How to send better push notifications — the complete guide to push notifications

Push is a big channel for retention and engagement for mobile apps. In this post i’ll talk about the best practices for push notifications and the metrics to be considered when measuring the impact of push on your overall app growth.

Topics to be covered:

1. Constraints on mobile — designing better push notifications
2. Common failures of push — what’s the optimal number of pushes?
3. Simple steps to improve push notifications
4. Measuring push notifications — metrics for push notification

Among the constraints when designing for mobile one of the major ones is divided attention. So we’re usually doing 5–6 things when we’re using our mobile phone so it’s really important that the message is short and clear. The other important point to be considered is that we’re constantly on the move. Hence it’s difficult for a user to act immediately on a notification.

Let me elaborate this a bit more.

Here’s an example of dorm-room debbie crossing the busy street with a latte in her hand when she gets a push notification from her library app.

So which of the following push notifications would be most useful?

The first notification provides you with an alert however in the middle of a busy street there’s little one can do about it. Also we’re so constrained for time and bombarded with notifications so there’s a small chance that I’m going to act on it right away.

The 2nd option provides more information however the 3rd option really kills it. It let’s to extend the validity of the book or allows you to navigate to maps if you want to figure out how to reach the library. Nicely done, won’t you say?

Below are a few examples of a few apps that do notifications well.

This notification from Medium does 3 things:

1. Provides a quick overview of the article — see how they emphasize the author name and picture.
2. Bookmark — Save the article to be read later. Note that this option is on the right since most people are right handed (Paying attention to handedness).
3. Recommend — This action recommends/favorites the article resulting in an increased reach for the article. Medium here has preferred ‘Recommend’ over the share feature usually found in news app notifications.

.Let’s check Gradestack — an app which helps you take courses online.

1. Pros: Provides actions to save the notification to be viewed later. Also lovely icon.
2. Cons: Generic messaging which fails to grasp user attention. A better idea would be to use the information for ‘interests’ captured while on-boarding to suggest a particular course in demand.

Some of the content for this article(the debbie example!) has drawn from the fabulous Udacity course UX Design for Android Developers.

Making it visual also helps bring it to the user’s attention.

As Anand points out in his post unsubscribing a push notification is too much work for a user who has really low real-estate on his app. Currently with the large number of apps installed, my mobile screen looks something like this.

Personalize, Personalize, Personalize.

A lot has been said about personalization and how it helps you get the best out of push notifications. However the quintessential product manager in me tells me that one always has to find a balance between effort and results.

So let’s set out with the easy ones -

1. Control the default configuration for push
2. Make it easy to control turn on/off pushes.
3. Push notifications for logged-in users
4. Geo-location specific push notifications

Default push configuration:

Android Marshmallow will change this significantly with upfront permissions for each activity however for now we should put a lot of thought into the default configuration for push notifications categories/frequency. We can allow the user to opt-in to particular categories for push for a news app.

Make it easy for the user to turn on/off push notifications.

Here’s an example of MakemyTrip which makes it impossible for the user to turn off push-notifications.

Push notifications for logged-in users.

As I said earlier, personalized notifications are the best. Go a step-ahead and use information already available to do better.

Get Dinesh’s stories in your inbox

Example an push from Makemytrip for a trip would be -

Dinesh, your Jet Airways flight to Delhi departs in 2 hrs 30 min.

Dinesh, your Jet Airways flight to Delhi has been delayed by 2 hrs.

In the next article, I would explain how to send personalized push notifications using the push service of your choice.

Let people sleep!

Unless there’s an apocalypse coming there’s no need to disturb a user at 2.00 am! Also delay your push notifications to be sent a while after network is restored — need to check how to do this, just an idea currently!

Segmentation: Each user is different

Each user is different. Based on the response to push notifications, we can add a user to different segments/buckets to change his frequency/quality of push notifications.

E-commerce companies these days send a lot of promotional offers. Based on the action on consecutive promotional offers, we can limit the frequency of push messages.

Please note that sometimes a user reads the notification but doesn’t perform an action since it’s self explanatory — so a left swype is not always bad. However no action on an offer denotes ‘not interested’

Measure impact of push notifications — essential metrics

Now that we’ve considered the best practices for push notification, let’s look into some of the metrics to be considered for push notifications.

An app open isn’t the only metric to be considered when measuring the effect of push notifications. With Android adopting the lock-screen notifications, a lot of users swype the notification after reading it in the lock-screen.

Push notification attribution

To understand the success of your campaign, it’s required to tie pushes with goals inside your app. Tie campaigns to only most important goals to avoid noise.

Goals for a news application:

1. Read — article open in the app
2. Share — share from the notification window
3. Read and share — article opened and then shared
4. Read and bookmark — article opened and then bookmarked

Examples:

A news app might record an event each time a user shares a story on social media. (Is the content deep-linked from notifications relevant to users?)

A retail app might record an event each time a user makes a purchase following a promotional message. (Did app revenue increase in response to a “Sale” notification?).

Currently there are 2 ways of attribution:

1. Direct: Events that occur during app sessions after open from a notification.
2. Indirect: Events that occur when the app is opened without interacting with a notification and within 12 hours of a notification’s delivery.

Your push service provider might add some marketing terminology like ‘assisted opens’ but we can ignore it for now.

Snap-shot of opt-in/opt-out status

If you have enabled an opt-in for your app, you can track the number of users who’re changing the status on a daily basis.

Do push notifications lead to uninstalls?

The most important question on every app-developer/product manager’s mind is ‘Are push notifications leading to app uninstalls?’

Looking at the number of devices uninstalled daily, we can get an idea if push notifications are causing more uninstalls. Please note that we only know a device is uninstalled when we try to ping the device again and GCM returns a response.

How do we know if a device is uninstalled?

If a user uninstalls your app the next time you send a push to that device, you get a feedback from the platform push service(GCM). There are two ways to ping devices to check for uninstalls:

1. Via a standard push message (iOS & Android)
2. Via a background push, using the Content Available flag (iOS7+ only)

For option one, after sending a push to a device that has uninstalled your app, we receive feedback from GCM or APNs that the device is inactive. This method of checking for uninstalls requires that the device had push enabled, as it is dependent on sending a standard push message.

On this same note, Anand talks about how many push tokens become invalid after a while. https://growthbug.com/the-most-important-push-notification-metric-ea0aeb2c0249#.tj6380ksx This can help you figure out the time-period over which uninstalls happen.

If you found this post useful, please feel free to comment and hit RECOMMEND so that others can read it too. You can also follow me on twitter https://twitter.com/VernekarD

If you have questions, please feel free to email me at lastnamefirstname@gmail.com

In the next article i’ll talk about how to tie up push notifications with Google Analytics and how to complete the entire loop of data. Peace!