5 Push Notification Best Practices to Skyrocket App User Engagement

What according to you is the difference between a winning marketing strategy and a mediocre one?

Well, smart marketers need to act with a clear, pre-determined plan based on industry best practices, instead of instinctively shooting in the dark. Data is your oil, and actionable analytical insights are your refined fuels to propel your marketing strategy forward.

For mobile marketers who use push notifications as their strongest and most crucial channel for app user engagement, a well-designed push notification strategy is very important.

Many users enable opt in to receive push notifications during the first time app launch. But non-contextual, impersonal, and too many push notifications do more harm than good. If the app notifications that your users are bombarded with provide no value, it is obvious that they will find them irritating. Remember that your push notifications must add value to the entire app usage experience, and not be perceived as spam, thus resulting in drop-offs.

All you need to do is follow the proven mantras and see push notifications do wonders for you.

Here are 5 push notification best practices that you must imbibe in your mobile marketing plan to skyrocket your app user engagement, one carefully acquired user at a time:

1. Make it easy for your app users to opt in/out

Sustainable customer relationships are based on trust and transparency. Ask users whether they would like to receive push notifications a couple of days later after they install the app.

Do not trick or force them into opting in for your push notifications. Let them know what kind of push notification messages you wish to send and educate them about the advantages of choosing to opt in.

Also, keep it relatively easy for users to opt out. You can always re-engage them with in-app messages and ask them to opt in later. If you do not let them disable, you might risk losing the user altogether, through app uninstall.

Ask users to opt-in to push notifications

Also Read:5 Best Examples of In-App Messages to Power User Engagement

2. Personalize your push notification message

Sending impersonal and generic push notifications become a sure-shot way of annoying your users and increase the risk of uninstalls. It is extremely important for you to know and understand your users closely and deliver notification message that is highly personalized and relevant.

Push notification messages crafted based on your users’ historical behavior and preferences, sent at their preferred time is bound to perform well and uplift your app notifications click-through rates (CTRs) and conversions.

Here is an example of how a cab-hailing app sends a push notification designed to encourage a dormant user to start using the app again. The notification message is personalized, and also contains an offer that the user might find useful. Based on whether this notification message works or not, these can help you gain a better understanding of what your customer might be looking for.

Re-engage dormant users with push notifications

This video serves as a quick reference guide on how can you personalize your push notifications to elevate your mobile marketing strategy.

3. Craft meaningful and attractive push notification message

Push Notifications are short-form content. Every word matters. Carefully crafted push notifications that have the right length, tone, and flavor can go a long way in creating the desired impact.

In the example below, a fitness app sends this push notification on a Friday afternoon. The notification message is light and fun, instead of being plain and machine-like, thus boosting the user’s connect with the app.

Fitness app attractive push notification message

Check out Smartech’s amazing tips that can guide you with writing killer push notifications. The essence is to write clear, concise, engaging, and relevant notification message in sync with your campaign objectives.

4. Constantly experiment with A/B testing of push notifications

Batch-and-blast campaigns are things of the distant past now. Each push notification you send out is an opportunity for you to bring a dormant user back to your app, or nudge him/her to complete that transaction, or get him to relaunch your app.

You certainly want to be doubly sure that the push notification serves the purpose right. This is precisely where Mobile A/B Testing feature comes into the picture. Mobile A/B Testing is the calibrated process of comparing two or more variants of a push notification – for a particular campaign – to determine a better performing variant based on key metrics. These include open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), and/or conversions.

Each variant is targeted at a percentage of your entire user base – defined by you – and the winning variant is then sent to the remaining relevant user base. Utilizing this feature, you can experiment with varying degrees of personalization, the notification message as well as rich elements like audio, video, etc.

Push Notification A/B testing - Variant A

Also Read: How to Increase CTR (Click-Through Rate) of Your Push Notifications

5. Don’t overwhelm your users with multiple push notification messages

Excess of anything is bad. However good and relevant your push notifications be, you do not want to bombard your users with too many push notifications. You could be running a number of distinct marketing campaigns, but if the recipient user base is the same, it is extremely critical that you limit the number of campaigns a user receives.

Identify a cap that suits your user the most. A news and media app needs to send more number of push notifications to its users (to keep them updated) as compared to a music or travel app. Also, keep optimizing the cap through a process of data-driven experimentation and testing.

If you are an e-commerce brand, your users would not mind getting frequent push notifications during a sale period. This is precisely where Frequency Capping becomes a valuable tool, helping you orchestrate multi-channel customer journeys without having to worry about flooding users’ phones and inboxes with too much content.

Build a Push Notification Strategy that Wins

You now know the 5 most important tips a successful mobile app marketer should follow. Do it right, and you will see your key app metrics rise over a period of time.