also use them to remind us to book a workout?
Permission push notifications builds on the notion of Permission Marketing that Seth Godin popularized in 1999. The subtitle of his book, "...Turning Strangers into Friends", is highly appropriate for what we'd like to do with our consumers. We'd like for them love using our app. We'd love for them to introduce us to their friends. The permission marketing insight is that you don't make friends by being a nuisance, you make friends by being useful and offering something of value.
This campaign would work really well around New Year's Day. The push notification would simply ask: "How often would you like to be notified to book a workout?" Daily? Just Tuesdays and Thursdays? Once a week on Fridays so you can book all your yoga classes for next week? No problem.
At this point, we craft fun and helpful push notifications and we test them against each other to track their effectiveness. We give consumers what they want, and we delight them a little more by making the push notifications catchy, inspirational, and relevant. Then, when a new consumer joins the app, we use all the data we've tracked (verticals, age, sex, interests, app use style, regions) to send them the best possible push notifications to help them forward on their journey, like a friend would.