A Complete Guide For App Push Notifications

More than 3 billion people are using smartphones worldwide, and this number is increasingly growing with each passing day.

Despite technophobic remarks about smartphones’ ill effects, people on average spend 3 hours and 15 minutes on these, says statistics.

This has rendered it beneficial to businesses and brands to reach customers through mobile phones. 

One of the common techniques used by them for this purpose is to app push notifications. Push notifications have to be attractively crafted to gain the attention of the users. These need to be useful enough for them.

This blog discusses everything you need to know about creating and running app push campaigns. Thus it will be your reliable app push notifications Guide. 

What are app push notifications?

An app push notification is a message sent by an app when the user is active in it. For receiving these, the users should have opted-in to receive your notifications.

These are used for engaging users and enhancing the user experience across different points of their journey. 

What are app push notifications used for?

Mobile app push notifications with personalized and contextual messages are sent for various purposes to engage users and enhance their experience. Here are some usages of these.

1. Onboarding

App pushes can be used to walk your first-time users through the app actively. Also, it should make them feel welcomed and motivate them to use your app with the necessary tutorials, tips, and instructions.

So, this way, they won’t feel lost or confused after downloading it. Also, This will help them find value in your app and benefit from it. 

2. Special promotion

App push notifications can also be used to inform users of your special promotions. These can bear announcements of discounts, freebies, or coupons. This will work in increasing your sales and also boost user retention.

3. New feature introduction

Whenever you launch a new feature, you can introduce it to your users through app pushes. You can let them know of its purpose, usage, benefits, and functionalities. This way, not only will your users know that the feature exists but also its usage. 

4. Transactional

In-app notifications are excellent for sending out transactional messages to your users. So, depending upon your niche, these can be messages involving online invoices, legal updates, double opt-ins, delivery confirmations, password resets, shipping notifications, order confirmations, etc. 

5. Announcements

In-app notifications can also be used to announce important news about your brand or business to users. These can be about changes, sales, price drops, new arrivals, localized deals, etc. 

6. Complete an action

When a user leaves an action incomplete, you can send out an app notification reminding them to complete it. For instance, if he leaves reading an article in the middle, you can ask him to save it to his reading list so that he can read it later.  

7. Build user habits

App pushes can be employed to build user habits. For instance, if yours is a health and fitness app, notifications can be sent to motivate them to start working out sessions for achieving different goals like managing stress, sleeping better, losing weight, getting stronger, etc. 

8. Loyalty

App pushes can be used to send out loyalty program invites. So, these messages can promote customer loyalty with discounts and free samples on the next purchase or encourage users to stick to your brand through social media sharing of achievements. 

These are just some purposes of using app pushes. It is also used to make recommendations addressing users’ immediate needs, run referral programs, ask for feedback, reward users for their in-app activities, and more. 

What are the advantages of app push notifications?

App push notifications not only drive user engagement but also create a richer and stronger app experience.

Tailored in-app messages can prolong session durations, enhance the user experience, and increase user retention. Here is the list of advantages of in-app push notifications. 

• Initiate user engagement
• Target the right users
• Retain/re-engage users
• Increase traffic
• Enhance brand consistency
• Drive conversions
• Increase conversion rates
• Get insight into customer behavior
• Improve customer care strategy with useful content

Besides, since mobile app push notifications can be friendly, targeted, and relevant to the user, these are easy to use and easy to manage.

All these make apps priceless assets for different businesses like hotels, restaurants, beauty salons, banks, non-profits, health and fitness, and other professional services. Even special events like conferences have begun using apps for communications. 

How to create app push notifications that drive engagement and enhance the user experience?

Rather than seeming like additional marketing, your in-app messages should seamlessly feel like a part of the in-app experience. So, this should be personalized, content-rich, and answer the user’s immediate needs.

This App Push Notifications Guide provides you with some best practices to develop successful in-app notification campaigns.

1. Segment & Personalize Messages

Sending out generic messages to your entire user base won’t be effective enough. It would help if you came up with campaigns for specific user sections. For instance, users in a particular location would benefit from receiving your new store’s notifications opened at that place.

Likewise, you would benefit by notifying rewards to customers with higher average order values. Such personalization will improve your engagement rates and user experiences.

2. Timing Matters

You should send your in-app notifications to your users at the right time. It is important to avoid disturbing or interrupting users with your messages.

Also, the ideal notification sending times are immediately after the app’s launching by the user and after the trigger of events like setting up one’s profile, navigating through the buying process, earning a specific number of loyalty points. 

3. Headlines Matter

Like how the subject line of an email affects the open rates, the headline of an in-app notification works. It is important to have a strong and attractive headline. This will motivate them to read the message till the end instead of closing the notification automatically. 

4. Keep the copy short

In-app notification messages offer a little space. So remember to keep the message short and crisp. This is particularly crucial if you’re incorporating an image in your message. 

5. Highlight the CTA

Your CTA tells your users what you expect them to do soon after reading your notification. Let your CTA copy have a short copy and an attractive button color.

6. Work on the Visuals

App push notifications can be made attractive with rich media like images, videos, and GIFs. So, these drive more engagement than those text-only posts.

7. Ask for Feedback

App pushes are good not only for delivering information but also for collecting customer feedback. So, employ these for running short surveys, asking for reviews and ratings, and inviting users to initiate a chat. 

8. Test & Improve

A/B test your in-app message to find the most successful notification. At the same time, you are testing change just a single variant at a time. Also, you can choose among variants like CTA, text, image, placement, etc. 

Examples of successful app push notification campaigns 

1. Snapchat sends app push notifications for new user orientation

Snapchat, an American multimedia messaging app, walks its new users through its app usage with its in-app notifications. Also, this familiarises users with the app’s layout and helps them navigate through and use the app easily. 

2. CashFlow’s in-app notifications help users discover new features. 

CashFlow, an app facilitating a real or virtual movement of money, is quite feature-rich. So, it sends notifications to enable users to discover its range of features. So, This promotes user engagement with the app. 

3. Delicious sends customized offers to lapsing customers.

Delicious, a food app, sends suitable customized offers for dormant retargeting customers. Also, this helps in retaining inactive customers and boosting engagement. 

4. Spotify sends app push notifications for cross-selling 

Spotify, a digital music service, sends in-app notifications to its users for cross-selling. So, allowing them to skip six songs per hour, it encourages them to upgrade to a premium account.

It also integrates its premium feature into the user experience. so, this enables users to comprehend the way it would benefit them. 

5. Amazon makes important announcements through app push

Amazon delights its users by sending the right information at the right time through in-app notifications. So, this instance sends a message about its new feature and lets them know how they would benefit from it. 

6. USA TODAY asks for feedback with in-app notifications

USA TODAY, an internationally distributed American daily middle-market newspaper, sends out in-app notifications asking for feedback. It sends it out right after certain user experiences so that a high percentage of users give their reviews. 

Rounding it all up

App push notifications with personalized and contextual messages are sent for various purposes to engage users and enhance their experience. So, these are great for reaching your users with the right message at the right time.

However, you need to employ the best practices for creating your campaigns; else, you will end up annoying and disturbing them.

If done properly, these digital marketing strategies can be highly fruitful and help you engage and retain your customers. I hope our app push notifications guide was useful in this regard.