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When it comes to marketing your app, push notifications are one of the best ways to drive user engagement and target your most engaged users. With mobile app usage on the rise, customers are expecting more from their apps than just a functional experience. They’re looking for apps that offer them a seamless, user-friendly experience wherever they happen to be. It is no wonder, then, that investment in mobile marketing is at an all-time high right now. If you’re prepared to take the plunge with your app growth strategy, here are some tips for driving engagement with your app via push notifications strategy:
Create a specific audience for your push notification strategy.
One of the first decisions you’ll need to make when building your push notification strategy is who you’re targeting. You don’t just want people who have your app installed and in their phone’s app tray. You want people who are actively engaging with your app — people who are already interested in your content and are therefore more likely to notice and respond to your push notifications. When you have created your specific audiences, you can target them with different offers and different content to test what works best and what doesn't.
Ask for permission.
Another major factor in driving app engagement is to ensure that you’re collecting user permission for push notifications. This is especially important for business apps that want to send push notifications about new deals, sales, or events. If you’re not sure whether you need permission or not, you’re probably not doing it right. Be upfront about what you plan to do with the user’s device, and make sure to get their permission before you start pushing notifications. A nice alternative to a pop-up-style request is to have your app ask for permission in a more subtle way. For instance, you could use a question in your push notification. This way, the user can choose to reply with their response (yes or no), which would then pop up on their device.
Use analytics to understand what works and what doesn’t.
One of the best ways to get a sense of what works in your push notification strategy is to track engagement. This way, you can find out which push notifications are driving the most clicks, opens, and conversions. There are several ways to track your push notification performance. You can use a third-party service like Firebase, CleverTap or other available platforms. From the user’s perspective, both options will provide you with the exact same data. You can also track engagement by looking at the data from the user’s device. This way, you can find out which push notifications are triggering the most app action — from a click to a conversion to an uninstall.
Get the timing right of the notifications.
Timing is one of the most important aspects of your push notification strategy. If you send late or off-timing notifications, you’ll lose a lot of potential engagement from your app. Your timing is based on the time that a user is actually looking at their phone. This can change from moment to moment, so you’ll need to be constantly checking the user’s attention span to get the timing right. One tip to help you get the timing right is to look at the app usage data that your analytics service gives you. From this data, you can get a sense of how often your users are actually engaging with your app and when they are engaging. From that, you can get a sense of the timing of your notifications.
Choose your content carefully.
Before you begin building your push notification strategy, you need to think carefully about what kind of content you’re going to showcase in your push notifications. The most important thing to remember when choosing content for your push notification strategy is that you need to choose content that your target audience wants to engage with. You can’t just create content for the sake of creating content. You need to take cues from your users and create content that is relevant to their interests. Some other things to keep in mind are to keep your language clean, avoid using too many emojis, and keep your content story-driven — instead of just showing facts and figures, try telling a story.
Test, test, test!
The best way to understand how push notifications work and how they impact your app is to test them. This is especially true when it comes to timing and delivery. You can test timing by sending notifications at different times, at different intervals and on different days of the week to see what has the most engagement. You can also test out different delivery methods like email, social media posts, and push notifications. You can test for engagement by looking at which content is driving the most clicks and app actions. You can also test which content categories and types are the best at driving interest and clicks.
Engage with your users regularly.
Besides testing your push notification strategy and looking at how they’re performing, you should also be engaging with your users regularly. This includes things like responding to user reviews, retweets, and comments, as well as engaging with your fans on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. This can be done by responding to specific comments, thanking fans on Facebook for their five-star review, and doing the same on Twitter when someone tweets at you. If you want to go a step further, you can use a tool like Zendesk to moderate reviews. This way, you can quickly respond to any reviews that need attention.
How often should you send push notifications?
In the past, marketers would push notifications once a day during the working day. This would send data about the user’s location, the app they’re using, and the content they’ve interacted with. As our world has become more connected and people are on their mobile devices more often, marketers have split these daily push notifications across multiple days. This way, you can continue to send relevant push notifications about content that is likely to catch the user’s attention. However, there are some studies that have shown that pushing notifications too often does not promote engagement and actually decreases the likelihood of a person taking action. So how often do you need to send push notifications? The answer lies within understanding your audience and how interested they are in your app. Once you know this, you’ll be able to determine how often you need to send push notifications to maximize their effectiveness.
Conclusion
Push notifications are one of the fastest ways to drive app engagement and usage. These messages can be sent to specific users at any time, and they don’t need to open an app to see them. With all of the potential they have, it’s important that you use the best practices for push notifications to achieve their full potential. Push notifications are a new way to interact with your users, and you need to make sure that you’re engaging with them as often as possible. While push notifications are quick and easy to use, they can also be very effective if you make the effort to create engaging content and tailor it to your audience.
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