The Kumulos team provide advice on how to maximise engagement using push notifications

Push Notifications one of the most effective ways of driving recency, frequency and higher mobile app engagement.  Used well, push notifications, and in-app messages, can drive up to 20 per cent greater app engagement, reduce attrition and drive more profit from your apps.

But just having push notifications installed within your app isn’t enough to guarantee success. You have to work at it.  How successful you are at driving users to enable push notifications at first install (30 per cent success is a good number) and how you drive push notification campaigns is what will make a difference.

Relevance of push notifications

Delivering the right content, to the right user, at the right time is one of the most important drivers of success from your mobile app. For this to be effective you need to carefully segment your customer base and use intelligent segmentation tools to build different customer groups.  You then need to build the specific rules that will deliver that relevant content to that segment when they are most ready for your content.

Buying preference

Know your customer and you’ll sell to that customer. Using analytics to understand their historic behaviour and how/when they have consumed a push notification from you in the past. It’s likely that different market segments will react to and interact with your push notifications in different ways. Modelling your push automation systems against this behaviour will have a huge impact on the engagement you’ll get.

Driving intent into the purchase phase

Engaging someone just as they hit the intent to buy with a well targeted offer is one of the best ways to drive them to buy from you.  A well targeted push notification just after they have been browsing your products and services but not bought will give you a huge lift in your sales funnel. There are many push notification services with powerful cross platform engines that can drive very clever re-marketing campaigns. You can combine push notifications with in-app messaging to create very effective engagement campaigns. Kumulos award-winning messaging platform gives you the flexibility of setting up both push notifications and in-app messaging in the same dashboard.

Not every metric is born equal

It’s always tempting to measure and judge success based on the measures most easily available. More important is to study and understand what the true purchase lead indicators are and then build your measures of success around those.  Be clear what part your push notification programs play in that buying funnel and ensure that the metrics you are using analyse push notification activity results against the specific objectives you set. Be clear that it is push notifications that are driving that and not other factors. A/B testing where you have a control group receiving no push notifications is probably the most effective technique here.

Measure/Refine/Measure

Treat this as an ongoing exercise. It’s important to continually measure and refine your push notifications campaigns to make sure you optimize their effectiveness. Buyers behaviour changes – your push notifications need to continually adjust to fit. It’s also important to continually raise the bar of what you expect. Complacency is death to progress.

Push Notification Services have come a long way in the last few years. There is a broad choice of Push Notification Services out there to choose from. Some are very strong at rule base automation engines and intelligent algorithms that are great at predicting behaviour and intent. Others are incredibly strong at analytics and segmentation. Some focus hard on delivery with SMS fail-over or virtual in-box technology that keep the push notifications visible longer. No one covers all areas. Which one is best will depend on many things, including the size of your data set and most probably how deep your pockets are.

Looking to pick one of the best Push Notification Services, then Business of Apps regularly publish a list of the top push notifications providers.

Try push notifications now using Kumulos app

Want to put Kumulos multi-award winning push notifications feature to the test in real time without integrating our SDK into your app? No Problem!

Just start a free trial and download the Kumulos App to see just how powerful and easy Kumulos is! The Kumulos App is free to download and use. It only takes seconds to setup. You can send unlimited push notifications while creating as many circular and polygon geofences as you want. You can pair as many devices as you want with each Kumulos App account. And, you can build unlimited numbers of notification automations.