Amazon said this week that it is adding push notifications to its Web services for developers, reflecting the significant growth in the mobile application market and related services.

The fully-managed service is cloud-based as well as cross-platform, meaning developers can tap it to send notifications to iOS, Android and Kindle Fire devices. While push notifications is a growing area, it faces challenges including other mobile messaging tools such as SMS and how to avoid annoying users with too many messages. 

?What this move by Amazon highlights is just how viable mobile push notifications have become for developers and marketers alike, as a way to connect with mobile users,? said Brendan O?Kane, CEO of OtherLevels, San Francisco.

?Although there are other players in this space, it is all upside for Amazon and its clients, as this service from Amazon provides developers with a great opportunity to easily and quickly boost their mobile engagement,? he said.

?This in turn, will lead to higher growth for Amazon and its core platform business.?
 
Driving engagement
Amazon is a late-comer to this area, with companies such as Urban Airship, Parse and others already offering similar services.

The interest in push notifications derives from the ability for developers and marketers to drive engagement with their apps.

?Push notifications play a critical role for all mobile apps as they drive 4x more user engagement and double user retention as compared to app users that don't receive them,? said Brent Hieggelke, chief marketing officer at Urban Airship, Portland, OR.

?With ?appathy? being a core issue, the majority of apps are not used 30 days after download, it is critical that companies focus on sustaining engagement, and push notifications are a key lever in making that happen.?

Competitive pricing
Amazon is hoping to compete in this space by offering competitive pricing and addressing current challenges related to delivering push notifications at scale across multiple platforms. 

The issue is that different mobile operating systems support different relay services for delivering push notifications, meaning that developers who build and maintain their own mobile push services ? as many do ? have to integrate with each operating system?s relay services, which can be complex and costly.

Current customers of Amazon Web Services will be able to use Mobile Push for Amazon SNS at no charge and send up to 1 million messages each month for free. After that, customers pay $.50 for every million messages published and $.50 for every million messages delivered.

The pricing is structured so that developers will be able to send push notifications for free until they are able to scale up their audience.

However, competitive pricing alone may not be enough for Amazon to compete in this area.

?There are some long standing partners for developers all ready who provide this functionality and their products have grown quite extensively over the past few years,? said Arun Ramdeane, senior account executive at Atimi Software, Vancouver, Canada.

?While cost may play a big factor into getting new clients or ones to switch, they need to provide the similar functionality as other players, which allow companies to use push notification strategically.?

Value-added services
Other push providers are focusing on ways to make it easy for developers to bring added value to their push notifications.

For example, Urban Airship is focusing on services such as rich media messaging, the ability to create an in-app message center and analytics.

?The push messaging market is moving from a developer concern to a core customer communications channel requiring greater sophistication to ensure messaging relevancy,? Urban Airship?s Mr. Hieggelke said.

?Customers aren't interested in receiving more messages, but rather only the messages that matter to them at the right time and the right place,? Mr. Hieggelke said. ?As a result, we now see more marketers having primary responsibilities for push messaging rather than IT staff.?

While push notifications are supposed to be a way for developers to keep users aware of critical events and relevant information, there is misuse, with developers sending too many messages and annoying users.

?Marketers have the responsibility to ensure that they?re making sure each message is well-timed, and relevant is what matters because overabundant and meaningless pushes just end up alienating the audience,? Mr. O?Kane said. ?Intelligent push ? push that adds value to a customer?s life and is sent sparingly, at the right time ? is what really drives engagement.?

Mobile relationship management
This speaks to the broader idea of how to manage mobile relationships, with push notifications just one of the options open to marketers.
 
?While the push ecosystem's relationship is defined by whether an application is installed or not, short code application provider's help brands define the relationship by whether a customer opts-in or not,? said Tim Miller, president of Sumotext, Little Rock AR.

?Our common ground is found in messaging the mobile wallets - or what we call the 'community apps' - like Passbook,? he said.

?We believe these programs will leverage and integrate with the opt-in database better and provide more value to marketing managers through software tools and user interfaces that extend segmentation and targeting beyond developer SDKs and APIs."

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York