3 Ways to Put More Nudge Into Your Push Notifications Push notifications are influential drivers to maximizing mobile presence.
By SC Moatti •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
There is no astonishment as to how meaningful push notifications have become for mobile. We all understand that a significant amount of a company's success hinges on their presence in the mobile world. This means that a plausible portion of your business strategy should be based around mobile marketing, while push notifications should be a front runner within that section.
What I learned while managing push notifications at Facebook is that there are a few things to consider when trying to create a mobile presence through push notifications. You should be able to measure it, increase the impact of your program once established and also determine what other channels you should utilize.
Measure success
The question many have is what metric should you use as your KPI to measure the success of your push notifications? The open rate of your notification is the biggest performance indicator when utilizing push. In other words, what percentage of push notifications were opened by users?
The higher the better.
Of course, it's inevitable to not lose users as they go down the funnel. However, getting users to open your notification to begin with at least brings them into the funnel. Push notifications are more effective when going down a funnel anyway. Therefore, open rate is the metric that is crucial for you to examine, and optimize accordingly.
Open rate does, however, depend on the platform they're getting delivered to.
Android Vs. IOS
When deciding which platform works best for push notifications on mobile, we can analyze data from Android and IOS. Leanplum.com shows that the open rate for push notifications is roughly 1.77 percent for iPhones, and 3.48 percent for Androids. Meaning, delivering your push notifications to Android Users will create more engagement with your brand and/or app by placing them in your funnel.
This statistic is due to user experience, another important part of making push notifications successful on mobile.
Android and IOS notifications function in different ways. With IOS, as soon as a user unlocks their phone, the notification is out of sight. While Android users have no other option but to acknowledge the notification eventually since it sticks in their notification section.
Related: 3 Push Notification Strategies to Increase App Engagement
Personalize
When increasing the impact that your push notification program has, your first objective should be to educate users on the benefits of receiving these notifications. This allows them to think about whether or not they want to opt out of receiving these.
Your second objective should be looking at how many people you currently send them to. While there's no right or wrong push frequency, you need to experiment and see what frequency works best for your particular platform. If you notice that users are opting out, then maybe you're being to spammy and need to lower how many you send. If not, you should increase the number you send out.
However, my recommendation to guarantee a much more prodigious impact is personalizing your notifications. It has been discovered that brands who personalize their push notifications leads to an increase of open rates to roughly 800 percent.
Related: Mobile Marketing and the Magic of Push Notifications (Infographic)
Leverage all channels
After you've developed an app for your brand, you begin sending push notifications and utilizing techniques to increase the impact of your program. Now what? Do you stick to this method of bringing individuals into your funnel or do you utilize other channels as well?
Many companies are wondering whether or not they should send an email, after they've already sent a push notification. The fact is that you should be utilizing multiple channels besides push. You want to send these notifications to every channel possible to maximize reach.
What other channel can you use? As I mentioned above, email notifications are one, along with SMS and in-app notifications.
Email notifications is second to welcome emails when it comes to open rates as well. A push notification coming to a user's phone is fine and all, but how about also sending it to their inbox, a tool many Americans check every day. By doing so, you maximize deliverability as well.
But what if you're scared that you may annoy users by sending to multiple channels?
It would be worse if a user missed a piece of information than if they got it twice. Ultimately, you should think about your notification channels (email, push, in-app, SMS) holistically as a "universal inbox."
Related: Push Notifications -- Finally a Non Annoying Way to Promote Your App
Push notifications are influential drivers to maximizing mobile presence. Measuring the open rate, utilizing multiple channels to reach your users, and personalizing your notifications are surefire ways to receive the full benefit of push notifications.
