Push Notifications: The Key Factor to Mobile App Engagement
In the last years mobile devices have become more and more important to us: we spend a huge part of our daily time on such devices and 80% of our phone use seems to be spent on mobile apps.
But how many of the apps we download we really use? Mobile app publishers shouldn’t forget that user acquisition is just half of the challenge and they should commit to address user retention in a wiser and more consistent way in order to increase it. Push Messaging Services are the key to this goal.
Here is a familiar scenario: you built a great product, a mobile app which made your business idea come true. People start downloading it and you’re excited: they love your idea and you’re ready to succeed. But the truth is you are just half way and you probably overlooked the importance of another key factor for the future growth of your app: your users’ engagement. No matter how much people love your product, they will likely forget about it if you don’t give them efficient recurring reminders of the service you provide. That’s what Push Notifications do!
What is a Push Notification?
Push Notifications are informative messages delivered to mobile app users when they are not actively browsing the app. They display text, logo, images and sometimes sound alert to catch users’ attention and give them relevant updates about new products, offers and important activities going on through the app. Clearly, the goal is to engage the users and ‘push’ them to go back to the app, open it and use it again.
How to build effective Push Notifications?
In order to be effective, a Push Messaging Service should provide value to customers and target different users with specific meaningful content. This means that if you are a mobile app publisher, a big part of your work should be to monitor and analyze your users’ behaviour. It’s important to understand who are your customers, what are they searching for and at what time/location! The segmentation of users according to their demographical data or other meaningful aspects, such as their preferences and/or geolocation, is the key to deliver personalized messages and therefore increase the conversion rate. Targeting people with valuable content, at the right time, in the right location, it’s a powerful way to increase your users’ engagement and make sure you are really connecting with your customers’ needs. Good analytics and measurement of key variables like UX, customers’ purchase and search history and so on, reduce the chance of users’ drop out. A Push Messaging service which doesn’t take these aspects into account might even ‘push’ the customers to uninstall the app from the phone.
Different kinds of Push Notifications
To build an effective Push Messaging Service you have to invest a lot of time and energies into study and research. But don’t get discouraged if you don’t have enough of such resources, because you can find online platforms that help you on the way. Netmera is one of them. It’s a cloud based mobile engagement platform which allows you to easily manage your app users’ engagement through:
- Regular Push Notification: a message with a few lines of text and the logo.
- Rich Push Notifications: when you think the test is not enough, with these notifications you can add images, maps and videos to your messages.
- Interactive Push Notifications: they demand an action from the user. According to the user’s response, a different page will be open within the app.
- In App Popups: they are triggered by user actions within the app and help users access targeted content that is responsive to their needs and behaviours. In App Popups work even if the users have disabled push notifications.
- Geolocation: this feature enables you to target customers by location in real-time.
- Notifications for specific Geo Fences: automatic messages for users who enters a certain area.
- Beacon Management: beacons are physical devices you can install in your store. They allow you to engage with customers while they shop in your store and subsequently analyse user behaviors to create powerful new campaigns.
All these Push Messaging services are implemented for Android, iOS and Windows OS and they usually require permission from the user in order to use his geographical location.
The notifications’ layout is a little different between Android and iOS Push Messaging Services. iOS users have more control over the notifications’ layout than Android ones, that means that Apple devices’ owners can deeply personalize the style of the notifications they will receive. On Android devices, though, is now available a new service which allows you to add images to your regular push notifications, making them even more engaging. Among Push Messaging services it’s worth mentioning Nokia messaging push email service, the mobile applicabtion for Nokia devices which makes it easy for you to manage up to 10 email addresses at once, delivering messages automatically as push email.
Hopefully, this little journey through mobile Push Notifications helped you better understand what this services really are and what it’s possible to achieve by using them. In the last years mobile devices have become more and more important to us: we spend a huge part of our daily time on such devices and 80% of our phone use seems to be spent on mobile apps. But how many of the apps we download we really use? Mobile app publishers shouldn’t forget that user acquisition is just half of the challenge and they should commit to address user retention in a wiser and more consistent way in order to increase it.
Push Messaging Services are the key to this goal!
Original Article