If you’ve got a mobile application, then you need to know what push notifications are – and no, they are not the same as text messages. Push notifications can be an effective marketing tool for anyone with a mobile app, because they help you stay in touch with your users. Just make sure you use this strategy carefully. If you overdo it you can cause users to mute your notifications, which you’ll want to avoid.
Although there are lots of similarities, push notifications are not the same as text messages. Both of these messages go directly to the user’s phone and look similar on their lock screen, but they’re still very different. For a push notification to show up on a lock screen properly, you need to have a restricted character limit.
Text messages can be longer because the user can open it up to read the entire message. But if your push notification gets cut off on the lock screen, it’s going to hurt your conversions.That’s why push notifications with fewer words have higher click-through rates.
The value
Push notifications can provide assistance and value to app users e.g. provide sport scores and news on their lock screen, utility broadcasts like traffic and weather, flight check-in and connections data and more. Banks and vendors also use push notifications to send important transactional data to users.
So what are the do’s and don’ts of push notifications?
- Do segment AND micro-segment your audience. The more relevant the information to the user, the better.
- Find the right time and frequency. Dive into the data and discover when your users are most responsive, then include that into your app marketing strategy.
- Location, location, location. Nearly half of mobile app users opt-in to both push notifications and location-based content, and when used in tandem, they can create extremely engaging and useful experiences.
- Reminders: If your app has any form of scheduling in it, people will want to be alerted when their schedule calls for it. When they see they have an event coming up, they will click through to find out details about it.
- Excessive usage of notifications will lead to spamming and the user unsubscribing from your notifications.
- Not all decives are capable of handling multiple push notifications within a particular app, which means only the current notification will be displayed and others won’t be seen.
Happy marketing!
The Affiliate Management Team.
