Push Notification strategy for mobile apps

Push notifications are great way to increase the user engagement of your mobile apps. But I have seen a tendency among the people to treat push notification as just an add on. As if since push notifications can be a possibility, let's do it. This is a wrong approach. You need to be really careful. Bombarding the user with too many notifications can actually back fire.

To get started let's look at some of the statistics that I have come across when it comes to push notifications.

1. 75% users start their app engagement through the app notifications
2. 66% of the self-directed shopping is through notifications
3. 83% of the users feel online advertisement through notifications is disruptive

Nobody likes getting bombarded with unnecessary push notifications. If you push notifications for every irrelevant stuff, then user might actually go ahead and disable the notifications for the app. You don’t want that to happen. You don’t want to become so much irritating that, user choses to completely ignore you.

So here are some common strategies.

1. Customise the notifications - Don’t use the default textual notification design. Try to customize it as per your needs with image thumbnails that convey the message effectively. User custom notification icons with your branding. Even music plays important role. Spend some time on it. Also if you are sending notifications on same app for different category, try to differentiate it through different motivation designs. For example Cricket related notification could look slightly different from a Tennis related notification. These are very small things, but they make a major difference how customer perceives your brand.
2. Group the target audience - Group your users based on geographic location, age, gender and if necessary more based on what makes sense your business case. Use this information to properly send the push notifications. There is no point in sending a push notification to a user which is more likely to be ignored. This especially makes sense when you are working under lower limits of number of push notifications that you are allowed to send based on slab you have chosen on push notification platform
3. Get the opt-ins - Do not subvert the user preference about the push notifications in the mobile app. Ask specifically your consumer, whether he/she want’s to receive push notifications when the user installs the app for the first time. User preference is paramount.
4. Understand user preference about kind notifications they are interested in - Try to understand the kind of notifications that user is interested in. Assume that you are news aggregator app, specifically ask the kind of interest the user has. If user in more interested in sports related news, then send notifications based on this user preference. Most of the users actually don’t mind telling what they like and don’t like.
5. Use In App notifications - There are basically two kind of notifications. Fire and forget and in app notifications. Fire and forget notifications are basically are those when received on device, user needs to click on them. If user just swipes out the notification, then they are permanently lost. You don’t want that to happen. The user should still be able to some how track the notifications that he/she has received. This can be done with in-app notifications. This is so basic, but I have still seen some apps don’t have this feature.
6. Don’t send more than 3 notifications per day - This is pretty self explanatory, It is polite way of saying - don’t bombard your users with too many notifications.
7. Build a cohesive notification experience - It is quite common that your back end IT infrastructure are working in silos. Different systems trigger notifications for same event on different apps. Let’s assume that you have a app specification for stock market. You also have another app for Financial news. User has installed both of these apps on the same device. So if you want to notify the user about a stock that is performing better, will you send two separate notifications on both apps? Do you target only one of those apps? If you know that the user who has logged in those two apps is same person, then can we just send the notification to one of the apps, instead of bombarding the same user, about same news, on two different apps, at same time. Well, you can make these nuanced decisions if our back end systems can talk to one another and are not working in silos. So make sure you spend some serious time on deciding and designing this.
8. Track the performance - This is the most important factor. You can’t improve something that you can’t measure. How many of the people have actually enabled the push notifications? What the notification opening rate? That is for every 100 notifications sent, how may are actually being clicked and opened. Anything more than 10% open rate is considered pretty good by the industry standard. You can the decide based on this information how well you are doing. Most of the analytics tool will help you in this.

So next time you decide to integrate your mobile app with push notifications, keep these things in mind.

PS: If you want to learn technically how Push notifications work in Android and want to learn it from scratch, the you can visit this tutorial series that I have on my YouTube channel - Push Notifications in Android