Everything You Need to Know About Using Push Notifications

Recently I spoke concerning the 4 cellular channels to think about integrating with email and briefly touched on push notifications.

In this put up, we take a deep dive into every part you want to find out about push notifications, together with instance use circumstances and concerns for iOS and Android.

What Is a Push Notification?

Before diving deeper into how to use them, it’s essential to be sure we perceive push notifications—and the several types of push—on the base stage.

Push notifications are messages that come out of your cellular app and seem on a person’s lock display (or notification middle). When swiped by means of, the person may be directed to a deep-linked location inside your app.

Basic push notifications encompass the app’s icon and a few textual content however have developed over time to embody enhanced visible and purposeful choices.

For instance, wealthy push notifications permit you to connect media, reminiscent of static photos, animated gifs or movies (iOS solely), and sounds to a push to create a extra visually interesting expertise.

Push motion buttons give the person choices about how to work together along with your message, whether or not it’s to snooze or ignore a every day alert, learn an article, or reserve it for later. These give customers extra management over how they interact along with your app and how one can higher serve them.  

Rich push and push motion buttons add dynamic components to enrich the expertise.

With push notifications, you might be interacting along with your customers to entice them to revisit your app, whereas preserving your model high of thoughts.

Common Use Cases for Push Notifications

Ultimately, your particular person push technique needs to be knowledgeable by the worth supplied to the person and the CTA you’re driving.

We’ll cowl extra about this in future posts, however listed below are some (non-exhaustive) examples to get you enthusiastic about what might make sense to your app:

Vertical	Example Use Cases
E-Commerce	Transactional (ex: your order has been shipped, loyalty factors earned) Cart abandonment Discounts and presents
Gaming	Transactional (ex: your opponent simply performed their flip) Lives refilled Daily/weekly challenges launched or ending quickly
Media	Breaking information alerts New content material added by an creator/influencer of curiosity to the person
Travel	Transactional (ex: flight boarding, delays, gate modifications) Promotional (ex: seasonal gross sales, flight worth drop alerts)

The iOS and Android Push User Experience

One key distinction between the iOS and Android push notification ecosystems is permission standing.

In Android, customers are mechanically opted in to obtain push notifications and should select to choose out; the alternative is true for iOS.

iOS customers are opted-out by default and should actively select to opt-in. This can occur both from the Settings menu or from a local iOS immediate you may arrange.

One aspect impact of this opt-in stipulation is that Android tends to have a lot larger push opt-in charges. An eMarketer study means that on common over 90% of Android customers are opted in to push whereas underneath half of iOS customers are. Note that these percentages could fluctuate drastically by trade, however opt-in charges nonetheless have a tendency to observe this sample.

As a marketer, this implies it is best to think about A/B testing push messaging extra closely on Android as your exams will attain a bigger chunk of your viewers.

The user-initiated opt-in to push on iOS dictates that the app could solely ask the person one time ever if they want to obtain notifications with the native iOS dialogue field talked about above. Unfortunately, many apps have a tendency to “waste their shot” and ask the person to opt-in to push inside the first few seconds of their first session.

Don’t fall sufferer to this lure! Think of it because the equal of opening the door to a retailer and having the gross sales affiliate standing proper there asking you should you’d like to take a look at even earlier than you’ve had an opportunity to go searching.

You ought to wait till the person has had an opportunity to perceive your app’s worth or is actively engaged earlier than asking them to opt-in to push.

One method to create a greater opt-in expertise is to implement a “pre-permissions” or “soft push” in-app message.

Letting your customers know upfront the frequency and sorts of messages they’ll obtain incentivizes opt-ins.

A great “soft push” will let the person know what worth or sorts of messages they’ll count on to obtain.

If the person says “no,” then this offers you the chance to ask once more sooner or later with out citing the native iOS dialogue field.

If the person says “yes,” then it triggers the native iOS permissions dialogue field.

How to Use Mobile Push Without Being Pushy

The intimate nature of a push notification—reaching somebody on their private cellular gadget—brings with it a bunch of concerns. The final thing you need is to your model to be thought of annoying and invasive.

Email desire facilities, that are arrange by entrepreneurs, have addressed this subject by giving customers extra say over the frequency and sorts of messages acquired. The cellular desire middle has adopted go well with.

However, not like email desire facilities, any updates or modifications are topic to the iOS and Android ecosystem updates and usually are not within the marketer’s management.

Android and iOS have developed to provides customers extra management over how they work together with push notifications with out having to shut them off solely.

Nowadays, there are a bunch of in-between choices. For instance, customers can select to group an app’s push messages collectively on the lock display somewhat than chronologically to extra effectively atone for what they missed.

For short-term reduction from any notifications inflicting the cellphone to vibrate or “wake up” the lock display, customers have the flexibility to schedule or manually allow Do Not Disturb mode. Additionally, Android provides customers the choice to grant exceptions for particular apps.

If a person nonetheless cares about receiving messages from an app however doesn’t need them cluttering the lock display, they’ll select to have them “delivered quietly” solely to the notification middle.

The advantages of this are twofold because the person’s notification middle doesn’t develop into cluttered and they’re ready to extra rapidly catch up as all the messages are in the identical spot. Before, customers would have to filter by means of messages from each app, presumably lacking pertinent data.

Push notifications present the chance for fast, snackable messages proper the place the person is making purchasing decisions. They generally is a dynamic and interactive method to hold your customers engaged along with your app and model. 

At the tip of the day, you might have choices for varieties and frequency of push messages. The key to discovering that steadiness is all about displaying your person the worth in a push message and, after all, tons and many experimentation.

Check again quickly for one more spherical in our cellular sequence to dive deeper into how analytics ought to inform cellular messaging.

For extra about push notifications and what frequency is greatest, register for our upcoming webinar the place cellular knowledgeable Tasmin Singh and Jen Capstraw, co-founder of Women of Email, tackle Message Frequency: Tackling the Touchy Topic of Over-Messaging Customers.