Mobile marketers love push notification campaigns. Could there be anything more exciting than the opportunity to send messages to millions of consumers, right onto a device that they carry with them all day?
Unfortunately, that’s also a pretty decent summary of why consumers are entitled to have somewhat different feelings about the same subject! Let’s be honest, we’ve all suffered at the hands of one too many untargeted, irrelevant and indeed downright annoying push notification.
Does that matter? For mobile marketers, the answer is unambiguous: yes it does. If there’s one thing marketers need to understand about push, it is this:
The negative consequences of poor push notification performance go far beyond ineffective marketing, and in the worst case scenario extend all the way to killing off otherwise successful apps.
Why is that? Simple - consumers won’t go to the trouble of carefully removing push notification opt-ins from your app: they will simply delete it. That being the case, it’s important to use push notifications wisely and deliver great campaigns that users love (rather than awful ones that they detest!)
To help you do that, we recently wrote a whitepaper sharing the secrets behind successful push campaigns. After all, our customer success team have worked with some of the world’s smartest and most successful app companies, and we’ve seen a good few push campaigns in our time - so we know what we’re talking about.
Our first tip is simple - and has been covered previously on this blog. If you want to send effective push, you first need to have an audience to send campaigns to. So maximize opt-in rates. Here’s how to do that:
- Wait until users are familiar with your app before requesting a push opt-in. The reasons to do this are obvious: it’s when you are a trusted entity and the user feels comfortable with your service that they are more likely to say ‘yes’ to push. But of course exactly when to ask isn’t simply a matter of delaying as long as possible. App attrition being what it is, the longer you delay the fewer people you are asking! Ideally you would test alternatives: we’ve found the start of the third session to be a good starting point.
- Deliver a ‘two-step’ opt-in process. Users are significantly more likely to opt-in to receive notifications if you first show an in-app messages that explains why you are asking them and what’s in it for them. Look at the example from Uber below. It both explains why you should opt-in, but also appears at a relevant point in the app - when the user is being asked how they would like to receive confirmations. The result is some of the highest opt-in rates in the business.
That’s just one way to start improving your push campaign effectiveness. If you want the full set, download the whitepaper now!
