Implementing Push Notifications That Users Won’t Hate

Creating Useful Push Notifications

Purpose is one of the most important elements in any decision making process. This is true no matter the industry. Whether designing buildings, or designing mobile apps, a clear justification behind every decision is integral to a cohesive design. Furthermore, the same theory applies to communication. In fact, purpose in communication is even more crucial. Therefore, it’s vital that your mobile app development team carefully considers their application of push notifications.

A push notification is an automated message that applications send users when those apps aren’t open. Push technology powers an applications ability to deliver push notifications. Push technology is simply a communication initiated by the system or central-server, contrary to pull/get communications.

Understanding how to craft impactful push notifications that users welcome is critical to a variety of other success-driving factors relating to your application. There are many reasons that users prefer to turn push notifications off. Likewise, however, there are many reasons you can provide users to keep your specific mobile applications notifications on. In doing so, the user base remains more well informed, among other things. Additionally, having a user base that enables your push notifications drives a variety of other significant factors that benefit your mobile application.

Common Push Pitfalls

As mentioned above, there are a flurry of reasons that users might choose to disable notifications immediately after downloading an application. In order to help your team design and craft push notifications that users leave enabled, it’s valuable to learn from the mistakes of others that have walked the road before you. In that vein, the following are some of the common pitfalls regarding push notifications.

Too Many Too Frequently

The first mistake that novice mobile app designers are quick to fall into might seem pretty obvious to anyone who has actually owned a smartphone. However, it’s understandable – new designers often are excited to share their hard work with their new and loyal users. Yet, it can quickly become too many.

Flooding your user base with push notification after notification becomes overwhelming, and actually lowers the impact of each individual push notification delivered. This is important to note because it goes back to the point at the top of the article about purpose. In communication, and specifically your notifications, there needs to be a clear purpose behind the message. Going beyond that, there needs to be a purpose behind sending the message to your entire user base.

Having a clear purpose behind both the message and the delivery will speak volumes to your user base. It shows you respect their time, and that you only want to give them the updates that are most significant. This, however, can also be a bit tricky because “the significant updates” might vary from user to user.

The other issue with over-notifying your user base, beside dampening the impact of the more important push notifications, is that you can overflood their notification center. In other words, users might lose notifications from other applications that are more important to them in the midst of all the push notifications being sent from one source. This is a critical error and enrages users, quickly leading them to disable all notifications from your app. Or worse, delete it all together.

User Control

In the same vein as above; it’s critical to empower your users to have detailed control over the push notifications they do and don’t receive. This results in a series of positive results for the mobile app user, and the developer.

For instance, the more control a user has over the push notifications, the more customized the experience feels. Therefore, the user experience is already enhanced, just by allowing users to control the types of notifications that are sent to their device. A better user experience, in turn, leads to a higher chance the user will leave a review, continue their app-usership, and even spend on in-app purchases.

In addition to boosting the individual user-experience, this is also a great tool for mobile app developers. Allowing user-control over the notification settings limits the amount of users that disable your push notifications completely. Retaining some percentage of push-notifications enabled is a win, when the alternate is disabling notifications completely.

The lesson here is to give users as much control as possible over the push notifications they receive or don’t receive from your application.

Under Utilizing Push Notifications

The last pitfall we’re going to discuss is the under utilization of push notifications. While the above points have been cautionary tales about limiting the notifications you send your users, this is about optimizing the utility of the notifications sent. In other words, after creating a notification strategy that includes impactful, purposed messaging, developers can take their strategy even further.

Developers can start tying notifications into other user-based-actions on the application. For instance, a well-crafted and well-timed notification can result in the user logging an entire unplanned session. This is often the case when it comes to gamer-heavy user demographics. This demographic is specifically prone to log an unplanned session based on their investment into the games they play. The more invested the player, the more likely a significant push notification motivates them to play unexpectedly.

This isn’t exclusive to the gamer demographic, however. Every category of application can benefit from developing a strong notification strategy. Another good example are news and information-based applications. These applications might be set to deliver breaking industry headlines, headlines from user-chosen categories, or even headlines from geo-targeting. Regardless of the specific notification-settings, an intriguing headline that’s specifically relevant to the users interest could spark an unexpected reading-session, sharing of the article, and other various user-application-interactions, all of which passively boost your applications ratings.

Using Push Notifications To Garner Mobile App User Reviews

Another important element to a strong notification strategy is leveraging your push notifications into user reviews. This is a crucial element to tie into your notification strategy as it can completely revitalize your app-store ratings and user review scores. An application with a large user base but only a handful of reviews might have a high percentage of inactive users or users with disabled notifications entirely.

Directly tying back to the section above on under utilizing push notifications, there is a time and a place to use those notifications to your applications advantage. In other words, it’s on the developers shoulders to find opportunities within the notification strategy to prompt user feedback. This can be accomplished through a variety of methods. The most common, and most helpful, however, is through a store-app review.

Optimizing your notification strategy means creating impactful and purposed messaging that speaks to the user. It means delivering timely and significant notifications without needlessly flooding the users device. It means putting the user experience first.

Wrapping Up

Successful applications need push notifications for a variety of reasons. However, it’s crucial that these notifications are crafted to be purposeful and significant, otherwise users will opt out of push notifications entirely.

For more information on costs or anything else related to your notification strategy, or mobile app development help, visit NS804. NS804 is the premier mobile app developer of the everyday person. NS804 delivers mobile app development services and expertise to anyone with an excellent idea.