3 most common Push Notification mistakes that brands make

Authored by Chris Higgins, Senior Vice President, Marketing at Netcore Cloud.

Push notifications are a very powerful communication channel: low cost, delivered directly to the user’s screen, rich media and deep linking capabilities, and good engagement rates.

But many brands struggle to unlock the full potential of their notifications, failing to develop a comprehensive strategy for the channel that includes planning, creative and technical approaches.

The three most common mistakes that brands make with push notifications are sending too many notifications, not optimising the delivery, and not defining goals in advance.

Sending too many notifications

This is by far the biggest mistake – especially sending too many notifications to people who don’t want to get lots of notifications.

Push notifications can be an excellent communication channel, helpful to both retailers and customers. But if you annoy your customers and they block your notifications, you have lost the channel.

You don’t need to blast out every small update or piece of news, even when each product manager insists that their message is ‘relevant for everyone’.

The smartest approach is to segment your audience based on how they engage with the app. A user who regularly checks a piece of information might appreciate getting that information in a push notification regularly. An irregular user might prefer only notifications about sales, or a product they looked at being back in stock.

Relevancy is a key concept here, and comes from understanding your customer. If I mostly look at men’s t-shirts, then showing me info on men’s tshirts is a safe bet. Just because I looked at handbags once, for a gift, doesn’t mean I want push notifications about handbags.

A best practice is also to allow opt in/out from different types of notifications, so customers can help with their own segmentation.

Not optimising push notification delivery

Many brands struggle to get good delivery of their push notification. The solutions include more optins, improving app engagement, enhanced delivery systems.

The simplest solution is to get more opt-ins, and the most important element is to show the value of getting these notifications. Many apps ask upfront about notifications, without first explaining what the notifications are or what value they will provide. A few ideas are to gamify the experience – giving points or some reward for opting in, or to explain how valuable the notifications can be – “learn about flash sales before everyone else”.

Next, your delivery rates are linked to the level of engagement with the app. The longer the time since a user last opened your app, the lower your delivery rate. The best delivery rates can be in the 24 hours since the app was used, and drop significantly if an app is not opened for weeks. You can use orchestrated journeys with an automation tool to deliver relevant messaging to recent users. You can also segment out inactive app users and first explore other channels like email and SMS to bring them back to your app.

The other solutions are more technical. Relying only on FCM/APN will not provide the best delivery for many groups of customers. Particularly in regions with higher levels of android ownership, the processing and delivery of notifications becomes more dependent on the handset brand and model. Many CPaaS providers have developed their own systems for enhancing delivery. 

For example, Netcore Cloud’s SmartPushutilises multiple gateways in parallel and then deduplicates on the device to improve the delivery rate. The system also improves delivery to users that are offline or experiencing network issues. If push notifications are an important channel that drives revenue, it is worth exploring enhanced delivery systems.

Not defining goals and tracking metrics

A common mistake made by brands is to send push notifications and then report on the outcomes, rather than set goals in advance. Sending these notifications just because you can, contributes to all the above mistakes. 

All communication channels, including notifications, should stem from business objectives. For example are you trying to increase sales, onboard more customers, reduce churn, promote a new feature or action? What are your current benchmarks? What are you aiming to achieve? What is the role or contribution expected from each of your channels?

Next, how will you measure the results? What is your attribution modelling?

Careful planning of goals and metrics allows you better track the influence of push notifications. Many users may see a push notification and dismiss it, and later take action directly in the app, or after a reminder on another channel like email or SMS. By planning segmented campaigns, you can measure the impact of your notifications beyond clicks.

Setting goals also forces you to question more deeply the variance in outcomes. Let’s say you have a flash sale and set targets for both revenue amount, and % of total sale revenue that should come via push notifications. If your target was 25% but the result was 15%, what happened? Which other channel over-achieved and why?