Vizury Strives To Make Push Notifications More Engaging

For most consumers, push notifications are more an annoyance than an effective marketing or sales tool, with the typical push notification only converting about 4–8 percent of recipients.

That means that, for every 100 push notifications a brand sends out, only about four to eight of them wind up being at all successful at enticing or engaging potential consumers. Consumers simply don’t engage with the average push notification that pops up on their phone.

But Vizury, an omnichannel marketing platform based out of Bangalore, India, is seeking to change all that by using machine learning and Big Data analytics to help make push notifications more effective, engaging and viewed, instead of just ignored by consumers.

Vizury recently introduced its latest platform, Engage Commerce, designed to spike user retention and conversion rates by blending machine learning and analytics to “deliver deeply personalized one-to-one recommendations” that can be sent individually to target specific and unique users.

“The basic hypothesis with which we started Vizury as a company was that data and technology together in some meaningful way can make marketing more effective and efficient,” said Vizury Cofounder and CEO Chetan Kulkarni, adding that, when the company was founded in 2008, the process of using data to better understand consumers’ habits, trends and preferences was really in its infancy.

“The whole digital data, the ability to capture it, process it and to do some interesting things around digital identity was just beginning to evolve,” Kulkarni noted.

Now, Vizury works with over 600 clients in 50 countries, including brands like Sony, eBay, Citibank and Flipkart, and employs about 200 people in offices in Bangalore, San Francisco, Indonesia, Dubai and Singapore.

“We strive to create meaningful conversation and long-lasting relationships between our clients and their customers,” Kulkarni said in a statement announcing the rollout of Engage Commerce on July 27. “The Engage Commerce platform will take us a step closer to this vision. With the help of machine learning for individual users and our atomic technology stack that tightly integrates user data and omnichannel marketing, our clients are able to reach users at the right time and at the right place with the right message.”

With Engage Commerce, Kulkarni says that marketers can use the platform to target industry-specific users from whole segments of consumers all the way down to the individual level. For example, he noted, if a customer expressed interest in a pair of jeans online but didn’t purchase them at $60, marketers could use Engage Commerce to target and alert that specific customer that the price of the jeans had just been reduced to $50.

“I would, as a marketer or CMO, need an effective way of communicating this change in price on a one-to-one basis on those, let’s say, 5,000 people who are actually showing interest in the product,” Kulkarni said, noting that his company offers the “first marketing platform that targets users at an individual level.”

Vizury says that marketers will also be able to use data on the Engage Commerce platform to predict when a user might want to uninstall the app, with an accuracy rate of a startling 83 percent. The company can then target a retention campaign for these users by “preempting uninstall behavior through the platform,” which Vizury claims results in an improved overall in-app sales rate of 20 percent.

Even customers that opt to leave the app can still be targeted outside it through desktop and mobile websites and third-party apps, thanks to data collected when users engaged with the Engage Commerce app.

“On push notification and browser notification, when you look at those two specific channels, they are evolving from being ‘Hi’ and ‘Hello’ sort of channels to actually rich media channels, where you can engage in a one-to-one basis through specific messages for each user,” Kulkarni said.

He said that users have about a 35 percent conversion rate on push notifications sent from the Engage Commerce platform.

Kulkarni said he sees “massive opportunity” for growth in U.S. mobile sales, thanks to platforms like Engage Commerce and other apps and platforms that make the mobile shopping experience more user-friendly and intuitive.

Currently, Kulkarni noted, mobile sales in the U.S. only amount to about 10–20 percent of all online transactions, compared to Eastern countries, like China, India and Singapore, that have adopted the trend more quickly and see mobile online sales rates at 50–60 percent.