Author: James Ewen

What makes the best push notifications? There are many push notification best practices guides out there. We ask – what can really make the difference for developers when sending push notifications?

Most push notification strategies assume that all push notifications are created equal. They view a push notification almost as a psychological trick. One that aims to get the user to look at their phone and see what they have to offer.

This may well be the case. But what happens when you take a closer look at push notifications and app engagement? You might find that the trick is not a realistic option if you want to sustain mobile growth and engagement.

Take a look at any push notification enabled vs app retention charts. You’ll see that retention is always higher when push is enabled than disabled. But there’s something here that nobody ever talks about. Nobody mentions that both of those lines trend downwards at almost exactly the same rate.

So, when it comes to engagement were as bad at sending push notifications as we are at not sending them.

That’s because the standard push notification is a ploy. Perhaps your user will fall for it, but they won’t make the same mistake twice. This is why you need to think carefully about your mobile app engagement strategy. You must ensure that app engagement improves through value and great user experience.

Don’t think of your push notification strategy as a tool to grab your users attention. Think of a push notification as a tool to deliver value to your audience. Provide them with true value and engagement and retention will follow. Your users are not dogs – they won’t chase every stick that you throw their way.

Push notifications must be reliable – your users have to trust your app communication. If you want engaged users then you’ll have to create an engagement strategy that your users rely on. Not one that is reliably annoying.

That means you’ll need to personalize your push notification message strategy.

What do we mean by personalized app push notifications?

A personalized push notification is a powerful method of app communication. It doesn’t mean just putting a user’s name in the push notification. Personalized mobile push notifications are personal in the sense that they provide value for the app user.

It’s about solving problems for the user at the right moment, right from the lock screen. Instead of delivering a push notification that drifts into the notification center and is never seen again.

Developers should send push notifications in these personal moments. Nurturing engaged and appreciative users are much more beneficial to a mobile app. Trying to grab a user’s attention with aggressive and unpersonalized push notifications is not.

You can achieve personalized push notifications in a cross platform push user experience. Personalization is not limited to Android push notifications or iOS push notifications.

When should you send push notifications to your users?

The truth is that there is not a concrete answer to this. The question that you should be asking is why should you send push notifications to your users?

The answer to this is also complex. It provides better insights into your user’s psychology. This is helpful to understand how to best personalize your push notifications.

Why would a user want a personalized notification at a specific moment? Once you start to ask yourself this question you’re beginning to look at the value that your app provides.

Let’s look at this in a specific example. Say you have a recipe app and you’d like to improve engagement with mobile push notifications.

Rather than asking when or how many mobile push notifications you should send, ask why.

The answer for when might be between 4-7pm. That’s the normal time that your users might be thinking of what to have for dinner. It seems reasonable to throw them a stick (push notification) during this period.

But there’s a subtle difference between when and why that helps you understand user psychology. In this case, why would users want you to send them a push notification? Well, now you’re starting to think about what it is that your app provides to users, and how they will find it useful.

The answer might be – to communicate a recipe idea when they are in a store and lacking inspiration.

Identify this and you’re doing much more than guessing and attempting to engage with a stick. No, you’re personalizing the mobile push notification message to the user’s situation. Guess what – that will have an invaluable effect on app engagement.

How you can implement the why

This requires some technical skills to personalize push notifications to this level. But a simple and effective way to personalize push notifications is with location. Adding location to push notifications helps add relevancy to the push notification strategy.

In the example above this notification is sent when the user is inside a specific store. This can even be a or specific type of store.

A location is a powerful tool for personalization of push messages. It’s where you start to provide high value for your users.

There are many solutions to add location to your push notification strategy. You can do this with some push platforms. But it doesn’t stop here. You must also realize that you’ll need to test and measure your push notifications as well.

Test and test again – use data to understand your results

A single human is pretty bad at predicting what personalization looks like to your users. That means that it will take a few different people or attempts to answer the question of why. Even then, you might not get it right.

So, you’ll need a local notification platform that allows in-depth insights on smaller user segments first and then get in-depth insights on engagement.

Use this data to answer why you should be sending push notifications. Insights on location and app engagement can be effective in understanding user psychology. Be prepared to be shocked. Your previous understanding of how users use your app could be shattered.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The point is you’ll be closer to providing high-value, relevant mobile app communication. This will come in the form of helpful push notifications.

Contents

Introduction to app push notifications

There’s so much written about how to create high quality app push notifications. What are mobile push notifications?What constitutes a successful mobile push notification strategy? Which is the best push notification service? How can you use mobile push notifications to boost app engagement?

These questions are repeatedly asked by mobile developers. There’s a wide range on answers on the topic of app push notifications and what effect they have on a mobile app engagement strategy. For developers, it can be difficult to understand exactly which push notification service is best for your app.

That’s why we’re going to try and cut through the noise and help explain what in app notifications do and  what makes a successful push notification today.

This is an ultimate guide – so it’s does go into some detail. We’ll begin writing from the perspective that you have no previous experience with push notifications. Please use the contents to find the relevant section for you.

The basics of push notifications

What are push notifications?

A push notification is a method of communication between a mobile app and a user. Push notifications are used to communicate information with users in real-time. A push notification is delivered instantly to a mobile device, regardless of whether the device is locked or unlocked. The push notification is delivered even if the user is in a different app or away from the app sending the push notification.

Push notifications are constantly being updated and they have developed significantly since they were initially introduced back in 2009.

Android push notification vs iOS push notification

Why are app push notifications used?

Mobile push notifications form a part of an effective mobile engagement strategy. They provide communication between apps and users, providing value by delivering relevant information within the push notification.

Mobile push notifications can also be used to deep link to relevant app functions to add extra functionality to app push notifications.

Generally, in app push notifications provide a valuable channel of communication for app publishers. A push notification is more immediate than other methods of communication, such as email. There’s no chance of them being caught in spam filters, so mobile push notifications to form an effective way of reaching users with important information.

App push notification opt in

Every channel of communication has it’s spam filters.  App push notifications are no different – however they are filtered in a slightly different way. Mobile push notification delivery is based on an opt-in feature. This means that the user is given the choice as to whether they wish to receive push notifications.

More emphasis is being placed on explaining to users the value of the push notification. Increasingly, users are opting out of notifications due to irrelevant communication and abuse of the app push notification service.

That’s why it’s important to have a clear opt-in process for your mobile push notification strategy. Explain exactly why you want your users to opt-in to your app push notifications. Make sure that you do this at the right moment.

App push notification opt in rate by industry

How are mobile push notifications received

The user will receive a push notification as a banner alert if the phone is locked. If the phone is unlocked the user will see a banner alert from the top of the screen that will appear for a few seconds before disappearing.

An iOS push notification can be altered in settings where the user can decide if an app should allow sounds, how the iOS push notification appears (banner, popup etc). They also have the choice of whether the iOS push notification triggers a red number alert on the app badge icon itself.

An Android push notification operates in a similar way to a iOS push notificayion  – however, the OS reminds them of the notification with an icon in the top left corner of the screen. As a result of this the average Android user is less likely to miss a notification than a typical iOS user.

Benefits of app push notifications for developers

To understand the benefits of mobile push notifications you’ll need to think of them in the context of app engagement and retention. App push notifications should also be understood in relation to your app monetization strategy.

Driving app engagement & retention with push notifications

Mobile push notifications are a fantastic tool for driving app engagement. But what exactly is an engaged user? Often a user downloads your app with the intention of using it. But sometimes the user will forget about the app, or it will sit inside a folder that is rarely accessed.

This is why you need app push notifications to engage your mobile users. Low app engagement doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a bad app – it just means that you need to communicate with your users.

With mobile push notifications, it’s about getting your app front of mind, reminding users of the value that your app brings, and ensuring that your users continue to achieve this value in the relevant moments.

Mobile retention over time is pretty bad according to research. Let’s say 100 new users download your mobile app. After 24 hours you can expect this number to be reduced to 20. After 10 days this number will, on average, fall to 8. After 90 days the typical app will only retain 2 of those initial 100 users.

That’s why app push notifications are so important for developers. The figures also demonstrate this. Retention rates are almost doubled for users that have push notifications enabled.

These figures are typical for an average mobile app – that means that there is even more room for improvement for developers. Typical push notification strategies don’t take into consideration relevancy, personalization, and localization – all concepts that we’ll return to later in this piece. This means that there’s a huge opportunity for apps to increase their retention rates.

Mobile push notifications are incredibly effective at boosting app engagement and retention, and in reality, you don’t really have an effective app strategy without them.

Driving app revenue with mobile push notifications

The more experienced developers amongst you might already understand the benefits of app push notifications in terms of mobile app revenue. There’s a simple equation here and it goes as follows

If you can just increase your retention (downloads) and boost engagement (MAU) with an effective mobile push notification strategy, then very quickly you will begin to grow your app revenue.

Therefore, app push notifications are fundamental to any developer that wants to create an effective mobile business. Let’s not forget to add into the equation the rising cost of user acquisition. With all these considerations – you would be rather foolish to ignore the power of mobile push notifications.

Best app push notification practices

This is the part where we look at what makes the best mobile push notifications. This is the difference between using app push notifications because you see other apps doing it, or generating a larger engaged audience that will boost the app experience, and improve app monetization.

Mobile push notification relevancy

One thing that should be at the forefront of your mobile push notification strategy is the relevancy of your app push notifications.

That means you’ll need to really understand your app users, what they want from your app and where they are getting the most value. This requires you to place user experience at the center of the app push notification experience.

Mobile push notifications are much more effective if they are delivered to your users in the best possible moment. Defining when this relevant moment is the challenge – and the solution eludes many developers.

This can be achieved in multiple different ways. But a good place to start to discover app push notification relevancy is to hypothesize and test these push notification moments.

The cycle of mobile push notification relevancy

Make sure your mobile push notification service can deliver you with the necessary feedback around app push notifications and key delivery metrics – not just based on time, but also message type, audience segment, and location.

Personalisation of mobile push notifications

This really is the number one rule of mobile push notifications – keep your communication via push notifications personal. For developers, there’s a few different methods you can employ to ensure your app push notification strategy stays personal.

Of course, there are the basic methods of personalisation – identify your users by name, in the right language, on the right device, and with the right content. But you can take your push notifications to the next level with these other personalization tactics.

Personlized timing

Mobile push notifications are more personal when sent at the right time. This is more basic but can have a nice effect on app push notification interaction and app engagement. Message personalization based on the time of day is an effective way to increase personalization of mobile push notifications.

This is the first layer of personalization around app push notifications. It’s a good start, but to retain a modern user you’ll need to take your push notifications further.

Personalized mobile push notification triggers

This is where app push notifications start to get interesting. As an app owner, you have the potential to generate a huge amount of data around your user’s behavior. This data can be used to improve the personalization of your in app push notifications.

Of course, this is dependent on the function that your mobile app serves to your users. But, you should be  thinking about how you can leverage data to improve your app push notification strategy. Do you have data around user behavior that can help you deliver more personal mobile push notifications? If you do – you should certainly be utilizing this.

Remember, higher personalized app push notifications mean better engagement, and this means increased revenue. All of the efforts that you put into your mobile push notification strategy will benefit you multiple times over in the long run.

Most app owners have the ability to leverage user data to create a better engagement strategy. Identify how your mobile push notification strategy can take advantage of the huge amount of user data out there.

App push notification personalization with location

The holy trinity of mobile push notification personalization is completed with location data. Accurate mobile app location data can distinguish exactly where your app users are. This means that you can deliver app push notifications in precise locations that make sense for your users. This leads to higher app engagement and retention.

This level of personalization will become compulsory for apps that want their mobile push notifications to provide true value for their users. Using accurate location data you can understand where your users go and how they behave when receiving app push notifications. using this data, you can determine the best micro moment in which to send the push notification to users.

Let’s a look at a few examples to illustrate what makes a great location personalised mobile push notification.

The possibilities are endless and but the important thing to remember is that applying the three layers of mobile push notifications will help you to provide your users will value. Creating a better experience will then follow.

Deep linking app push notifications to relevant content

This level of personalization isn’t easy to attain. That’s why you have to think about where your app push notification takes the user. Many apps overlook this part of the mobile push notification process, but it can be just as important as personalization.

If you personalize the app push notification then make sure you personalize the experience that follows. That’s achieved using deep linking. Make sure your users are pointed to the relevant section of the app. It can seem rather complex at first, but the reward is worth the effort. Check this useful guide for a more in-depth overview

There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing content in a app push notification which appeals, to find the link go to the app home screen. If you forget the original content of the push notification then it’s impossible to find the original content. Remember, on iOS devices, the push notification disappears once it has been swiped.

Deep linking is especially important with personalized, time-sensitive mobile push notifications. If your notification is personalized then the landing screen will also need to be.

Frequency of mobile push notifications

A common question for most app publishers is ‘how often should I send push notifications?’

In general, less is more when it comes to mobile push notifications. Try and value quality communication over quantity. Again this comes down to providing value with your mobile push notification strategy.

You’ll be able to understand the peak number of app push notifications to send over a set time period once you start looking into the data around app communication. Use an app push notification service that allows you these insights – they will be invaluable when you are growing your audience.

Conversion with app push notifications

Mobile push notifications can also be used to increase conversion. If your app consists of sales or a lengthy on boarding process then app push notifications can be a method of increasing completion.

Remember – at the heart of every successful mobile push notification strategy lies personalization – and the same applies for conversion. So if you send a notification to remind users to complete the on boarding process, try personalizing the app push notification by changing the copy based on where the user is in the on boarding process.

The same applies for sale completions. Remind the user of what was in their basket rather than just providing generic app push notifications.

Understand the difference between an iOS push notification and an Android push notification

It’s important to tailor your mobile push notification strategy based on different mobile platforms.

In general push notifications see a higher open rate on Android devices. iOS users interact with notifications quicker than their Android counterparts.

To adapt your strategy to android push notifications and iOS push notifications you’ll need to adapt and think about how the experience will change on both platforms. That means you’ll need to utilize other methods of communication where appropriate.

In Android, the user will have to remove the app push notification manually once they open the phone. On iOS, the notification is more ephemeral and requires more effort to interact with, if this doesn’t occur on the lock screen.

It all demonstrates that there is no single mobile experience – be thoughtful about how OS can affect the mobile experience involved in sending mobile push notifications. Understand the data around your app on both platforms – it might be different to the general trends.

Mobile push notification feedback and insights

Be aware of vanity metrics

It can be tempting to look at app push notifications click through as a key metric for measuring engagement. Whilst in many cases this is important, sometimes it can be a vanity metric and not illustrate true app engagement.

In fact, there are many mobile push notification strategies that boost engagement without persuading their users to actually engage with the notification.

In this case, the notification provides value for the user without them having to engage with the notification. This reaffirms the app’s purpose and will most likely lead to reengagement with the news app at a later date. All of this isn’t initially clear from the push notification engagement statistics.

Mobile push notification timing

Don’t let people tell you that there’s a right time to send app push notifications to your users. Sending all of your notifications in a certain time period will only lead to disengagement.

Leverage the data around app push notifications to understand what suits your users. Break this down into audience segments and hypothesize and test for future push notifications.

Using location for data and insights

Learn and adapt to your users using data. This doesn’t just mean simple open metrics. Use location to understand where in the real-world your users engage most with your mobile push notifications.

In a world with over a million apps, it’s important that you leverage every piece of data that you can around app engagement. You need to make data your best friend if you want to keep developing your app engagement strategy.

If you can get data around your app users that the majority of apps can’t get access to then your onto a winner.

The truth is that many app engagement strategies fail to understand where their users go and how they behave.

Beyond basic engagement insights

For example, you might get feedback around how your users are opening your app push notification, using specific in-app features, or even just opening the app.

These insights might be based on time of day, or maybe you can even get a breakdown of this data based on audience type (depending on which service you use).

But what if you could get a better insight into the mind of your user at that time? Basic insights are great, but it doesn’t always paint the perfect picture. You need to get as much data as possible if you are going to keep engaging your app users.

Location insights around app users can help drive mobile app engagement KPIs. If you can understand exactly where your users go and how they behave then you can create a better idea of how to engage them.

Engagement data that retains users

For example, let’s say you have a sports app and you might send a re-engagement notification that performs reasonably well. You look at the data available to you and you see that a sizeable chunk of these notifications were opened between 12-3pm. Now that is a great insight, but what if you could learn more?

If you layer location insights around that data you might see a more useful pattern emerge. You could see that the majority of these notifications are opened in bars, and even more specifically sports bars.

Now you can really begin to hypothesise and fine tune your value proposition. You can see that the majority of your users are using your scores app whilst they are watching a game in a bar or sports venue.

This all links back to your app engagement strategy. You have a better idea of how and where your users get the most value from your mobile app, and this helps you to develop your app engagement strategy.

By understanding your user’s behaviour you are much better placed to say which factors are most likely to boosts your app engagement KPIs.

Resources, further reading and links 🔗

It’s time to deconstruct all the terrible advice out there around push notification best practices.

There’s an awful lot of bad advice going out around what makes the best push notifications. When it’s best to send push notifications. What message you should include in your push notification to increase mobile app engagement.

Much of this advice simply isn’t true. And it fails to consider what makes a successful app engagement strategy. Let’s look at some of the myths around push notifications and what might be the reality instead.

Push notification timing

Myth – the best time to send push notifications is between 6-8pm

Reality – the best time to send push notifications is exactly when your user gets the most value from the notification.

Of course, users are more complex than that. You might get relative success sending your notification at a certain time. but if you’re trying to effectively increase mobile app engagement, anyone telling you to send push at one time a is probably trying to oversimplify the problem.

You might say well, ‘when the user gets the most value’ – that’s hard to define. Well, you’re right. But there’s a whole range of solutions to try and find that ideal moment. Just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.

Questions in push notifications?

Myth – ask your users a question in the notification, that’ll trick them to love your app as nobody ignores a question

reality – actually this is just plain annoying and insulting to the average user.

Yes, that’s right, human beings, after many years of evolution can, in fact, resist the urge to answer every question that’s thrown at them. A mobile engagement strategy should seek to do more than trick people into engagement.

What people should say when suggesting questions as push notifications is – sometimes it makes sense to ask your users a question – as long as it is in the right micro-moment.

Push notification visuals

Myth – images and GIFs improve retention and engagement

Reality – value > moving images.

Whilst it has been said that some GIFs are insanely engageable, that doesn’t mean that your notification will receive 95% engagement because it has a moving cat on it.

Once again, the key to a better mobile app engagement strategy is relevancy. If your overall message sucks or is not relevant then no matter what visual you send with it, you’ll get terrible engagement.

How to personalize push notification strategy

Myth – Personalisation means addressing someone by name.

Reality – Push notification best practices to include historical, behavioural based personalization.

Woooooahhhh. I just got a notification with my name in it. How did it know? What a smart app. I’ll continue using it forever. – said nobody ever.

Using historical behavioural data, both in-app and in the real world are much better ways to personalize your push notifications and app engagement strategy. I’d much rather receive a notification that’s relevant without my name in than one that is addressed to me but serves no purpose.

Push notification KPIs

Myth – open rates are the most important of the app engagement metrics.

Reality – Vanity metric

Whilst notification open rates can be suggestive of positive engagement you have to look at the purpose of your push strategy. Some apps benefit when the notification is the message.

I don’t know about you but I want my push notifications to tell me everything I need to know concisely and give me the choice to dig deeper whilst simultaneously providing with justification for downloading the app in the first place. 🤔

Open rates are a controversial subject when considered as a part of a mobile app engagement strategy. It’s important to get as much data as possiblearound engagement and use this to understand if your metrics are truly representative of strong app engagement.

Communicating with your users

Myth – users want to know about new features and products

Reality – users don’t want to know about relevant products

Just because you think your new app feature is great doesn’t mean that all your users want to know about it. Reserve your notifications for essential, engaging content. Remember, in-app communication and effective onboarding are also part of a successful app engagement strategy and can be used to communicate new features and updates.

Conclusion

Many apps out there are doing amazing jobs of boosting app engagement with effective push notification strategies.

Fine tune your push notification strategy to focus on exactly what your user’s needs are. Communicate in a relevant way and ensure that you always put the user first.

Use data and insights to understand your push notification strategy and look at multiple KPIs to understand what’s right for your mobile app engagement strategy.

The best products and services to to leverage data and app analytics to create better mobile apps.

Without users, you wouldn’t have an app. At least you wouldn’t have an app that functioned as a business.

That’s why it’s so important to listen to your mobile users and understand how they use your mobile app. There are some mobile app analytics fundamentals you’ll need to understand if you want to create an effective mobile business.

There are some key metrics to measure if you have a mobile app. It’s crucial to get accurate in-app analytics around these in order to create a scalable mobile business.

The key mobile app analytic metrics are:

• New user acquisition
• App retention
• App engagement & experience
• Revenue

Every app is different and will look to focus on some of these KPIs more than others. Part of using data to inform your app business strategy involves learning which of these will benefit your app the most.

Here’s a look at some of the best app analytics tools out there to get started with. Whilst there’s no such thing as the best mobile analytics platform, a combination of a few of these will help you on your way to a successful mobile app.

Mobile app user acquisition

Data around user acquisition is the first stop in our break-down of app analytics strategy. You need to understand how users discover your app and what percentage of app impressions are being converted into downloads. App store analytics are the starting point for any serious app owner.

This is the first step to understanding exactly how mobile users view your app and a great opportunity to leverage data to improve your conversion.

Without in-depth analytics around user acquisition, you will have no idea how effective your app marketing budget is. If you don’t know exactly how effective you are at acquiring new app users then you can forecast your app monetization strategy.

User acquisition insights are usually spread across multiple different sources. This can make it difficult and time-consuming to see the whole app user acquisition story.

App acquisition solutions

Apple app analytics platform – If you have an iOS version of your mobile app then there’s not much better for rich data insights that the Apple app analytics platform. It’s free with the developer program membership. It’s really out shadowed by other solutions when looking at in-app analytics but to learn how users are adopting your app over time, but when looking at acquisition it an extremely useful tool.

Of course, that’s not too helpful if your app is only on iOS.

Apsalar – Has some good features including the ability to see the ROI of user acquisition campaigns.

What you’ll learn with data: Web traffic, app store impressions, downloads by time and date.

App analytics insights: App store conversion rates, target audiences, and referrers.

App retention

Once you’ve gained some insights around app acquisition (and hopefully devised a plan to improve it) you’ll want to keep those app users in your app. This is known as your mobile app retention strategy. Understanding app retention and how to improve it is crucial if you want to create an app that leaves your users happy and retains users effectively.

For this, you need to get valuable app analytics around app user retention. Understanding when users leave or delete your app is key to creating a scalable app business.

It’s also important for you to understand why certain app retention patterns are occurring for your app. Sometimes the basic data doesn’t seem to outline any clear motive.

Understanding your users and getting inside their heads is key to creating an effective retention strategy.

That’s why you need to add multiple data sets to your app retention model. Where they use your app and patterns around where users are deleting your app.

Retention app analytics solutions

Mixpanel – A nice platform that allows you define custom events and measure retention against these. One of the best mobile app analytics platforms for measuring retention.

Amplitude – emphasis on behavioural cohorts to really break down how your app retention strategy is working.

What you’ll learn: Retention, user churn, churn location.

App analytics insights: Why users are deleting your app. Retention strategy.

App engagement

To engage your app users you must have an effective mobile engagement strategy in place. More often than not this will need to include an effective push notification strategy.

The reason that push notifications are important as part of a mobile app strategy is that they can provide incredibly useful insights around how your app functions and how users engage with it.

The more detail you put into the push notification strategy the better your app engagement data that comes from it, and the level of app analytics insights you’ll get in return.

It’s great to have information about how your user uses each interface inside of your app. The next step is looking at where your users engage with your app.

Understanding accurate app engagement metrics are fundamental to building an effective mobile app engagement strategy.

Let’s look at an example – engaging your users in a specific moment.

A strategy such as this is great at increasing mobile app engagement, but the thing that’s even more powerful for apps is using data around the app engagement moment to learn about your users and how they want to interact with your app.

There are a few different mobile app analytics platforms that provide you with data around app engagement:

App engagement solutions

Tamoco – Takes engagement insights one step further by adding precise location to the above. Location is a relevant insight for app users because it allows you to understand in which location engagement is best and in which moment your users are most engaged. It’s all available in a nice platform with a mobile app analytics SDK to boot.

Universal Analytics (Google) – For a general overview of app engagement, there’s not much better than Universal analytics. Best of all is the price – but, it offers reliable stats to measure the effectiveness of your engagement strategy. It’s a great starting point for all app developers to have in their business strategy.

What you’ll learn: Communication engagement, time of engagement, location of engagement.

App analytic insights: when, how and where your users are most engaged with your mobile app.

Mobile user experience

Understanding micro-moments with accurate data.

For apps that were to succeed it’s crucial that they make the distinction between engagement and experience. They will also have to find ways to measure both effectively. It’s an important part of an app analytics strategy to be able to measure this separately to engagement.

However, app experience and mobile user experience can be subjective and therefore difficult to measure in a traditional app analytics platform.

You must think about many parts of your app’s strategy in order to create the best mobile user experience, as it encompasses many different factors.

As data is the single most important thing you can use to back up your app business strategy, it’s important to learn what contributes towards a positive app experience.

This involves hypothesizing (based on any data that you might already have) and then measuring and adapting with mobile application analytic tools. Let’s look at some examples of hypothetical positive app experiences.

A fitness app that understands where users like to work out and suggest recommendations. Also, can avoid potential risks by monitoring route etc

Booking app using location history to suggest much better experience. And understand where the users use the app to find these. The solving problem before users reaches the micro-moment.

In these two examples, it seems to be quite difficult to measure the success of these experiences. But what we can do is to use engagement and retention figures and combine this with other data sets and qualitative insights to get a better idea of your app experience.

One solution is looking at direct videos of user experience and matching this up to patterns in-app deletion.

Another involves looking at the real-world location in which apps are being engaged with most and where they are losing users.

App experience solutions

Appsee – lets you record real user sessions so that you can identify the reason for engagement patterns. Also has some nice heat maps.

Localytics – Also has good heat maps function to allow you to pinpoint where experience is increasing/dropping off.

What you’ll learn: Where micro-moments occur.

App analytics insights: New features, Retention strategy

In-app monetization

If you want to create an app that functions as a business then you’ll need accurate app analytics, insights and forecasts around app monetization.

Which insights you’ll need here depends on your app monetization strategy. There are many app monetization challenges, but some will be more relevant to your business.

If you have a mobile app monetization strategy that is based on delivering mobile ads to your users, then you’ll need a platform with in-depth insights around ad delivery, CPM, and impressions vs clicks.

If your app monetization takes the form of in-app purchases then it’s important to look beyond revenue. Can you find a app abalytics solution that shows you the optimal moment that your user is likely to purchase your service or digital goods? If you can understand how this kind of in-app monetization works then this will be the key to boosting app revenue.

App data monetization is another app monetization strategy that can deliver high revenue for apps. Platforms include dynamic CPM pricing based on your where your audience is most active. This allows you to forecast your revenue accurately and helps you to understand where to invest your app marketing budget to best improve your bottom line.

App monetization solutions

Universal analytics – Allows you to track revenue and in-app purchases.

Mixpanel – has a nice revenue tracking feature.

Tamoco – Allows you to monetize without ads and track your revenue by app, location, user and more.

What you’ll learn: Revenue, CPM, User value, app monetization best practices.

App analytics insights: Forecasts, marketing allocation, which kind of user is most valuable to your app business.

Conclusion

• Data is the most important thing to hypothesize, measure and test your app business model.
• There are many platforms that you’ll need to paint a complete picture.
• Data is effective in measuring how users find and download your app.
• An effective app retention strategy leverages user data.
• Engagement can be quantified and this is helpful to hypothesize.
• In-app monetization will benefit from data. Use it to understand how to improve your revenue.

Do you make the most of in app analytics? Have you got a reliable data strategy to inform your app’s business decisions?

Everything you need to know about using push notifications to boost app engagement.

Mobile push notifications form a crucial part of any app engagement strategy. To keep your audience engaged and improve retention you’ll need to communicate with your users. There’s no better way to do this than mobile push.

Investing time and money into a push notification strategy is vital for apps that want to keep their users engaged. But, you must be savvy about when and how you send them.

Let’s say your mobile app has 100,000 downloads. On average after just one day you can expect your audience retention rate to be around 20%. After ten days this figure drops to 7.5%. After ninety days this figure, for most mobile apps, falls to around 2%.

That’s why you need an effective mobile app engagement strategy that includes valuable in-app notifications.

What is a mobile push notification?

A mobile push notification is an app engagement solution that delivers a notification to the home screen of an app user. This notification is delivered based on specific targeting criteria.

Targeting criteria has developed significantly since the origins of push notifications. Using customer retention tools apps can now adopt a mobile app push notification strategy that provides high ROI and significantly improves app engagement.”

A push notification strategy forms a crucial part of improving app engagement. It’s an effective way to boost engagement when applied correctly.

KPIs that lead to engagement

When sending push notifications there’s a few key KPIs that you’ll want to look at. It’s important to ask yourself – which aspects of my app engagement strategy am I trying to improve with these notifications?

• Number of active users
• Retention rate
• Session length
• Session rates

You must keep these in mind when considering your push notification strategy.

Around 70% of users opt-in for push notifications

Push notifications almost double app retention rates

But actually, as impressive as these statistics are, there is much room for improvement. One look at your phone and you realise how bad apps actually are at communicating with you via push notifications. This only serves to demonstrate the opportunity for the apps can take their app push notification strategy to the next level.

Providing an opt-in experience

The best push notification strategies include a sound opt-in experience for the mobile app user. Notifications do distract users from their daily routines. Therefore, your users must expect this to happen from the first moment they open your app.

The last thing that you’ll want to do is annoy your users. That’s why it’s important to explain your push notification strategy. You only have one chance to get this right. Explain your push notification strategy badly and none of your users will opt-in. Lack clarity and your users won’t be happy when they receive notifications they weren’t expecting.

A note on spam

One of the worst things that you can do is to spam your users with push notifications. The entire point of this article is to help you to craft a push notification strategy that puts the user experience at the forefront.

Mindlessly spamming your users will lead to huge disengagement – despite many push notification services saying otherwise.

Remember that everything you do with your app and everything that you want to achieve should create value for the app users. Fundamentally this is the best way to think when creating any kind of mobile strategy.

Relevancy is key

That leads me on very nicely to relevancy in push notification strategies. Whether you’re sending ios push notifications or android push notifications, you need to think about one important factor – relevancy.

This involves understanding your app users. A good push notification service will deliver you with valuable insights around your app users each time you push to them. This way you can very quickly build up a complex persona of what your user wants and how they interact with your app. But more on that later.

Relevancy means communicating with your users in the best possible micro-moment.

That means delivering push notifications only when it is relevant for the user. Place your user experience at the center of everything you do. Figure out the optimal micro-moment, and ensure that notifications are only used at these relevant times.

There are multiple methods of figuring out what these moments are for your users. But the best way is using data.

The more complex your push strategy is – that is the more powerful the targeting options, the more powerful the app insights that you’ll get from the service.

Personalisation and location-based push

So, before we look at specific examples, let’s look at how you can create the best push notification strategy. Along with the individual targeting options that help create the optimal user experience.

Notification timing

One of the most important things to consider when creating your push notification strategy. App engagement strategies have developed beyond only asking when the best time of day to send push notifications.

One of the quickest ways to lose users is by annoying them with notifications when they don’t want to receive them. It sounds obvious but so many apps get this wrong.

That’s why it’s important to understand the best moment to reach your users. App developers must also choose a service that allows you to fine-tune push notification delivery.

As mentioned, we’re not just talking about the time of day. Whilst it’s a fundamental way to tailor delivery it’s just the beginning of getting the timing right.

Here’s a classic example of a personalized push notification. But to engage you app users in 2017 you’ll need to do better.

Timing includes location. Timing a notification to deliver when the user is a specific situation allows you to engage on a personal level, and ensure that you maintain communication effectiveness.

It’s in these micro-moments that you’ll be able to create value for your mobile app users, keep them engaged and improve the app experience.

Of course, it may take a little while to understand which are the best moments to reach your users. That’s why testing exists. Eventually, you’ll learn the perfect timing for your push notification strategy.

Segmentation

It’s important to choose which users should receive your notifications. Don’t just blindly send notifications to your entire audience as in the example above. Improving mobile engagement requires you to be savvy about who receives them. The better your segmentation capabilities, the better your push notification strategy will be.

This means segmenting your users based on how they have previously responded to push. It also includes how they use your app or services. Most push notification delivery tools allow you to do this.

If you want to take this even further (and you should), then you can segment your audience based on their historical location or behavior. But essentially, this allows you to reach the users that are most likely to engage with your push notifications.

Once you get to this level of user segmentations you can ensure that you deliver push notifications to relevant users. Not only will this reduce the number of annoyed users, it will also help you to create tailored communication with the users that you do target. Improving the user retention and keeping your mobile app users engaged!

Frequency

How often should you send notifications as part of an effective strategy? As a general rule of thumb, less is more until you have a sound understanding of your users and exactly how your app functions.

You should be searching for a push notification service provider that allows you to create a push strategy with frequency caps. Push notification delivery limits based on location is even better.

Push notification frequency largely depends on the type of app. If it’s an app in which the average user doesn’t spend a lot of time then it will be counterproductive to send notifications frequently. You’d be much better off understanding exactly the right moment to communicate, segment your users as much and possible and personalize the message to boost engagement and revenue.

If you have a shopping, lifestyle or similar app then it is understandable that you would be communicating with them more regularly. But that’s not an excuse to take advantage. Ultimately the best app push notification strategies prioritize quality over quantity. They understand exactly how often to push to their users.

Deep linking

This all become pretty worthless if you don’t think about where you want your user to end up inside your app. The relevant function in your app should open from the notification

This is where you can be creative and provide an experience that makes sense based on the content that you have in the push notification. You can get really smart and personalize the experience even further by using different endpoints for different user segments.

Ultimately think about deep linking and ensure that your push notification service provider can adapt to specific requests and end points. Make sure that you push notification service allows you to be flexible around deep linking as a minimum requirement. Insights around push notifications and mobile user experience

Your mobile app engagement strategy and your push notification strategy should influence each other. Understanding how can be difficult unless you get into the data mindset.

You can learn a lot about your app users by sending them notifications. If the targeting criteria are highly specific then the insights that you’ll generate from the push notification campaign will also be specific.

Precise data sets mean that you can adapt and learn as you develop your push notification model. As you learn more about your users you’ll understand how to boost engagement even further. Mobile app testing and learning is the key to any marketing strategy and it’s no different for push notifications.

The insights you’ll gain from communicating and engaging with your users will extend to other aspects of your app strategy as well as helping you to improve the mobile user experience.

The future of in-app communication

Push notifications are more than just a pop-up on your phone. If you don’t abuse the trust that your users give you then they can be an extremely valuable tool to improve app engagement.

User engagement should be at the top of every developer’s priority list. Ensuring that your mobile app audience gets the most relevant notifications in the best possible micro-moment builds trust with users and can have far-reaching benefits into other aspects of your mobile app strategy.

Conclusion – An in-app notification checklist for app developers

• Your opt-in experience is just as important as your push notification experience.
• Put your user first and understand how they use your app
• Relevancy is the most important factor when choosing a strategy
• Choose a push notification provider that allows you to leverage location into your strategy. The right mobile engagement platform can make a huge difference to results.
• Think post notification click.
• Data and insights are your best friend. Learn and grow.