Why and when to use push notifications in your app

When you’ve launched an app one of the biggest challenges you face is to keep your users coming back for more. It’s an area that app push notifications can help you with but get it wrong, and customers can end up deleting your app altogether – It can be a tricky balancing act.

Firstly, what is a push notification? It’s a message that’s sent from your application to a device, appearing as an alert on the screen. Customers can opt out of push notifications so the alerts you send won’t reach every user and should users find them annoying, they’ll switch them off. Most push notifications are text only, but it’s an area that’s slowly giving developers more options, with the ability to now experiment with other media, such as images.

But why use them? Push notifications let you push your app back into the mind of users and draw them back in. When used right, push notifications can deliver a high click-through rate, with some sectors boasting average engagement of around 40% .

You can direct users that have engaged to specific parts of your app, such as to your latest blog or to explore a new feature you’ve added, perfect for when you’re focusing on a specific area. You can even segment your users and time notifications to match their routines – get this right an engagement can soar up to 80% - or link notifications to accounts for a personal touch.

So, when should you use push notifications and what should they say? We’ve got the key areas that you should think about to craft excellent push notifications every time.

· What’s the intended outcome? When you’re planning push notifications, each should have a desired outcome. Whether it’s to get users interested in your sale items, alert them to industry news, or entice them to try out a new feature, you need to make sure it’s relevant and interesting. Not all push notifications need to aim to improve engagement but can instead be about brand building, such as those delivering news.

· Who will be interested? In some cases, you may want to target the whole of your user base, but it’s always a good idea to ask who will be interested. It gives you an opportunity to segment your users to allow for better results. A few push notifications that are appealing and interesting are far more likely to drive engagement than flooding a user’s phone.

· When should you send it? This depends on what content is in the notification, but timing is important. A notification that acknowledges a transaction, for example, should be immediate. However, those where you want to engage or alert need to consider the time – nobody wants to be woken up at 2am to hear a game has a new update. Likewise, you could find you get more engagement when you target traditional commute times over working hours.