Push Notifications Done Right: What US startups can learn from their Indian counterparts
I moved to India recently to explore the startup eco-system in Bangalore. Part of my early education here has been talking to a lot of entrepreneurs and really diving into the apps, companies and services built in India.
Although the ecosystem is definitely not as mature in the US, Indian startups are doing a much better job at engaging users through push notifications.
Little Black Book: is a fast growing media startup based out of Delhi. I would describe them to my US friends as a combination of Lonely Planet and Yelp. They push out great content regularly and spend a lot of time with the copy and images for their campaign push notifications. I click into the article more often than not when I get a push notification from them.
Myntra: is an eCommerce company focused on fashion. I receive a push notification from them every couple of days which without fail contains a very well-designed image and great copy. I am also pretty sure that they have invested time into personalizing push notifications. I am willing to bet that I received the Puma Brand Day push notification because I had purchased Puma shorts & T-shirts on Myntra before.
Urban Clap: connects customer with vetted service professionals. Their push notifications are always relevant, have an interesting image as well as a strong call-to-action (CTA). This particular push notification was sent out as soon as it started getting hot in Bangalore — telling their customers that they could book a trusted specialist via UrbanClap to service their AC.
PayTM: is most known for being an alternate method of payment in India. I received this particular push notification after I had set up my PayTM account but before I did any sort of transaction. They knew I had an Indian phone number and they knew that I would have to pay for it at some point. Since I received this notification, I have always paid my phone bill through PayTM.
Flipkart: was the first eCommerce company to hit any kind of scale in India. I received this push notification after I downloaded their app (but before logging in). What I really like about this particular notification is the two strong CTAs to try and get me to use the app immediately.
Goibibo: is a booking website based out of India. Their push notifications are always well-branded and consistent. The only slightly annoying thing about them is that their notifications are always deals-focused (which can get tiring).
Push Notifications at US companies
Just for comparison’s sake, lets take a look at some push notifications sent out by US companies (special thanks to Joshua Debner for sending these to me).
Google Photos: is a great product to organize and store your photos. However, I feel that there hasn’t been enough product thought put into the push notifications that gets sent out to Google Photos users. There is no CTA or any real indication of what would happen if the user were to click into the push notification.
Yelp: is still probably the largest source of user generated content for restaurants and businesses in the US. Their push notifications feel very lazy to me. Sure, they have a nice picture of macaroons but its really not giving enough information to get the user curious enough to click into it. I think they should definitely experiment with stronger copy and CTAs for their notifications.
Lyft: seems like they have a auto-triggered campaign to get users into the habit of using Lyft. I definitely like the idea behind the campaign. However, they can definitely do a better job with branding their notifications.
Closing Thoughts
Most people in India don’t even have an email address and only a fraction of the people that do have an email address actually check it regularly. So the companies here are forced to put a lot of effort into these micro-interactions with their users.
In most of the developed countries, emails have proved to be a strong driver for revenue. Most entrepreneurs and product managers can point to how well emails did at their previous company so they will go on to invest heavily in emails at their current startup. In the process, push notifications almost takes a back seat — purely because of time and engineering constraints.
This was the definitely the case at my last company Oyster. We invested an order of magnitude more time and energy into building out our email campaigns as compared to our push notifications campaigns (which was pretty much non-existent).
I think there are very few US startups that do a good job with push notifications (I am looking at you Foursquare). So there seems like there is an enormous opportunity for more startups to capture the user’s attention via this medium.
What do you think?
