For busy business owners, the constant stream of push notifications can quickly become overwhelming. As a result, many financial institutions haven’t seen value in trying to elbow in amid notifications about orders, industry news, and social media updates—especially when there are other ways to reach their business customers.
However, as Ian Benton, Senior Digital Banking Analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, detailed in the report How to Turn Push Notifications into a Powerful Engagement Tool in Business Banking, many businesses are open to receiving relevant updates from their bank through push notifications. Even more, this underutilized channel has use cases that can strengthen a financial institution’s communications.
Benefits That Stand Out
Although push notifications may not be top of mind for banks, they offer an open channel to business owners. The study found that roughly two-thirds of mobile banking users have enabled push notifications, a rate that outpaces the monthly adoption rates of SMS and email.
Many financial institutions have shied away from push notifications amid concerns that they could be intrusive, but that largely isn’t the case. Benton’s study found that only 18% of business owners said they received too many alerts from their bank.
Additionally, most respondents said they would be comfortable with automatic enrollment in alerts designed to improve their organization’s financial health.
Despite this receptiveness from business owners, push notifications haven’t been an effective communication mechanism for banks for one main reason: They are mostly used to report routine information like account balances or suspicious purchases.
According to the Javelin survey, this is not what most business owners want. When the respondents were asked how they would like to receive messages like “We noticed an unusual transaction” or “Your monthly statement is ready,” they overwhelmingly chose channels other than push notifications.
Financial institutions are not only using push notification for the wrong type of messages but also failing to take advantage of the format’s full potential.
“Push notifications have certain benefits that email and SMS don’t have,” Benton said. “You can deep-link; you can put actions directly within the notification. The notification can go to any device type. You can control their timing a little bit better. There are some definite benefits of using push notifications, but the problem is that business owners and people in general receive dozens of them on a daily basis.”
“If you really want to use them, you have to stand out,” he said.
Rethinking the Banking Experience
The expanded capabilities of push notifications also include adding rich media like images, progress bars, and graphs. This gives financial institutions a much more powerful way to personalize the content they send.
Benton identified five ways that banks can optimize this content, each directly correlating to the major day-to-day areas of business management. These include cash-flow analysis, accounts receivable, accounts payable, spending oversight, and business performance.
“With cash flow analysis, it’s letting people know, ‘Hey, you have a shortfall upcoming’ or ‘Payroll’s going to be due in the next few days and here’s what you need to do to run that,’” Benton said. “It’s ‘You’ve got a large bill upcoming, but you might not need to make a transfer.’ That’s something that’s going to be proactive, and it’s going to demonstrate that the bank is on the side of the business owner.”
A few other examples:
Accounts receivable: The bank could remind the business owner that they have outstanding invoices that need collection and offer assistance.
Accounts payable: The institution could remind the business owner that a quarterly tax payment is due and offer to schedule it.
Spending oversight: The bank could send a notification when a company has exceeded budgetary constraints in a specific area. A push notification regarding performance insights could be generated when a company reduces its debt or expenses.
“You do have to build the back-end capabilities behind that to be able to even generate those types of insights, but it’s not just about the messaging capability itself,” Benton said. “It’s about rethinking the banking experience in general.”
Tactical Relevance
Beyond better content, financial institutions can tactically use push notifications to reach their customers. The onboarding process can often be complex, but enrollment for notifications is often more intensive, often with a series of menus rife with dozens of on-off toggles that a customer has to wade through to select their notifications.
This complexity often daunts business owners, and many will stick with default configurations and rarely adjust them.
However, financial institutions can take the onus off the user and make push notifications more relevant. One of the most effective methods is to bundle notifications.
“Let’s say you have a delegated user like an accountant,” Benton said. “You could pre-enroll folks like that in a set of bundle notifications that are going to be useful for them, versus a business owner who might need to make approvals and things like that.
“It’s thinking about who the user is and prompting people—not just during onboarding, but if they’re making a payment or creating an invoice—and asking if they would like to set up alerts for this, and taking them to the right setting. There are opportunities to make it easier for folks to enroll in push notifications.”
Associating with Action
Though email and SMS are well-designed for many of the most common alerts, financial institutions should also incorporate push notifications. These messages can be a highly effective avenue for banks to engage with their customers—once they find the sweet spot.
“It has to be contextual,” Benton said. “It has to have an action associated with it, but it can’t be super urgent. It has to be something like, ‘You probably want to act on this now, but we’re not going to pull you out of a meeting to act on it.’”
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