Don’t be Pushy : How To Send Push Effectively

Last month I wrote a post on the background, need and technicalities of push notifications. This post is about effectively utilizing the push technology to drive more engagement to your app. This is one of those few tools which let you communicate directly with the consumer in the most personalized way. If executed with a well thought strategy, it can give great results but the abuse of it can actually lead to users going away from your app. That is the kind of power push notifications have. I will share my insights as push sender as well as push receiver.

Image Credits : http://zazzle.com

First thing first, since it is a personalized way of communication, so it has to be data driven. If you send same message to all your users, you are doing it in the most incorrect way. Using the data of your users, you should build segments in order to uniquely identify different personalities and behaviours. Take into account following factors next time you want to push users.

Users segmentation: If you want push to be effective, you must ensure right message reaches to the right user. The message should only be sent to users to whom it makes sense. This user segmentation could vary a lot depending upon the kind of campaign you are running.

• Suppose you see drop in your users count, so in order to bring users back you want to push “Hey! Long time no see”. In this case your target users are those who have not logged into the app for a while. If you do not segment, the push might even go to users who logged in 2 minutes ago.
• Suppose you are offering a 25% discount on 4th purchase, your target audience should be users who have purchased atleast twice. A user who has never made a purchase, may not be your target audience for this offer.

Geography matters : So you want to notify your users about 50% sale on Nike showroom in New Delhi or Happy hours this weekend in Gurgaon or Farhan Akhtar’s Live Show in Noida, these messages hold very little value for users living in Bangalore or Mumbai or Kolkata so why bother them with these? Before sending push, you need to take a call on whether this is location based campaign or not. If you keep sending messages to Mumbai’s users which are only relevant to Delhi’s users, you are frustrating Mumbai’s audience.

Timing is (mostly) everything : It overlaps with geography at times. If you have global audience, you should also consider the timezone of users. Even if this is not a global audience then you should think about the most relevant timing for the message you want to convey. For example you want to push ‘Upto 300 off on dinner bill at XYZ restaurant!’. It is wiser to send it in the evening rather than in early morning.

If a message is delivered at wrong time, it would either annoy users or be ignored and thus no positive results.

Frequency : This is a very important aspect of push, how frequently should you push a user. It largely depends upon the kind of application you are running.

• If you are a news app, you should push users everytime there is any relevant news for them, which could be 3–4 times a day.
• If you are a messenger like WhatsApp, you must push user everytime there is a new message for him, which could be as large as 100 times a day or even more.

So frequency is absolutely about the kind of service your app provides to user. Overdoing or underdoing it would defeat the purpose of your app. If WhatsApp sends only one push per day even when there are 20 people who sent me message or Candy Crush sends me promotional messages every 30 minutes when I expect at most 1 message per day, I am unhappy in both the cases.

I have uninstalled a famous app-only online shopping application because they were sending me promotional push every hour.

Send creative, accurate & personalized message :

• Why creative? So that users read complete message without getting bored. Keep the message simple, short & creative. Don’t put rich content, that is not what push is for.
• Why accurate? Because you should not mislead user, give them correct information. Glib messages that can mislead users, will work negatively for you. A famous cab company sent me a push ‘Free ride in Delhi, use this coupon’. What they were actually offering was a 50 INR discount on each ride. Their push message was not accurate.
• Why personalized? Because it makes users feel special, it makes them feel that you are listening to them. I added a book in my Amazon cart but did not checkout. Next day I receive push from Amazon, offering me help in checkout. That message was personalized only for me, how cool is that!

Relevance of push : A push should be an indicator of further activity that user can do in your product, user should be able to do something. If a dating app pushes ‘Swipe more! Find your match’, but when user goes to app, it shows ‘No matches right now, come back later!’. You are surely disappointing users that way.

Experiment & monitor : Try to incorporate small batch experiments with your push to see what works better. For example,

• To send a discount coupon for dinner, send to a batch at 5 PM, another batch at 6 PM, another at 7 PM.
• To bring your old users back to app, make a batch of users who did not login in last 3 months, another batch of users who did not login in 6 months and another batch of users who did not login in 9 months. Now push these batches on different time.

Try to figure out patterns of what works better than other. Users who last logged in 6 months ago are more likely to come back compared to others? Users who receive dinner coupon at 7 PM are more likely to use it?

Custom sound : Choose a custom short and non-annoying sound for your push messages. Your users should be able to identify you even when they are not looking at their phone.

Ability to opt-out : Your application should have the ability for user to opt out of receiving push notifications. It would be even better to give them selective opt-out option, where they can choose the kind of push messages they do not want to receive. If you go for selective opt-out, remember to make this list as small as possible (2–3 options max), you do not want to give them a form with 15 options.

Monitor the results : Monitoring the results is even important than sending push. How has user behaved to this push? What should you change next time? Was this campaign upto the expectations? Has the engagement increased? and many more questions depending upon the kind of push message. This is extremely important for the product so that further steps are inspired from this data.

This is not the complete list, but from my experience these have been the most important factors to consider while sending push. It is better not to send push at all rather than sending a push with ill strategy. It is a very powerful tool but as the saying goes, ‘With great power comes great responsibility’.