We are doing push notifications wrong. Here’s how to fix it.
A year ago, push notifications were all the rage. The latest and greatest in mobile app engagement, analytics gurus were pushing push notifications hard with promises of more engagement, prolonged app use, and increased brand evangelism from thrilled users who were always in the loop.
A look at the state of push notifications in late 2015 tells a slightly different story. It’s not that push notifications are a bad idea — far from it, in fact. It’s that, like with most supposed magical solutions, things are a little more complicated than they seem.
The right amounts of personalization, customization, and notification relevance can increase engagements and conversions by close to 400% — clearly, push notifications are well worth tapping into for any app that’s serious about growth and continued engagement. On the other hand, inadequate or over-abundant push notifications can push your customers away and lead to an inordinate amount of social media backlash.
Push notifications are just a tool, like any other. What they end up doing for you depends entirely on how you use them. You can carefully tighten the bonds between you and your users, building your engagement, your brand, and your revenue, or you can hammer things to hell when a few turns of the wrench would have sufficed.
We’re here to help you figure out the difference.
Push Notifications with Immediate Importance Get the Highest Engagement
It might seem like a no-brainer, but the type of push notification that shows the highest user engagement and the most positive response are the ones that provide updates of immediately practical importance to your users’ daily lives. News that might affect their plans and decisions in the real world, fleeting opportunities that they’re likely to take advantage of if they get the word in time, and status updates about any situation they’re monitoring are never seen as unwelcome interruptions, and help users live more efficiently and effectively.
That’s what mobile is all about.
Examples:
- Updates on road closures, accidents on regular commute routes, etc. (e.g. Waze)
- Financial notifications detailing account activity and balances/budgets (e.g. most of today’s banking and credit card apps)
- Coupon/limited-time sales offers sent to carefully targeted users (e.g. Groupon)
Not all mobile apps are geared towards providing this kind of info. Games, social apps, and other apps that are exclusively entertainment-focused can quickly water down their brand and lose user interest by trying to force immediate relevance where it doesn’t exist. Don’t worry, though — there are other ways you can use push notifications to your advantage.
Don’t Let Your Push Frequency Shove Users Away
Even financial and travel related apps — the types of apps that show the highest rate of user engagement because of their immediate importance to users’ decisions — need to limit the number of push notifications they send. For other apps, getting the right rhythm and timing down is even more important. You want your push notifications to build your esteem in your users’ eyes, not wear their eyes out with hourly updates.
When it comes to user engagement through push notifications, less is most definitely more. Too many push notifications is the fast lane to falling engagement, fewer downloads, and a folded app.
Examples:
- Periodic recap notifications instead of real-time updates (e.g. SigFig’s weekly stock portfolio updates)
- Summaries of social activity tailored to user preferences (e.g. TweetCaster’s customizable notification settings)
- Score/challenge updates based on individual user frequency of game play (e.g. Clash of Clan’s updates)
Send timely messages
Time of day and week are also important considerations for effective push notification use. If your notifications are coming in overnight or in the early morning, they’re far more likely to be seen as disruptive than helpful (and not in the good, “we’re disrupting the mobile analytics space” sense of the word, either).
Again, it goes back to relevance: if it’s not something your users need to know RIGHT NOW in order to make the best decision, then it’s going to take a little finesse to get into their consciousness.
Play around with time-of-day and day-of-week (and even time-of-year) for your push notifications, finding the most relevant time to give your users information that they’ll find useful. Track changes in engagement rate based on your timing shifts, ideally on a per-user basis. If you can customize your push notifications to greet each user at the time they’re most likely to engage, you’ll get a lot more growth and a lot less blow back from your push notification efforts.
Examples:
- Entertainment notifications during the last hour of the workday (e.g. Netflix)
- Weekend event promotions sent out on Thursday or Friday afternoons (e.g. museum and zoo apps)
- Travel deal opportunities 4–8 weeks before holiday weekends (e.g. Marriott)
Again, the more personalized you can get with your analytics, the more effective your push notification timing will be. Some people are planners, others are more spontaneous, and sleep and work schedule are always shifting, too. Use all of the engagement info you can to push your app’s relevance right when each user will appreciate it.
Notify People, Not Devices
No one appreciates the technical complexities of push notifications to various mobile devices and platforms better than we do, but at the end of the day all of the programming and infrastructure is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Your goal is communicating with people — mobile devices and your app are just the mundane details of how you achieve that communication. The three major tips above can really all be boiled down into one simple sentiment:
Every business is a customer service business, and this is all the more true of businesses whose entire revenue model depends on being a relevant information provider riding around in your customer’s pockets. Your goal is to form a fairly intimate connection with your users, such that you’re always in reach no matter where they are or what they’re doing. That means knowing when to push, when to back off, and what to say when you have their attention.
It takes some practice, but the right perspective paired with the right analytics can make push notifications one of the top tools in your user engagement arsenal.
