In brief
Use push notifications to build engagement: reserve vibration for urgent matters, match timing to users’ routines, and direct users to the pages they expect. Assess your strategy through permission rates, uninstall rates, and responses per 100 notifications.
Smartphones have been around for nearly 10 years, yet founders of technology companies still describe mobile development as the least mature area. Among mobile technologies, push notifications have the greatest potential for growth. Build your push notification strategy around the following principles.
Acquiring new users
An app can offer only a limited number of features, and you have to rely on users discovering those features the first time they use it. Mobile app development faces its biggest obstacle in acquiring new users. There are strategies to address this problem: effective in-app marketing, social channels, SEM (search engine marketing) and SEO (search engine optimization). However, getting users to form a habit is even harder than attracting new users.
If users become tired of your push notifications, you face three possible outcomes: they may allow only selected apps to keep sending notifications, turn off push notifications altogether, or uninstall your app.
How can you assess your push notification strategy? Use these three measures: 1. The proportion of users who grant permission for push notifications; 2. The uninstall rate; 3. The rate of user responses per 100 push notifications.
Managing the novelty effect
After receiving push notifications they dislike, users generally take no action for a month, such as changing their settings or uninstalling the app. There is a threshold at which their irritation outweighs the inconvenience of uninstalling it.
Always keep three questions in mind: how to send notifications, when to send them, and where to direct users
Push notifications serve one purpose: increasing user engagement. Drawing on years of professional experience, here are some details that deserve particular attention:
Enable vibration only in the most urgent situations
Experience shows that enabling vibration is one of the riskiest choices. If you enable vibration and users discover that the notification concerns something trivial, they may become irritated enough to uninstall your app. Consider an urgent situation—for example, when someone is about to miss a flight, or a colleague sends a message requiring further action. In those circumstances, vibration can make users see your app as a very useful tool. In general, people check their phones 70–100 times a day, so messages are usually read within about 15 minutes of being pushed.
Work with users’ body clocks
The timing of push notifications matters. Although there is no clear rule about the best time to send them, could you pause to consider how users spend their day? Do not send notifications while users are asleep: you may wake them, or leave them facing a phone full of notifications when they get up. Also consider the content you are sending. News notifications will certainly work well in the morning, and notifications sent during the commute to or from work will also attract plenty of readers. You can adjust your notification schedule by observing user engagement. Personalization makes a considerable difference and demonstrates your understanding of users. 」
Look at push notifications from an Uber perspective.
Suppose you ask an Uber driver to take you to a particular shop on New York’s Lower East Side, but the driver drops you off on some street in Manhattan. Would you be happy? Obviously not! Many startups forget this point. Users will click your notifications, but if the page you take them to differs from what they expect, they will roll their eyes the next time you send one. For this very reason, many e-commerce apps, afraid of getting it wrong, generally send users notifications directing them to the homepage rather than a specific product or page.
http://www.hksilicon.com/articles/1175765