To push or not to push, that is NOT the question
The vast majority of us, if not all, have been on the receiving end of a push notification, which made us doubt why we actually received it. Sometimes we even question whether we actually installed the app that is now sending us this message 🤔 The answer is obviously “yes”, but the reason behind you questioning it is important.
So for people trying to engage with you through push notifications, what can they actually do? Can they expect that one push works for both Monica, Erica, Rita, Tina, Sandra, Mary, Jessica and you? Do they even know you?
And the question then comes, should the companies care? Do they actually need to know you and do they need to be successful with their push strategy? Short and simple, YES!
65% of users return to an app within 30 days when push is enabled and only 19% of users who do not have push enabled return to an app within 30 days. Additionally Push notifications boost app engagement by 88% (Source:Localytics).
This is a crucial area for us at Tonsser, especially within our Customer Success team and our Product team, since it’s one of the make-or-break moments. If a user opts out of pushes, then the likelihood of them turning it back on is close to zero. All I need to do to emphasise the importance, is to point back to the percentages above. 👆
So are you ready to get to know your users?
1. Timing is key ⏰ ‼️
One thing you will notice is that your ability to make the best pushes for your audience relies heavily upon the data you have available. So the fast win is using some of all the wonderful data available at your fingertips. At Tonsser we utilise both the data on when our users are normally online, but we also take common knowledge into account. From personal experience I can safely say that you will not be any better than the data you have available and are willing to utilise. Sources such as your user researcher, if you have one, Intercom and Localytics are heavy on data and will be a good place to start for any company or startup. We rely on our User Experience Researcher, Jose, doing his amazing job on an everyday basis 💪
Most CRM tools also allow you to set delivery windows for your pushes. This is crucial for us, since we know that a lot of our users have football practice Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday between 17:00 and 21:00 and are unavailable. This is important information when setting up our pushes. Especially if the goal is engagement right away.
Send Time Optimisation 🚀
Given the standard learnings seen above, then it should be fairly simple to do some minor optimisations to your pushes. But if you want to take it to the next step and have the ressources for it, then a new trend is emerging, using machine learning to get patterns for your individual users. Allowing you to differentiate the time you send a message based on each individual users phone and app behaviour 😱 This is definitely next step for us at Tonsser and we will have something on this in the future. If you can wait for us to test it, then you can check out more from AppBoy on the subject here.
This is again quite an advanced approach to take. So from personal experience I would say that most business and startups can greatly benefit from “just” collecting data and assigning ownership over pushes to a data-driven individual within the organisation, like we’ve done within our Customer Success team.
2. Relevance is key 👋 ‼️
All of your pushes ultimately comes back to how well you know your users / customers. This is especially visible when you sit down and look at how relevant your messages in fact are. The audience you set is the foundation of any push message. We have seen that too little segmenting will lead to a far too generic message, hitting users north, south, east and west.
If your message isn’t sent to the right audience it’ll feel like spam to whoever gets it. — Ruarí Galavan, Product Education at Intercom
We get a much higher engagement with our pushes, now that we rely not only on the profile of the user, but indeed also their behaviour. As shown by Localytics in the graph below, hitting the sweet spot requires an understanding of your users, but also the behaviour of your users ❤️
Something as simple as using the user’s first name will bring a much greater personalisation to your messages, but please don’t add the first name and then lean back. Add stuff such as city, actions done and also remember where your users are outside your app. All this is just the start. Unleash your data 🤖
The Training Test ⚽️
At Tonsser we often use our CRM tool, Intercom, to test things before implementing them large scale. This often gives us a good indication of how big an impact relevance can have on our success.
So in the training test we sent out a push to users before their training and then one again after their training. Given that we are an app for footballers, then it was highly relevant to ask them how their training went. Additionally we had the training hours for each of the users, making it possible to send the pushes right before and right after the individual user’s training. About as relevant and personal as it gets! 😍
The results of the tests were overwhelmingly positive. The overall open rate was at 41% and out of the users who opened the push, 80% answered the question. An additional point was that not a single one of the users who received the push, decided to opt out of receiving pushes from us. Not even the ones who didn’t open the push 👆 And this is the key difference between a user wondering why they received the push and a user who gets why this is relevant to them.
This was a fantastic example of the effect of not only making the push personalised by sending it based on their individual training hours, but also understanding the behaviour of the user outside the app and understanding the importance of their training. This approach forces you to understand the life of your users beyond your app, but will also greatly benefit your push-strategy.
Utilising Push for Proof of Concept 🤓
With our training push we not only proved the value of relevance, but we fortunately were able to prove something much more important to us. The push helped prove our users’ desire to both receive feedback and evaluate their themselves. This tied into the launch of a new coach-feature in our app, allowing coaches to give individual feedback to their players after matches, which you can see more about here if you feel like geeking out.
3. Volume and Frequency is key ✌️ ‼️
One important thing to remember when sending push messages, is the volume of pushes you are actually sending. This is especially important if you haven’t previously paid much attention to the amount you are sending. Perhaps you have both your product, your marketing team and your content team sending stuff to your users. If that is the case then getting an overview of how often and how much is sent to the users, should be your first step.
Every Monday we check the percentage of reachable users and the amount of users who opted out of receiving pushes from us in each of our markets. We then keep an eye out for drops in the percentage, which we can then track back to the push activity during the previous week. This is currently done very manually by using numbers we have available on our CRM tool, Intercom, and then putting those numbers into a customised Google Sheet. Not the most high-tech but it gets the job done.
4. Data is key ✌️ ‼️
Both before and after sending a push, you will greatly benefit from utilising the data you have available. This will ensure that you test out the right things, have a good foundation to start off and that you get the best learnings available to you. You can’t just rely on vanity metrics, such as open-rate and click-rate.
As you see, look at increases and decreases in reachable users and uninstalls. It will give you a much clearer view of the effect of your push strategy. You’ll thank yourself at those Monday Morning Meetings 🙏
Traditionally, push notifications have been measured by metrics such as open rates, click through rates etc. These glass-half-full metrics only tell half of the story — Geoffrey Keating, Intercom
5. Conclusion 💪
So should you push your users? That should definitely not be the question you ask anymore.
A well-established and personalised push campaign could be the difference between a retained user and the user who no longer remembers installing your app. Don’t be that app. Be better than that app.
