Push Notifications Best Practices

Push Notifications Best Practices 

The introduction of push notifications in  mobile apps has been a move that greatly improved user engagement over the past few years.  Recently though, marketers, in a bid to fully exploit the advantages that push notifications provide, have turned it to a trifle blast marketing medium.  Are you also spamming your customers? or still figuring out how to utilize push notifications as a part of your next marketing campaigns. To help you stay ahead of the game, we have summed up the best push notification practices in this blog post.

What are the inhibitions faced by push messaging?

First of all, there is the obvious fact that marketers are over exploiting push messaging. On the average, a user receives about 60+ push messages each day excluding email notifications. To put this in perspective, on the average, a user will only interact with about five of these push messages. What then happens to the other fifty-five?

Users have started to become frustrated with the constant notifications, largely due to the fact that they feel like they do not even need most of this information. This leads to the decision that some users make to uninstall the apps that push these messages, because it all begins to feel like spam after a while. Nobody likes spam.

The sad thing about this is, once a user makes the decision to block or uninstall an app, the chances of that user having a rethink are very slim. This means that once you lose a user due to your bad decision making, you have probably lost them for life. You do not get a lot of second chances, so why not do things properly the first time?

You should not be so obsessed about passing across every piece of information you have at every point to all your users every time. It’s a lazy approach to marketing, and you are bound to annoy some users who find no use for it. How do you approach it then? When is the best time to run your push notifications, and how do you know which users may need the information?

Understand context

Communication without context is not really communication, even when its one-way like push notification is. When you constantly bombard your user with notifications, you are basically throwing contextualization out the window.

What does it mean to communicate within context? In this situation, it simply means that you should tailor your content to suit your users’ preferences. When you collect information such as demographic data (who the customer is), historical data (what the customer has done) and situational data (what is going on with the customer at the moment), you will have a better idea of the type of content that these users will respond positively to, and those that may put them off.

For example, if you’re running a campaign that only users in England can take advantage of, the demographic data that you compiled will let you know which customers to send the offer to. If you send the offer to customers outside England, it will probably be useless information to them. The idea is that, if you send a push notification to a user that has no need for the information it contains, then it is a bad push notification.

Focus on developing great content

Apart from filtering what users to send your push notifications to, you also have to make sure that that content of the notification you’re sending makes sense and is well composed. There are no strict rules guiding what your content should be, as it all depends on context.

As an example though, compare these two push notifications:

“Enjoy 15 percent off on Blue Denim Jacket. Use promo code DENIM102”

“Forgetting something? You can use promo code DENIM102 to get 15 percent off on the Blue Denim Jacket today!”

Both quotes are passing across the same message, bit the first one sounds more rigid and non-conversational. The second one sounds friendlier, and is more likely to get a reaction from the user that reads it. Content!

Location is Key

We already mentioned this briefly while we talked about demographic data, but there is the need to emphasize due to its importance. A report by Venturebeat stated that the success of a campaign increases by 45% when marketers target their users based on geolocation. Incredible difference, isn’t it?

It is not particularly surprising though. One would expect that there will be better response when the users that are receiving your messages are people that may actually have a need for them.

Why Gomeeki?

Having discussed these three key practices to note when running a push notification campaign, you may now be faced with the question of getting in touch with a company or individual that may help you with you a tool or strategy to plan the next campaign. This is where we come in. We are one of top mobile app development company , and apart from developing apps, we also provide other extended services including helping out with push notification campaigns.

All you have to do is reach out to us to discuss your needs and get a quote on how to maximize your next campaign ROI.

Why not see what our customers are saying about us and how we approach your project