In today’s app-dominant market, nudging the users is crucial in several aspects. It can be helpful in improving retention, increasing revenue, boosting DAUs, and mobile app engagement. Push notifications are highly effective in this regard and are a reliable choice for app marketers to achieve great results. But randomly sending push notifications without a plan may do more harm than good, and that is why it is vital to follow some push notifications best practices.
With the increasing usage of push notifications, if you are not following a proper approach, there are high chances that your users will end up bombarded with both relevant and irrelevant messages on their mobiles and browsers. It is advisable to have a customized strategy according to user requirements and the nature of their business.
It is important for marketers to look for effective ways to engage their users, following some of the best practices.
Today, we will be sharing with you some do’s and don’ts while setting up the push campaigns for your users.
Do’s and Don’ts of Push Notifications: The Best Practices
Do’s
1. Effective Segmentation to deliver more value
Push notifications should be targeted to specific users as per the different requirements and scenarios. It’s essential to get your user segments right to send the push that will match the users’ needs. This is the one golden rule which can not be ignored, and it helps reduce the push opt-outs to a great extent since users are not bombarded with irrelevant notifications.
Segment your users based on their user behavior in the app/ website interactions, user profiles, and historical data so that you can eventually improve your click rate for your push notifications. Moreover, personalizing push messages always begins with a good segmentation strategy.
Read more: Ready-to-use HealthTech Push Notification Templates
2. Personalize your message
Who doesn’t love notifications addressing them with a personal touch? Adding personalization to your push notification is always a best practice. It can be addressing a user with their first name, suggesting new products based on their previous searches, or any other suggestions based on the context and historical data.
It will improve the push notifications’ response rate, and users will never feel that these are irrelevant or spam. But, always be careful while using personalized data, as data privacy is an important aspect these days. You need to ensure you follow the rules formulated by GDPR and other regulators.
3. Identify the right time to nudge
Another push notifications best practice to keep in mind while sending them is “the right time.” Find out the best time to send push messages to the users. While scheduling the campaigns, consider the geographical location of your users as well. Apart from it, observing the active sessions happening in the app/web for a given time will also help you narrow down the appropriate campaign time.
To find out what timing is the best, you can also try A/B testing your messages. Push opens from previous campaigns can also be helpful.
4. Use Rich Media
Rich notifications will allow you to incorporate images, short videos, action buttons, and icons within the notification. Since users won’t pay attention to all the push notifications, a message rich in media content will grab their attention. We can use different media types as per the business use case; for example, send a push message and the image of the latest product released on the app or add a badge icon on the push, saying you have earned a badge based on recent activity.
5. Come up with Good Content
To convey the message in a meaningful way and to keep it crisp and spot-on, one must use good content. It can be addressing the user with their names, using humor, or using some attention-grabbing text like announcing some great discounts, now or never deals, etc.
Don’ts
1. Avoid sending generic content
Sending generic content to all the users, irrespective of different segments, will reduce the push campaign’s effectiveness and cause users to feel that they are getting spammed, resulting in more push opt-outs.
2. Don’t send notifications at improper times
Nudging a user with a push notification at the wrong time will only interrupt a user. Bad timing can turn even well-crafted push notifications into a disturbance, no matter how great your message content is. Even if your users find your app helpful, poorly timed notifications can negatively affect your user retention and more inclined to abandon or uninstall the app.
3. Don’t send too many notifications
Do remember that users are receiving a lot of push notifications from other apps, also. Instead of sending too many notifications per day, aim for quality over quantity and include rich images, useful content, deep links, and emojis to achieve good performance for push notifications.
4. Don’t forget to localize your message
Although it’s applicable only if you have users in multiple geographies, addressing users in their local/preferred languages enables higher engagement. Localizing the push notifications will help attain more clicks and conversions.
Closing thoughts
Following the above-mentioned best practices will help you create an effective push notifications strategy. One crucial aspect to keep in mind while following these methods is to use the right engagement tool to execute the above vision. It is also important for brands to follow design best practices while creating push notifications.
We would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to one of the most potent omnichannel engagement and analytics tools called Upshot.ai. This revolutionary customer engagement platform is used by Fortune 1000 companies such as Amway, ITC, CBS, UHG, and Tenet Healthcare to increase user engagement, retention, and monetization dramatically.
Upshot.ai uses advanced analytics and segmentation engines to create tailored target segments. It has various options to customize the push notifications for both mobile and web. Leveraging Upshot.ai, you can create diverse push notifications like images, banners, and other styles while localizing the text for all the languages in a breeze.
Upshot.ai dashboard can tell you the users’ activity levels in an hour/day/week format so that you can identify the right time to nudge the users for different segments. Upshot.ai action reports will give you the push notifications performance results and many more insights for your next campaigns.
Also Read: Creative push notifications templates that work for any app
About Upshot.ai :
Upshot.ai is an omnichannel, user engagement, and gamification platform that helps digital product owners and marketers improve their product adoption and conversions. Fortune 1000 companies such as GE, UHG, Puma, Sony, ITC, and Tenet Healthcare are using Upshot.ai and observed a massive increase in product adoption and YoY increment in revenues.
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