Best tactics to maximize value from mobile push notifications
Push notifications are one of the most powerful tools to engage your mobile users. If they are well timed and tied to a relevant context, the resulting engagement tends to be many times higher than with email. As majority of apps use them, they are also not considered disturbing, even though their attention-grabbing-rate is very high.
In this article I explain how to create an effective push notification strategy. You will also get tips on how to test notifications on Appzio’s platform.
Why push notifications matter?
After getting users to install them, the biggest struggle for consumer facing apps is retention. App owners struggle to keep their users engaged. Naturally the base needs to be covered — the app in itself needs to be valuable and engaging on its own. After this has been achieved, the best way to fight the user churn is to utilize a well structured push-notifications strategy. It should take into account the most common churn points in apps’ usage. So make sure you have a good analytics tool to understand at which point users leave.
Getting a push permission
Android used to ask all app permissions upon installing the app. However, with Android version 6 (a.k.a. Marshmallow), things are changing. Android still supports upon-install permissions, yet it has added an ability to ask further permissions when app is used. This approach is much more considerate for the user, and it is the recommended tactic for newer Android versions.
The worst possible strategy is to ask for push permissions when the app is launched for the first time. If you got this way, you can expect a very low acceptance rate.
In general, we observe highest push-permission approval rates for apps, that ask for the permission only after registration is completed and after tying the ask with a relevant context. For example, if you have a dating app the most logical moment to request permission would be when a user has liked another user. You could inquire like this:
Would you like to be notified if “Marti” matches with you?
Or inside a chat application it can be:
Would you like to know when “Marti” writes back to you?
The better the context is, the better the acceptance rate would be.
Giving more control to your users
Worst thing that can happen, is that user disables push notifications for your app entirely from the phone’s settings. The only way to get them to turn them back on, will require user to visit the phone’s settings screen. This doesn’t happen so easily.
One way to discourage users from disabling push notifications for your app, is to include push notifications settings in your app. For example, the user might want to receive notifications about new messages from other users, but not to be sent marketing messages.
Allowing this is obviously a balancing act and its success and benefits depends on what is your overall strategy in terms of push notifications.
What is your strategy for sending pushes?
When formulating your strategy, I would suggest that you clearly define the different push notification contexts and build around them:
- Transactional messages (ie. there is some activity which is directly related to users connections / purchase / level advancement / expiring task etc.)
- Pull-back messages (ie. user hasn’t been active in the app for some period of time)
- Gifting (for example: Congratulations! You have been with us for two months already, and as a thank you, we’d like give you a 20% discount on any item from our bestseller list)
- Location triggered (for example: Our closest store is only 500m away from you, open the app to receive a special discount coupon)
- Feel good messages (one of our favorite apps, YOU-app uses this very well, sending a positive good-life tip every morning)
- Pure marketing messages (for example: we have just recently updated our entire category of tech gadgets, have a look)
Once you have your push notification strategy formulated, you want to make sure of the following:
- A/B test the messages. Even minor changes in the copy-writing can have a huge impact in terms of conversion.
- Make sure that user is not getting too many pushes. If your app has lot of transactional messages, it might be better to configure digests for less active users.
- Follow actively if certain strategies lead to users disallowing push notifications. If you are using Appzio, best way to keep track of this is via OneSignal’s dashboard, which keeps track on deliveries. If there are no more deliveries for some segments, try to analyze what has annoyed your users.
Linking from push
If your push notification has a clear context, clicking it should take the user directly to the relevant part of the app. Making users search within the app for the context is a sure conversion-killer. If your app is built with Appzio, this can be configured easily when creating push messages so that the navigation flows logically.
Timing
Unless it is a transactional message that should be triggered upon an event, you should be mindful about when messages get sent. There are various ways for determining users time zone and use it. Sending push messages during night time usually results in a poor conversion and it can be quite annoying.
If you are not collecting users location in your app, you can still extract the time zone either from the app’s locale information or even based on user’s IP address.
Again, a good example is YOU-app, which sends the message in the morning, to give you that extra positive vibe for the day.
As further read, here is a good article, which discusses not only right timing, but also the effect of copy-writing on the effectiveness of your push messages.
Tying notifications to location
If you are developing an application where location is relevant to the app’s usage, have in mind that location specific notifications tend to have a very high engagement rate. In order to make this possible, you need to be collecting users location on the background, though. Apple approves this type of apps only if the background location collection can be proven to be relevant for the app’s users. Using background location has also impact on the app’s power consumption, so it should be utilized sparingly.
Using multimedia
Newer mobile operating systems support rich push notifications, which can include images and even animations.
As these notifications take considerably more screen real-estate, their attention value is high, but they should be used carefully.
Depending on the mobile operating system, they might be initially collapsed, but in many cases, users will see the media content right inside their notification feed.
Another addition that can, in some cases, bring value is adding custom notification icons. These can be superb hints, especially when there is a clear link to context. Note, that in most cases push notification icons will have to be included in the app resources, so they need to be pre-configured before building the app.
Platforms for push messaging
While Google and Apple provide direct API’s for sending push notifications, they can be arduous to work with. Also, getting information like push-delivery status requires extra work on the mobile client side. That’s why many developers revert to using services that provide ready-made SDK’s for additional functionality and help to integrate the server-side with easy REST API’s.
With Appzio, in addition to direct API’s from Google and Apple, we’ve been using OneSignal for good time, already. We’ve been extremely satisfied with their service. OneSignal is a completely free service, regardless of the volume. But since its free, OneSignal monetizes by gathering (anonymous) data about the users and sells this information to marketers and other parties.
Good commercial alternatives for push notifications are:
Urban Airship
Batch
Amazon Simple Notification Service
This article gives a very good overview of the currently available platforms and their benefits.
Testing your notifications inside Appzio’s platform
Most of the Appzio applications use OneSignal as the delivery service. To understand testing applications that use Appzio as a platform, it is important to note how push permissions are handled inside.
On Android, by default, applications have the push permission set. On iOS you need to ask for each permission separately. My recommendation here, is that you tell the user why push permissions are required in order to motivate them to allow it. When push permission is requested, a special set of tokens is sent to the server that signs the user for push notifications. On Android these tokens are sent upon app-launch.
Push-permission tokens are sent to server when the app starts. After login they are updated to the current user. If you are using test users at different devices, the latest login will “take over” the push destination address. Ie. consider the following scenario:
- You first login with iOS device with your test user
- Then you login with Android device with the same user account
- Push notifications would be delivered only to the Android device, but not to iOS device, as the latest login has “taken over” the push destination.
Following your push permission settings
Appzio dashboard displays basic information about your users and push permissions:
If you want to see more details, they can be found from OneSignal’s own dashboard:
OneSignal allows you to see much more information about active users and their engagement. One of the great features of OneSignal is that it tracks the delivery and also whether user have clicked on the push notification.
Sending custom notifications from Appzio dashboard
Appzio’s dashboard allows you to target users using specific criteria. By using filtering with variables you could for example send a message to all users in a specific city. This is a very powerful feature for creating custom campaigns. Usually more targeted the campaign is, better it engages the users.
Final thoughts
Getting your push notification strategy right requires planning, good copy-writing and most importantly testing. Do it right, and you will see an increased users retention rate and you can fight the churn, where it matters.
Do you have other tips / ideas to add? Share in comments below.
