Push Notifications Best Practices for 2021: Do’s and Dont’s

Upshot.ai
6 min readMar 26, 2021

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In today’s app dominant market, nudging the users is crucial in several aspects. It can help improve retention, increase revenue, boosting DAU’s and mobile app engagement. Push notifications are highly effective and are a reliable choice for app marketers to achieve great results.

With the increasing usage of push notifications, if you are not following a proper approach, there are high chances that your users will end up bombarded with both relevant and irrelevant messages on their mobiles and browsers. It is advisable to have a customized strategy according to user requirements and the nature of their business.

Marketers need to look for effective ways to engage their users, following some of the best practices.

Today, we will share some do’s and don’ts while setting up the push campaigns for your users.

Do’s and Don’ts of Push Notifications

Do’s

1. Effective Segmentation to deliver more value

Push notifications should be targeted to specific users as per the different requirements and scenarios. It’s essential to get your user segments right to send the push that will match the users’ needs. This is the one golden rule which can not be ignored, and it helps reduce push opt-outs to a great extent since users are not bombarded with irrelevant notifications.

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Segment your users based on their user behavior in the app/ website interactions, user profiles, and historical data so that you can eventually improve your click rate for your push notifications. Moreover, personalizing push messages always begins with a good segmentation strategy.

2. Personalize your message

Who doesn’t love notifications addressing them with a personal touch? Personalization can be addressing a user with their first name, suggesting new products based on their previous searches, or any other suggestions based on the context and historical data.

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It will improve the push notifications’ response rate, and users will never feel that these are irrelevant or spam. But, always be careful while using personalized data as data privacy is an important aspect these days. You need to ensure you follow the rules formulated by GDPR and other regulators.

3. Identify the right time to nudge

Another critical aspect to keep in mind while sending the push is “the right time.” Find out the best time to send push messages to the users. While scheduling the campaigns, consider the geographical location of your users as well. Apart from it, observing the active sessions happening in the app/web for a given time will also help you narrow down the appropriate campaign time.

To find out what timing is the best, you can also try A/B testing your messages. Push opens from previous campaigns can also be helpful.

4. Use Rich Media

Rich notifications will allow you to incorporate images, short videos, action buttons, and icons within the notification. Since users won’t pay attention to all the push notifications, a message rich in media content will grab their attention. We can use different media types as per the business use case; for example, send a push message and the image of the latest product released on the app or add a badge icon on the push, saying you have earned a badge recent activity.

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5. Come up with Good Content

To convey the message in a meaningful way and keep it crisp and spot-on, one must use good content. It can address the user with their names, use humor, or use some attention-grabbing text like announcing some great discounts, now or never deals, etc.

Don’ts

1. Avoid sending generic content

Sending generic content to all the users irrespective of different segments will reduce the push campaign’s effectiveness and cause users to feel that they are getting spammed, resulting in more push opt-outs.

2. Don’t send notifications at improper times

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Nudging a user with a push notification at the wrong time will only interrupt a user. Bad timing can turn even well-crafted push notifications into a disturbance no matter how great your message content is. Even if your users find your app helpful, poorly timed notifications can negatively affect your user retention and more inclined to abandon or uninstall the app.

3. Don’t send too many notifications

Do remember that users are receiving a lot of push notifications from other apps also. Instead of sending too many notifications per day, aim for quality over quantity and include rich images, useful content, deep links, and emojis to achieve good performance for push notifications.

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4. Don’t forget to localize your message

Although it’s applicable only if you have users in multiple geographies, addressing users in their local/preferred languages enables higher engagement. Localizing the push notifications will help attain more clicks and conversions.

Closing thoughts

Following the above-mentioned best practices will help you create an effective push notifications strategy. One crucial aspect to keep in mind while following these methods is to use the right engagement tool to execute the above vision.

We want to take this opportunity to introduce you to one of the most potent omnichannel engagement and analytics tools called Upshot.ai. This revolutionary customer engagement platform is used by Fortune 1000 companies such as Amway, ITC, CBS, UHG, and Tenet healthcare to increase user engagement, retention, and monetization dramatically.

App analytics — Upshot.ai
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Upshot uses advanced analytics and segmentation engines to create tailored target segments. It has various options to customize the push notifications for both mobile and web. Leveraging upshot.ai, you can create diverse push notifications like images, banners, and other styles while localizing the text for all the languages in a breeze. Upshot dashboard can tell you the users’ activity levels in an hour/day/week format so that you can identify the right time to nudge the users for different segments. Upshot action reports will give you the push notifications performance results and many more insights for your next campaigns.

Also Read: 5 best tips and strategies for a new app launch in 2021

About Upshot.ai :

Upshot.ai is an omnichannel, user engagement, and gamification platform that helps digital product owners and marketers improve their product adoption and conversions. Fortune 1000 companies such as GE, UHG, Puma, Sony, ITC, Tenet healthcare are using Upshot.ai and observed a massive increase in product adoption YoY increment in revenues.

Book a demo of the most comprehensive user engagement and gamification platform to achieve your digital product goals. Join our communities for more insights, guides, and best practices that keep you updated with proven strategies and tips to supercharge your campaigns.

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Upshot.ai
Upshot.ai

Written by Upshot.ai

Upshot.ai is an omnichannel, customer engagement and gamification platform that helps businesses to create amazing experiences to deepen customer relationships.

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