Billboards, not megaphones

Last four weeks, we’ve been covering the impact of the most underutilized marketing channel in ecommerce: push notifications.

This week, to wrap up the series, I’m going to share a little about what makes push such a versatile channel - how you get crazy value even from notifications that aren’t selling anything.

The three types of push notifications

Every push you send falls into one of three buckets:

1. CX notifications (event-driven). Order updates, shipping notifications - functional notifications that don’t drive revenue, but contribute to a better customer experience.

2. Promotional notifications. Sales, new product drops. The kind built for conversions.

3. “Awareness” notifications. This is is where push is most underutilized, and where you probably don’t realize the true value of the channel.

Push notifications that don’t sell anything

Push is a great revenue channel. Abandoned cart notifications alone can add six figures in new revenue per month (we covered that last week).

It's also one of the best channels for CX & lifecycle messaging. The ability to automate pushes based on key triggers, and reach customers instantly with updates, is unparalleled.

But you don’t need to reserve push for high-value moments.

Push has zero marginal cost. The intrusiveness factor is relatively low. And you’re not relying on an algorithm for reach.

Which means you can use it to do something other channels can't really afford to do: stay top of mind for the sake of staying top of mind.

Weekly tips, notes, check-ins, motivational messages. Things that align with your brand’s values and voice, and keep you in their headspace.

Of course, being able to do this without turning off subscribers depends on the kind of brand you have, the kind of audience you have, and getting the cadence right. Miss the mark, while constantly spamming app users, you can lose subscribers/downloads.

But hit the sweet spot, and you’ve got something with underrated value:

A display ad on your customer's phone.

A billboard on the best real estate in ecommerce

Here's the way I think about it.

How much would you pay for a billboard your customer drives past every morning on the way to work?

A real one. On a real highway. Targeted to your ICP. You'd pay a lot. Brands do pay a lot, all the time, for far less targeted impressions than that.

Now what about a billboard that doesn't sit on a highway, but on the most precious possession your customer owns?

That’s what a push notification is. It’s an impression, an imprint in your customer’s mind. Even if it doesn’t convert, even if it’s not meant to convert, it builds and maintains awareness in a way that businesses pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to Google for.

Why you have an app in the first place

The constant, always-on connection is why you have push - and an app - in the first place.

You get a direct line to your best customers. You can use that connection to sell to them (the easiest customers to sell to, mind you), or just to maintain the relationship.

Even if you can’t prove an incremental revenue boost from your app/push, just keeping your top customers from slipping away is worth the cost of having it.

Treat it not just as a revenue channel, but a presence channel.

Your goal is to be always present in front of your customers. If you do that, and if your buyers know you’ll follow through with a good product and good value when they do buy, you’ll have a stronger and more resilient business than 95% of ecommerce brands today.

The compounding part

Mobile apps and push together are the channel most seven-figure DTC brands haven't really built yet. And it's a compounding channel.

The more app installs, the stronger both channels get. The more people you have a direct connection with, the more you can reach for free with push notifications.

It becomes a stronger and stronger asset (unlike paid channels where you’re on a constant treadmill).

Your app and push list becomes a competitive advantage for BFCM, for when CPMs go vertical and your paid margin evaporates for a week, when new tariffs come in and break your unit economics, when Google or ChatGPT decides to shake things up.

Brands with a real direct channel to their best customers, one they own end-to-end, weather those moments differently.

Once you’ve scaled to around $1M annually, you need to start thinking seriously about adding an app and push to your channel mix, and turning your initial traction into compounding (and sustainable) growth.

If you’re at $5M, you need an app and push notifications already.

The brands that understand this are those with the real retention edge.

The Smarter Way to Launch An App

If you don’t have an app yet, you’re likely closer than you think.

As long as you have a fast, mobile-friendly website, the bulk of your work is already done. You just need to create a native layer on top of that.

MobiLoud makes that simple. MobiLoud turns your existing website into custom iOS and Android apps, with push notifications, native UI, an app-exclusive experiences.

You get a custom app that you control through your web platform, whether that’s Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, or a custom platform. A new channel, no new codebase to maintain.

If this series convinced you that push should be in your retention stack, there's no faster way to get there.

Want to learn more? Get a free preview of your app or DM me on LinkedIn.

Quick Hits

Home Depot Is Relaunching Its Mobile App, Calls It The "Front Door" To The Brand

At Shoptalk last week, Home Depot's EVP of customer experience and online, Jordan Broggi, confirmed a refreshed app coming later this year. Their ecommerce business is now doing $25 billion a year, and they're talking about the app as the connective tissue between site, store, and customer (his exact phrase: "the front door to the Home Depot").

eMarketer: US AI-Platform Ecommerce Will Hit $20B in 2026, $144B by 2029

eMarketer's new forecast pegs US ecommerce sales running through general-purpose AI platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) at over $20B this year, hitting $144B by 2029. That's a 7x climb in three years for a channel that didn't exist as a distribution layer eighteen months ago.

Amazon's "Hear the Highlights" Now Talks Back

Amazon rolled out "Join the chat" on April 28, an interactive layer on top of its AI-generated audio product summaries. Customers can interrupt the AI host mid-summary, ask a question by text or voice, and get a real-time answer pulled from product details and reviews. It's another step toward shopping inside a conversation rather than on a product page.

Whatnot Adds Shopify Plug-In As Live Shopping Approaches $20B in US

Live shopping platform Whatnot launched a direct Shopify integration this week, syncing products, inventory, and orders. Beta merchants like Glow Luxury and FashioNica have already pushed over $10M through it. Users spend an average of 95 minutes a day in the app, and eMarketer expects total US livestream retail to approach $20B this year.

WooCommerce + YouTube Shopping Goes Live, 2.7B Shoppers Within Reach

Google for WooCommerce 3.6 shipped on April 22, letting Woo merchants tag products in YouTube videos and Shorts directly from their catalog. The pitch: 2.7 billion YouTube shoppers, automated AI ad creative across Google's stack, one feed powering Shopping, Performance Max, and YouTube.

AI Is Coming For Resale Too: Digital Closets, Agent-Driven Sourcing, ThredUp Says The Channel "Isn't Mature Yet"

At the inaugural ReCon resale conference, executives from McKinsey, ThredUp, and Tata Bazaar mapped how AI is reshaping resale. The headline from ThredUp's James Reinhart: in-chatbot purchases are "just not mature enough as a shopping channel," but it's a matter of time. Read alongside the eMarketer hit above. The agent layer is being built across every adjacent vertical right now. The brands that come out of this with their margin intact are the ones with a direct retention engine running in parallel.

That’s all for now.

If you have any thoughts on what we discussed here, or anything else you’d like to see covered in relation to retention, CX and growth, just hit reply and let me know.

Until next week,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.