Author: James Ewen

It’s time to deconstruct all the terrible advice out there around push notification best practices.

There’s an awful lot of bad advice going out around what makes the best push notifications. When it’s best to send push notifications. What message you should include in your push notification to increase mobile app engagement.

Much of this advice simply isn’t true. And it fails to consider what makes a successful app engagement strategy. Let’s look at some of the myths around push notifications and what might be the reality instead.

Push notification timing

Myth – the best time to send push notifications is between 6-8pm

Reality – the best time to send push notifications is exactly when your user gets the most value from the notification.

Of course, users are more complex than that. You might get relative success sending your notification at a certain time. but if you’re trying to effectively increase mobile app engagement, anyone telling you to send push at one time a is probably trying to oversimplify the problem.

You might say well, ‘when the user gets the most value’ – that’s hard to define. Well, you’re right. But there’s a whole range of solutions to try and find that ideal moment. Just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.

Questions in push notifications?

Myth – ask your users a question in the notification, that’ll trick them to love your app as nobody ignores a question

reality – actually this is just plain annoying and insulting to the average user.

Yes, that’s right, human beings, after many years of evolution can, in fact, resist the urge to answer every question that’s thrown at them. A mobile engagement strategy should seek to do more than trick people into engagement.

What people should say when suggesting questions as push notifications is – sometimes it makes sense to ask your users a question – as long as it is in the right micro-moment.

Push notification visuals

Myth – images and GIFs improve retention and engagement

Reality – value > moving images.

Whilst it has been said that some GIFs are insanely engageable, that doesn’t mean that your notification will receive 95% engagement because it has a moving cat on it.

Once again, the key to a better mobile app engagement strategy is relevancy. If your overall message sucks or is not relevant then no matter what visual you send with it, you’ll get terrible engagement.

How to personalize push notification strategy

Myth – Personalisation means addressing someone by name.

Reality – Push notification best practices to include historical, behavioural based personalization.

Woooooahhhh. I just got a notification with my name in it. How did it know? What a smart app. I’ll continue using it forever. – said nobody ever.

Using historical behavioural data, both in-app and in the real world are much better ways to personalize your push notifications and app engagement strategy. I’d much rather receive a notification that’s relevant without my name in than one that is addressed to me but serves no purpose.

Push notification KPIs

Myth – open rates are the most important of the app engagement metrics.

Reality – Vanity metric

Whilst notification open rates can be suggestive of positive engagement you have to look at the purpose of your push strategy. Some apps benefit when the notification is the message.

I don’t know about you but I want my push notifications to tell me everything I need to know concisely and give me the choice to dig deeper whilst simultaneously providing with justification for downloading the app in the first place. 🤔

Open rates are a controversial subject when considered as a part of a mobile app engagement strategy. It’s important to get as much data as possiblearound engagement and use this to understand if your metrics are truly representative of strong app engagement.

Communicating with your users

Myth – users want to know about new features and products

Reality – users don’t want to know about relevant products

Just because you think your new app feature is great doesn’t mean that all your users want to know about it. Reserve your notifications for essential, engaging content. Remember, in-app communication and effective onboarding are also part of a successful app engagement strategy and can be used to communicate new features and updates.

Conclusion

Many apps out there are doing amazing jobs of boosting app engagement with effective push notification strategies.

Fine tune your push notification strategy to focus on exactly what your user’s needs are. Communicate in a relevant way and ensure that you always put the user first.

Use data and insights to understand your push notification strategy and look at multiple KPIs to understand what’s right for your mobile app engagement strategy.

The best products and services to to leverage data and app analytics to create better mobile apps.

Without users, you wouldn’t have an app. At least you wouldn’t have an app that functioned as a business.

That’s why it’s so important to listen to your mobile users and understand how they use your mobile app. There are some mobile app analytics fundamentals you’ll need to understand if you want to create an effective mobile business.

There are some key metrics to measure if you have a mobile app. It’s crucial to get accurate in-app analytics around these in order to create a scalable mobile business.

The key mobile app analytic metrics are:

• New user acquisition
• App retention
• App engagement & experience
• Revenue

Every app is different and will look to focus on some of these KPIs more than others. Part of using data to inform your app business strategy involves learning which of these will benefit your app the most.

Here’s a look at some of the best app analytics tools out there to get started with. Whilst there’s no such thing as the best mobile analytics platform, a combination of a few of these will help you on your way to a successful mobile app.

Mobile app user acquisition

Data around user acquisition is the first stop in our break-down of app analytics strategy. You need to understand how users discover your app and what percentage of app impressions are being converted into downloads. App store analytics are the starting point for any serious app owner.

This is the first step to understanding exactly how mobile users view your app and a great opportunity to leverage data to improve your conversion.

Without in-depth analytics around user acquisition, you will have no idea how effective your app marketing budget is. If you don’t know exactly how effective you are at acquiring new app users then you can forecast your app monetization strategy.

User acquisition insights are usually spread across multiple different sources. This can make it difficult and time-consuming to see the whole app user acquisition story.

App acquisition solutions

Apple app analytics platform – If you have an iOS version of your mobile app then there’s not much better for rich data insights that the Apple app analytics platform. It’s free with the developer program membership. It’s really out shadowed by other solutions when looking at in-app analytics but to learn how users are adopting your app over time, but when looking at acquisition it an extremely useful tool.

Of course, that’s not too helpful if your app is only on iOS.

Apsalar – Has some good features including the ability to see the ROI of user acquisition campaigns.

What you’ll learn with data: Web traffic, app store impressions, downloads by time and date.

App analytics insights: App store conversion rates, target audiences, and referrers.

App retention

Once you’ve gained some insights around app acquisition (and hopefully devised a plan to improve it) you’ll want to keep those app users in your app. This is known as your mobile app retention strategy. Understanding app retention and how to improve it is crucial if you want to create an app that leaves your users happy and retains users effectively.

For this, you need to get valuable app analytics around app user retention. Understanding when users leave or delete your app is key to creating a scalable app business.

It’s also important for you to understand why certain app retention patterns are occurring for your app. Sometimes the basic data doesn’t seem to outline any clear motive.

Understanding your users and getting inside their heads is key to creating an effective retention strategy.

That’s why you need to add multiple data sets to your app retention model. Where they use your app and patterns around where users are deleting your app.

Retention app analytics solutions

Mixpanel – A nice platform that allows you define custom events and measure retention against these. One of the best mobile app analytics platforms for measuring retention.

Amplitude – emphasis on behavioural cohorts to really break down how your app retention strategy is working.

What you’ll learn: Retention, user churn, churn location.

App analytics insights: Why users are deleting your app. Retention strategy.

App engagement

To engage your app users you must have an effective mobile engagement strategy in place. More often than not this will need to include an effective push notification strategy.

The reason that push notifications are important as part of a mobile app strategy is that they can provide incredibly useful insights around how your app functions and how users engage with it.

The more detail you put into the push notification strategy the better your app engagement data that comes from it, and the level of app analytics insights you’ll get in return.

It’s great to have information about how your user uses each interface inside of your app. The next step is looking at where your users engage with your app.

Understanding accurate app engagement metrics are fundamental to building an effective mobile app engagement strategy.

Let’s look at an example – engaging your users in a specific moment.

A strategy such as this is great at increasing mobile app engagement, but the thing that’s even more powerful for apps is using data around the app engagement moment to learn about your users and how they want to interact with your app.

There are a few different mobile app analytics platforms that provide you with data around app engagement:

App engagement solutions

Tamoco – Takes engagement insights one step further by adding precise location to the above. Location is a relevant insight for app users because it allows you to understand in which location engagement is best and in which moment your users are most engaged. It’s all available in a nice platform with a mobile app analytics SDK to boot.

Universal Analytics (Google) – For a general overview of app engagement, there’s not much better than Universal analytics. Best of all is the price – but, it offers reliable stats to measure the effectiveness of your engagement strategy. It’s a great starting point for all app developers to have in their business strategy.

What you’ll learn: Communication engagement, time of engagement, location of engagement.

App analytic insights: when, how and where your users are most engaged with your mobile app.

Mobile user experience

Understanding micro-moments with accurate data.

For apps that were to succeed it’s crucial that they make the distinction between engagement and experience. They will also have to find ways to measure both effectively. It’s an important part of an app analytics strategy to be able to measure this separately to engagement.

However, app experience and mobile user experience can be subjective and therefore difficult to measure in a traditional app analytics platform.

You must think about many parts of your app’s strategy in order to create the best mobile user experience, as it encompasses many different factors.

As data is the single most important thing you can use to back up your app business strategy, it’s important to learn what contributes towards a positive app experience.

This involves hypothesizing (based on any data that you might already have) and then measuring and adapting with mobile application analytic tools. Let’s look at some examples of hypothetical positive app experiences.

A fitness app that understands where users like to work out and suggest recommendations. Also, can avoid potential risks by monitoring route etc

Booking app using location history to suggest much better experience. And understand where the users use the app to find these. The solving problem before users reaches the micro-moment.

In these two examples, it seems to be quite difficult to measure the success of these experiences. But what we can do is to use engagement and retention figures and combine this with other data sets and qualitative insights to get a better idea of your app experience.

One solution is looking at direct videos of user experience and matching this up to patterns in-app deletion.

Another involves looking at the real-world location in which apps are being engaged with most and where they are losing users.

App experience solutions

Appsee – lets you record real user sessions so that you can identify the reason for engagement patterns. Also has some nice heat maps.

Localytics – Also has good heat maps function to allow you to pinpoint where experience is increasing/dropping off.

What you’ll learn: Where micro-moments occur.

App analytics insights: New features, Retention strategy

In-app monetization

If you want to create an app that functions as a business then you’ll need accurate app analytics, insights and forecasts around app monetization.

Which insights you’ll need here depends on your app monetization strategy. There are many app monetization challenges, but some will be more relevant to your business.

If you have a mobile app monetization strategy that is based on delivering mobile ads to your users, then you’ll need a platform with in-depth insights around ad delivery, CPM, and impressions vs clicks.

If your app monetization takes the form of in-app purchases then it’s important to look beyond revenue. Can you find a app abalytics solution that shows you the optimal moment that your user is likely to purchase your service or digital goods? If you can understand how this kind of in-app monetization works then this will be the key to boosting app revenue.

App data monetization is another app monetization strategy that can deliver high revenue for apps. Platforms include dynamic CPM pricing based on your where your audience is most active. This allows you to forecast your revenue accurately and helps you to understand where to invest your app marketing budget to best improve your bottom line.

App monetization solutions

Universal analytics – Allows you to track revenue and in-app purchases.

Mixpanel – has a nice revenue tracking feature.

Tamoco – Allows you to monetize without ads and track your revenue by app, location, user and more.

What you’ll learn: Revenue, CPM, User value, app monetization best practices.

App analytics insights: Forecasts, marketing allocation, which kind of user is most valuable to your app business.

Conclusion

• Data is the most important thing to hypothesize, measure and test your app business model.
• There are many platforms that you’ll need to paint a complete picture.
• Data is effective in measuring how users find and download your app.
• An effective app retention strategy leverages user data.
• Engagement can be quantified and this is helpful to hypothesize.
• In-app monetization will benefit from data. Use it to understand how to improve your revenue.

Do you make the most of in app analytics? Have you got a reliable data strategy to inform your app’s business decisions?

Everything you need to know about using push notifications to boost app engagement.

Mobile push notifications form a crucial part of any app engagement strategy. To keep your audience engaged and improve retention you’ll need to communicate with your users. There’s no better way to do this than mobile push.

Investing time and money into a push notification strategy is vital for apps that want to keep their users engaged. But, you must be savvy about when and how you send them.

Let’s say your mobile app has 100,000 downloads. On average after just one day you can expect your audience retention rate to be around 20%. After ten days this figure drops to 7.5%. After ninety days this figure, for most mobile apps, falls to around 2%.

That’s why you need an effective mobile app engagement strategy that includes valuable in-app notifications.

What is a mobile push notification?

A mobile push notification is an app engagement solution that delivers a notification to the home screen of an app user. This notification is delivered based on specific targeting criteria.

Targeting criteria has developed significantly since the origins of push notifications. Using customer retention tools apps can now adopt a mobile app push notification strategy that provides high ROI and significantly improves app engagement.”

A push notification strategy forms a crucial part of improving app engagement. It’s an effective way to boost engagement when applied correctly.

KPIs that lead to engagement

When sending push notifications there’s a few key KPIs that you’ll want to look at. It’s important to ask yourself – which aspects of my app engagement strategy am I trying to improve with these notifications?

• Number of active users
• Retention rate
• Session length
• Session rates

You must keep these in mind when considering your push notification strategy.

Around 70% of users opt-in for push notifications

Push notifications almost double app retention rates

But actually, as impressive as these statistics are, there is much room for improvement. One look at your phone and you realise how bad apps actually are at communicating with you via push notifications. This only serves to demonstrate the opportunity for the apps can take their app push notification strategy to the next level.

Providing an opt-in experience

The best push notification strategies include a sound opt-in experience for the mobile app user. Notifications do distract users from their daily routines. Therefore, your users must expect this to happen from the first moment they open your app.

The last thing that you’ll want to do is annoy your users. That’s why it’s important to explain your push notification strategy. You only have one chance to get this right. Explain your push notification strategy badly and none of your users will opt-in. Lack clarity and your users won’t be happy when they receive notifications they weren’t expecting.

A note on spam

One of the worst things that you can do is to spam your users with push notifications. The entire point of this article is to help you to craft a push notification strategy that puts the user experience at the forefront.

Mindlessly spamming your users will lead to huge disengagement – despite many push notification services saying otherwise.

Remember that everything you do with your app and everything that you want to achieve should create value for the app users. Fundamentally this is the best way to think when creating any kind of mobile strategy.

Relevancy is key

That leads me on very nicely to relevancy in push notification strategies. Whether you’re sending ios push notifications or android push notifications, you need to think about one important factor – relevancy.

This involves understanding your app users. A good push notification service will deliver you with valuable insights around your app users each time you push to them. This way you can very quickly build up a complex persona of what your user wants and how they interact with your app. But more on that later.

Relevancy means communicating with your users in the best possible micro-moment.

That means delivering push notifications only when it is relevant for the user. Place your user experience at the center of everything you do. Figure out the optimal micro-moment, and ensure that notifications are only used at these relevant times.

There are multiple methods of figuring out what these moments are for your users. But the best way is using data.

The more complex your push strategy is – that is the more powerful the targeting options, the more powerful the app insights that you’ll get from the service.

Personalisation and location-based push

So, before we look at specific examples, let’s look at how you can create the best push notification strategy. Along with the individual targeting options that help create the optimal user experience.

Notification timing

One of the most important things to consider when creating your push notification strategy. App engagement strategies have developed beyond only asking when the best time of day to send push notifications.

One of the quickest ways to lose users is by annoying them with notifications when they don’t want to receive them. It sounds obvious but so many apps get this wrong.

That’s why it’s important to understand the best moment to reach your users. App developers must also choose a service that allows you to fine-tune push notification delivery.

As mentioned, we’re not just talking about the time of day. Whilst it’s a fundamental way to tailor delivery it’s just the beginning of getting the timing right.

Here’s a classic example of a personalized push notification. But to engage you app users in 2017 you’ll need to do better.

Timing includes location. Timing a notification to deliver when the user is a specific situation allows you to engage on a personal level, and ensure that you maintain communication effectiveness.

It’s in these micro-moments that you’ll be able to create value for your mobile app users, keep them engaged and improve the app experience.

Of course, it may take a little while to understand which are the best moments to reach your users. That’s why testing exists. Eventually, you’ll learn the perfect timing for your push notification strategy.

Segmentation

It’s important to choose which users should receive your notifications. Don’t just blindly send notifications to your entire audience as in the example above. Improving mobile engagement requires you to be savvy about who receives them. The better your segmentation capabilities, the better your push notification strategy will be.

This means segmenting your users based on how they have previously responded to push. It also includes how they use your app or services. Most push notification delivery tools allow you to do this.

If you want to take this even further (and you should), then you can segment your audience based on their historical location or behavior. But essentially, this allows you to reach the users that are most likely to engage with your push notifications.

Once you get to this level of user segmentations you can ensure that you deliver push notifications to relevant users. Not only will this reduce the number of annoyed users, it will also help you to create tailored communication with the users that you do target. Improving the user retention and keeping your mobile app users engaged!

Frequency

How often should you send notifications as part of an effective strategy? As a general rule of thumb, less is more until you have a sound understanding of your users and exactly how your app functions.

You should be searching for a push notification service provider that allows you to create a push strategy with frequency caps. Push notification delivery limits based on location is even better.

Push notification frequency largely depends on the type of app. If it’s an app in which the average user doesn’t spend a lot of time then it will be counterproductive to send notifications frequently. You’d be much better off understanding exactly the right moment to communicate, segment your users as much and possible and personalize the message to boost engagement and revenue.

If you have a shopping, lifestyle or similar app then it is understandable that you would be communicating with them more regularly. But that’s not an excuse to take advantage. Ultimately the best app push notification strategies prioritize quality over quantity. They understand exactly how often to push to their users.

Deep linking

This all become pretty worthless if you don’t think about where you want your user to end up inside your app. The relevant function in your app should open from the notification

This is where you can be creative and provide an experience that makes sense based on the content that you have in the push notification. You can get really smart and personalize the experience even further by using different endpoints for different user segments.

Ultimately think about deep linking and ensure that your push notification service provider can adapt to specific requests and end points. Make sure that you push notification service allows you to be flexible around deep linking as a minimum requirement. Insights around push notifications and mobile user experience

Your mobile app engagement strategy and your push notification strategy should influence each other. Understanding how can be difficult unless you get into the data mindset.

You can learn a lot about your app users by sending them notifications. If the targeting criteria are highly specific then the insights that you’ll generate from the push notification campaign will also be specific.

Precise data sets mean that you can adapt and learn as you develop your push notification model. As you learn more about your users you’ll understand how to boost engagement even further. Mobile app testing and learning is the key to any marketing strategy and it’s no different for push notifications.

The insights you’ll gain from communicating and engaging with your users will extend to other aspects of your app strategy as well as helping you to improve the mobile user experience.

The future of in-app communication

Push notifications are more than just a pop-up on your phone. If you don’t abuse the trust that your users give you then they can be an extremely valuable tool to improve app engagement.

User engagement should be at the top of every developer’s priority list. Ensuring that your mobile app audience gets the most relevant notifications in the best possible micro-moment builds trust with users and can have far-reaching benefits into other aspects of your mobile app strategy.

Conclusion – An in-app notification checklist for app developers

• Your opt-in experience is just as important as your push notification experience.
• Put your user first and understand how they use your app
• Relevancy is the most important factor when choosing a strategy
• Choose a push notification provider that allows you to leverage location into your strategy. The right mobile engagement platform can make a huge difference to results.
• Think post notification click.
• Data and insights are your best friend. Learn and grow.