User messaging: The thin line between educating and irritating your user

Devising a mechanism for interaction with one’s customers is a puzzle that is not easily decoded.

You push too hard, and you risk antagonizing your customer, you keep it too light, and the customer misses the message completely.

So how should one devise a strategy that just perfectly balances the two out?

In an increasingly competitive market, it is a fight to ensure high recall value for one’s products, and marketers have consistently worked on devising new ways to ensure top-of-the mind recall for their products.

From distributing paper pamphlets to email marketing to sms marketing to in-app messaging techniques, marketers have tried all sorts of BTL marketing techniques to reach out to users out there. Who knows, pretty soon we might have VR based personalized 3D messages that simulate an advertisement exactly as per the behavior of an user.

Unfortunately though, the solution to the problem doesn’t depend only on the medium of the communication, but with WHAT and HOW it is communicated.

If it is an utility bill payment platform, it makes sense to send a notification ONCE every month to users reminding them that the due date is round the corner, so, no matter how highly customized the message is, it won’t make sense to the user if notifications are sent a day after he pays his bills.

Similarly, if an app is about sharing the news highlights of the day, it makes more sense to send one notification every morning so that users can get to know all that happened over the last day. Bombarding the user with messages while he is at work during the rest of the day will probably only add to his irritation.

The solution to this lies therefore in proper segmentation of users, and using messages that are relevant to the segment concerned.

For our games, we classify our users into segments based on what we want our users to try out in the game, and what an user, depending on his level of engagement with the game, would love to do most.

We classify our users into three categories, a mix and match of which determines the segment the user would be a part of:

• Regular players
• Churned Users
• Payers

Which means,

• An user who is new to the game should be educated about the features of the game that he will discover if he goes ahead
• An user who is fairly new but has an understanding of the features needs to be encouraged to play on
• An user who is fairly engaged but not playing for some time now(potential churned user) needs to be helped with some freebies that help him move ahead
• A payer needs to be encouraged to try out other purchasable items, and be educated about the benefits of the same
• A churned payer needs to be offered some exciting discount so that he has enough reasons to come back to the game

And so on…..

It is with intricate planning that we can ensure that whatever messages a user sees during the course of his lifetime, is always relevant to him, which is what makes users stick to our games a lot longer than competition.

Another factor that significantly impacts user response is the time of messaging. We have had users who have received notifications late at night, and have been offended enough to drop off after shooting an angry email to us without realizing that it might have been an one time glitch from a third party service provider’s end, or because they had set a wrong local time on their device, thus affecting our notification server’s ability to pick the correct time slot.

The best time to send a notification would be when the user is not preoccupied with matters of higher importance than what the notification is going to convey.

So, it might be a good idea to send a message around midday, when people generally take a break from work, or in evening, when users are relatively free from their daily activities.

Now, depending on the call to action associated with the message, the time slot needs to be chosen carefully.

A message that is meant to convey some information, for example, an important news item, inviting an user to a sale over the coming weekend can be sent out during lunch hours.

Whereas, a notification demanding a specific action, like inviting users to try a new feature in the app, or completing a purchase that the user has left unfinished, must be sent when the user has time to complete the action, which is why evenings are a perfect time for the same.

To sum it up, truly, user interaction is a delicate balancing act, and the parameters that help us keep our notifications useful to our customers are:

• Relevant messages
• Balanced intensity of messages
• Perfect scheduling