Tomer Molovinsky explains how coffee shops can use push notifications to drive sales. They get 70% higher open rates than email and let you promote specials and new menu items directly to loyal app users, though fewer people download apps in the first place.
Starbucks growth hack number four, send push notifications. So we mentioned square loyalty. How do you let people know special incentives that you're doing with loyalty? Or if you have new menu items, how do you let them know? Obviously, email is a great way to communicate. You can blast out text messages. But the reality is the most effective and the most direct way to communicate with your users is to send them a push notification. And a push notification is a native notification sent through a mobile app. It's either on iOS, so iPhones or Android. And the difference is that it's going to be branded to your store, so they're going to see your logo there. You can customize the message. And the beautiful thing about it is there's no links or anything like that. As a user, when that pops up on my phone, I just tap and then I'm right in the app. So you want to let me know that, hey, we're running this special today. We got a bogo deal today. Have a new menu item that you should really check out, whatever it is that you want to promote, then a push notification is going to be the most effective way to do it. It's up to 70% more in terms of open rates over email. It's the best direct response marketing channel there is. I think the caveat here is that you're probably going to have more email addresses than you do have people who download your app. But nonetheless, the people who do download your app, they're typically your best customers. They're the ones that are most loyal to you, and they're the ones where those push notifications will probably be most impactful.
