Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/3023016/fast-feed/foursquares-smart-push-notifications-roll-out-on-ios
Acquiring users for your app might be seen as the most challenging problems for app owners. However, what you should remember is that increasing app retention is as crucial as user acquisition. While having an awesome app is an important step to ensure this, different ways like app deep linking have an enormous effect on this. Push notifications are one of these ways to increase app retention. The main question here is: How? How can you get benefit from push notifications to increase user retention?
Here are the best practices for push notifications:
Don’t Bore Users With Over Do
Showing your users that you care about them is good but it should have a limit. If you overdo it, it might be the main reason of your decreasing app retention. Don’t forget that people don’t only use your app and they overwhelmed from irrelevant push notifications. If you should send notifications to notify about likes, friend requests, comments, or some other things like that, you should give people the chance to manage the notifications as they wish.
Segmentation is Important
According to a research conducted by Localytics, conversation is 3x more than generic notifications. You need to know your users according to their behavior. It will give you the strength to direct them as you wish. Segment them in the most meaningful way: The ones who do not open the app last 15 days, The ones who do not tweet last 30 days etc. When you segment your users wisely, you can easily optimize your push notifications to send them meaningful messages.
Personalization is the King
People tend to show different reactions for the same messages. If your notifications don’t contain any personalized item, it bores them. Using your users’ name, their interest, their action and more helps you show that you know them. However, using big data needs a smart algorithm to avoid such situations below!
Number of Words Count
Your push notifications should be to the point. Stay away from boring your users with unexcitingly long notifications. According to research, push notifications which has less than 128 character limit have higher click-through rate. What you need to do is being clear and concise to attract people.
Timing is Everything
The winning push notifications are the ones which sent in the right time, in the right place and with the right content. One of the first things you should optimize for is sending your push notifications at exactly the right time! When they arrived airport, when the TV show they like had started, you should be there. It makes your users happy and build trust about being on time.
Watch Your Competitors
Competitors can easily give you insight and even a brilliant idea about your push notifications. See what they are doing and try to benchmark to find the best solutions. It may sound weird but they can be your best idea generators.
Don’t Forget A/B Testing
The best way to find the most effective version of a specific push notification is analyzing it. Benchmarks between the different alternatives of the same segment notifications give you the data-based reality. Do this for different notifications with different segments and conduct these tests repeatedly.
