Whip up the best push
  notification strategy

Recipe 1:

Segment...or burn

This may sound a bit drastic, but the downside to not segmenting? Uninstalls. And without installs, your app can no longer make revenue.

Gone are the days when you can send a bland blanket push notification, spam, or blast your users and expect them to stick around. It’s not even enough to separate users out by gender. You really have to spend time spicing up campaigns by segmenting users. Users are more likely to convert on an offer or notification when it’s targeted to them as compared to a general one.

Here’s what you'll need.

1. Location data gives you information for where the user is located. This helps you send appropriate offers based on country, state, or city information, and keeps you from sending offers to users who don’t qualify for offers based on their location.

2. Behavioral segmentation allows you to separate users based on what they are doing in the app. For instance, you can categorize users by how often they use the app, how many in-app purchases they have made, how many push notifications they have opened, how long it’s been since they opened the app, etc. There are many ways to slice and dice the categories depending on your objectives.

3. Device characteristics, such as OS version, OS type, screen size, language, or whether push is enabled, provide information to be able to send an optimal push notification. Other uses include targeting by device and asking users to update their app because there is a bug in the current version. Consider segmenting users who have disabled push notifications, as that gives you the opportunity to target them through a different channel, such as email or social media.

4. CRM data can provide you with information such as age, engagement rate, which marketing campaigns they have been a part of and how they interacted, geography, and much more. Being clued into your CRM platform and data will make segmentation much easier. For instance, if you have a music streaming app like Pandora, you can see how many songs specific users are listening to and which ones they are. Ride sharing services like Uber can segment by user rating. Sports apps like ESPN can get information about users’ favorite sports teams.

Once you’ve segmented, look at retention over the first 30, 60, and 90 days and adjust your strategy accordingly. Maybe you notice that a segment of users drop just before 30 days. Consider sending users a push notification with an offer to sweeten the deal and get proactively get them back into the app before they drop in usage.

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Recipe 2:

Set limits for your messaging

An effective push strategy has both transaction and engagement-based messages running full-steam. One issue to plan for is over-messaging users.

If you have a dashboard of 20 campaigns planned out, you may be worried to send users more messages in fear of annoying them. To dodge this issue, in your platform, set a designated maximum number of messages a user can receive in a given day, week, and month. That way, if they receive more transactional notifications than you expect, they won’t be bombarded with the engagement-based ones marketers have sent out. Having these parameters is like guardrails to make sure your push notification plan doesn’t crash and burn by over-engaging or annoying users. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all number for how many messages is “too many,”.

The two biggest things to keep in mind are:

1. Be realistic: A healthcare or insurance app does not need to message users every day because people aren’t in those apps every day. But a shopping or travel app with many deals and offers and many daily active users could send more push notifications. Sending less frequent but more quality and targeted messages is a strong and smart game plan.

2. Be creative: Find the optimal time to send to users. We don’t mean between 5-8 p.m. when everyone is home after work (everyone knows that one). Think in the bigger context of your average user’s life. For example, if you run push for a sports ticketing app and want to sell tickets to the next Seahawks game, the optimal time to message users about it isn’t when they are in their app after work one random day. Segment users who have shown their interest in the Seahawks by their previous behavior in the app, such as looking at those tickets. Send those users a message about the game about a week before. Serve the message during the day to get the wheels turning and thinking about the game, and message the user again during happy hour about how few tickets are left to create urgency to purchase.

Note that there are exceptions to setting limits. Sometimes, you may have campaigns that you do not want to limit. If you have priority messages you want to go out, it’s important to have a system that can accommodate a variety of rules and configurations and is as flexible as your campaigns.

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Recipe 3:

Hand-pick from content marketing books

Just like push notifications, content marketing is a relatively new concept in the marketing world.

Content marketing is about writing pieces that are easy to understand, add value to the customer, are authentic, engaging, and have a call-to-action.

They do not take a hard-sell approach when speaking to customers. Instead, content marketing is about building up trust long before customers become your customers, so that when they eventually begin evaluating solutions or brands, yours immediately stands out on top.

These same tactics are helpful when applied to push notifications. Here are how to add some flavor to regular push notifications.

Example 1: A shopping app targeting a user who has recently purchased a pair of jeans.

Poor message: Jeans are now buy one get one free. Stock up on more now!

Why it doesn’t work: The user’s most recent purchase was jeans, and they didn’t get one pair for free. That message isn’t adding value to the customer and could give them buyers’ remorse along with mistrust that the app doesn’t follow what the user is up to. It’s not uncommon to hear of push notifications or targeted ads being sent to users on discounts for an item they recently purchased. This reflects poor or non-existent targeting. Cue uninstall.

Better message: How are those new jeans? Slide to buy a jacket to finish the look.

Why it works: In this message, the user sees that the company is aware of his/her actions, in a non-creepy way. By prompting them to purchase a jacket to go along with the jeans, the message is easy to use, and when they open the notification, they will be sent directly to the jackets page in the app.

Example 2: A fitness app targeting users who have not recently been back in the app during the holiday season.

Poor message: It’s the holidays! Work off the excess turkey and desserts.

Why it doesn’t work: This could be argued as being authentic or motivational, but shaming someone into using your app isn’t the emotion you want users to associate with your app. Instead, focus on the benefit of using the app to the users, not the drawback if they don’t.

What to send instead: The holidays are busy — here’s a quick, 10-minute workout you can do anywhere, anytime.

Why it works: It empathizes with the user’s daily life and schedule. The holidays are filled with travel and time spent with family. By acknowledging those humanistic characteristics, the user is more likely to open the notification or save it for when they are in a time-bind and wishing for a quick workout.

Example 3: A travel app promoting winter sales.

Poor message: Holiday deals are here!

Why it doesn’t work: This message is nonspecific and doesn’t have a call-to-action. If the user opens the app, they are not guaranteed that the sale will be from their home airport or to a destination they’d like to go to.

Great message: Holidays deals are here! Finish buying that trip to Hawaii with a 30% discount applied right now.

Why it works: This message is clearly based on previous actions – the user was looking up flights to Hawaii and abandoned the cart before purchasing. The user understands that if the action of purchasing the tickets is completed, a 30% discount will be automatically applied, taking out the guess work of a discount code.

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Recipe 4:

Make personalization easy

Instead of constantly guessing what users want, make life a little easier for yourself by asking them.

They downloaded your app because they are interested in the product or service; help them help you make their experience as tailored as possible. Think about how you can collect valuable data from the user without annoying them. This will mean getting creative with your asks. Plan to A/B test the best locations and times to collect data points. Start with information from the onboarding flow. If you master that, you will trim the fat and have a fully-baked profile of user information before they even start using your app. Setting this foundation will give way to using advanced optimization techniques.

Facebook allows users to hand-pick what they are notified for, whether it’s a new message, friend request, comment, or other. Pinterest asks users to select categories that they want to see more of and that’s what will be in their feed and push notifications.

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Recipe 5:

Prepping for permission

The adage “don’t ask permission, ask forgiveness” doesn’t apply to push notifications.

For iOS devices, once the user denies push notifications, there’s no outlet or time to ask for forgiveness from the user. Having the user enable push notifications is a one-shot situation.

To ask permission, also known as “prime for push notifications,” means giving the user background and context for why they should allow push notifications. If a user questions why an app needs to send them messages, the marketer has failed.

Instead of immediately prompting the user to allow or not allow push notifications, set up a buffer to lower the rate of opt-outs. First, provide them with an in-app message that asks them “do you want to push on push notifications?” with context and background given. If they say no, dissolve the message and no further action is needed. If they say yes, that is when you take the shot and fire the push notification prompt, as seen below.

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Recipe 6:

Use location

It’s obvious that different parts of the country, different states, and populations in different cities have varying preferences and stances.

Think back to the 2016 U.S. presidential election — different parts of the country responded in opposite manners to the same message. A high percentage of millennials — about 84% — act on location-based notifications².

Figure out locations where your product or offer benefits users most and target to them. Don’t write “good morning” if it might not be morning where the user is located. If you’re running an in-store promotion for a store based in London, set the location to users in London, or within 10-15 miles. Do research and see how far people commute into the city on average and send push notifications during the times the most people will be nearest the store.

Be knowledgeable of cultural differences as well. If users in a certain location don’t work on Fridays, like in Tel Aviv, sending them a push notification to grab dinner with coworkers after a long week on a Friday wouldn’t sit well with the user base.

The push notification below is crafted for who live in Seattle. The message is about a raincoat sale, and becomes a relevant reminder when it’s sent on a rainy day.

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Recipe 8:

Create post-open engagement experiences

Post-open experiences are the actions that are taken after a user swipes to open a push notification.

The point of sending a push notification is to inform the user of something they need to know in that moment, and nudge them to take the next action: interacting with the notification and going into your app, like this:

Here are more examples of whipping up an interactive post-open experience:

Retail or travel, like Nordstrom or Expedia: applying a discount code for the user (like in the example above with Uber).

Streaming, like Netflix: promoting a new episode of a favorite show and taking them directly to that video or episode.

Sports, like ESPN: promoting breaking team news and sending the user directly to that article.

Travel, like Virgin America or Alaska Airlines: Notifying the traveler that their gate has changed and when users open the app, they are shown their updated mobile boarding pass.

Food, like Epicurious: Promoting a simple recipe for dinner and directing users to the instructions.

Personal scheduling, like Google Now: Reminding you about your car servicing appointment and pulling up directions to get there.

Music streaming, like Spotify: Promoting an artist’s album and taking the user straight to it for easy listening.

Buy and sell, like OfferUp: Notifying the user that someone is interested in their item and taking them to the listing.

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Recipe 9:

The secret combination: Marketers and developers

Every department within a business has pressing needs. Marketers can have a bottleneck in their process if they can’t get into mobile app product backlogs.

Product engineers can feel pressure to release features before they are ready. The product and marketing teams may have a split in priorities, but the most effective way to work is for marketers to have products teams that work with them, not against them. Developers play a large role in marketers’ success. If marketers are not aligned with their developers, their marketing and overall business will be at a loss. Marketers figure out what experience suits the user best, but that only happens after a thought-out development plan.

Implementing a marketing automation platform has a lot more to do with people than with technology. What it boils down to: if people, processes, and technology finally meet, marketing automation can bring your marketing results to a whole new level.

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Recipe 10:

Perfect the method — Test, learn, test, learn...

Remember the first time you went to Chipotle and had a burrito? Maybe it was good, maybe it was even close to great.

Now think about if you had to eat that same burrito every time you went in. Not so appealing any longer. Chances are the burrito you get today isn’t the burrito you ordered on the first day. Perhaps you now ask for double meat, a little more salsa, and less sour cream. Those tweaks and burrito optimizations are what took your burrito from good to perfect.

It’s similar to push campaigns. Say you ran a campaign and it had a 5% conversion rate. The industry standard is around 2–3%, which means you’ve perfected the recipe. You’re ready for the Michelin star of push notifications, right? Not necessarily. What if a few tweaks could get you a 10% conversion rate? Making tweaks and testing messaging, metadata, creative, timing and the actions in the campaign is imperative to maximizing the campaign.

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Recipe 11:

The finishing touch — Analyze your data

You’re putting in a lot of time to plan and execute your campaigns. Take the time to analyze how your campaigns performed in order to optimize future campaigns.

But slicing and dicing data doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Decide how often you look at metrics, and analyze for that time period. If you look at results every week, see how your campaign is doing week over week. If you look one a month, look at month-over-month performance. Look at the broader picture as well. See if there are any trends over longer periods of time. Think about why trends are appearing and loop in the rest of your team to help with broader analysis.

The most important takeaway is to make sure your campaigns are resonating with your users and your key performance indicators are going up and to the right.

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