How To Maximize Value From Mobile Push Notifications?

In our rapidly digitizing world, any additional steps to a conversion funnel could be a deal-breaker. If you want to encourage consumers to use your app, push notifications are the way to go. However, they are still used less than optimally by many marketers.

Blackberry was the first to introduce push notifications. They were used to inform users when they’ve received an email. They have now grown in sophistication and ubiquity.

In fact, today push notifications are among the most powerful tools for engagement that mobile app developers use. If their timing is right, the resulting engagement can be way higher than with email, for instance. Also, they aren’t considered that disturbing, even though they have a high attention-grabbing rate. The average opt-in rates of push notifications for 2018 are for the main operating systems Android and iOS.

The biggest struggle for consumer-facing apps is retention. Among the millions of apps , how can you make consumers remember yours? Usually, the app itself needs to be valuable and engaging enough to keep it’s their attention. If it achieves that, it would need a strong push-notification strategy to remain consumers about its advantages.

In this article, we’re going to discuss multiple ways that can help you maximize value from push notifications.

Getting Permission

Notifications are among the mobile app development trends for quite a long time now. However, often they are still not used correctly.

You usually see a message asking you if you want to receive push notifications right after you’ve installed an app. This happens to be the worst possible strategy. Asking for push permission when the app is launched for the first time can get you a very low acceptance rate.

So now you might wonder when is the right time to ask for permission. Usually, the highest push-permission approval rates are if you ask for permission right after registration is completed and you’ve tied the ask with relevant context. Remember that the better the context is, the higher the acceptance rate would be.

You should be very mindful about what messages get sent and how often they are sent unless it’s one triggered upon an event of course. A very important thing that is usually skipped is the user’s time zone. Receiving push notifications at night, usually won’t make you that interested in the sent message and is even considered annoying.

You can extract data of time zones even if you aren’t collecting users location. You need to think of what is the best time of the day in which your app would be most useful and remind users about it then. Always consider different time zones to achieve higher efficiency from your push messages.

Giving Control to Users

A user disabling push notifications for your app entirely from their device’s settings is your absolute notification-strategy nightmare. Getting him to turn them back on is almost impossible. You can discourage users from disabling push notifications by including such settings in your app.

You need to give users the ability to choose what kind of notifications they want to receive. Like, for instance, they want to be informed about new messages from other users, but don’t want to see marketing ones. They have to be able to decide.

Of course, the success of this activity depends on your overall strategy in terms of push notifications.

Multimedia

Latest operating systems support rich push notifications. These include images and animations. As they take more of the screen’s space, their attention value is higher. However, they should be used even more carefully.

In addition to that, you can bring more value by adding custom notification icons. Your mobile app development team will have to pre-configure them before building the app, as they have to be included in its resources. When there’s a clear link to context, these can be an amazing hint.

Location-Based Notifications

If location services are relevant to the app’s usage, you can include location-specific notifications. These also have a very high engagement rate. If you want to use them, you’ll have to collect your user’s location, though. Apple, for example, approves this type of apps only if the background location collection can be proven to be relevant for the app’s users.

However, sending a push notification with some attractive offer, when the user is near your store or restaurant, for instance, could be a highly efficient strategy.

Something you should keep in mind if you want to implement location-based notifications is that background location collection impacts the app’s power consumption. That’s why it has to be utilized sparingly.

If the message you send as notification has a clear context, clicking it should be able to take users straight to the relevant part of the app. If your users have to search for the context, they’re most likely not to do it. Messages should be created in such ways that the navigation flows logically.

Otherwise, if your notification isn’t linked to the specific context, it’s rather useless.

Final Thoughts

Creating a solid push notification strategy is essential if you want to fully engage your users to your mobile app. It requires planning and testing. As one of the top mobile app development companies , we can provide you with a high-quality mobile app, that gets maximum value from push notifications, so you won’t be missing on all of their advantages.

Originally published at https://swagsoft.com.sg on July 22, 2019.