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Industry Insight

Push Notifications Could Be Better At Targeting The Appropriate Audience

10/3/2018

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by Marry Ann, Guest Contributor

In a survey on US smartphone users, 52% of the respondents said that push messages have improved in terms of relevancy. While 38% believed that there is no improvement, 10% firmly stated that push messages have gone worse these days.
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Underlying statement: People are becoming more aware, and their perception has improved towards push notifications.







Publishers should get to know their audience first to improve their push notifications.



However, there is still a considerable population who is unimpressed by the content and value proposition of the push messages. Therefore, there is still a requisite for the improvement of push notifications in terms of relevancy.

What kind of push messages are people seeing these days?
By tracking the in-app behavior of users, publishers send notifications based on different in-app activities. The above-mentioned survey also revealed that the most valuable notifications were ones that were triggered by a user’s personal preferences, not the in-app behaviors. Almost 50 percent of respondents believe that preference-based notifications enabled them to use an app more. While the alerts triggered by in-app behavior were practically irrelevant to them.

How many push notifications users want to receive?
If you want to kill your push campaigns, just start bombarding push messages as many as you can. There is no threshold, but consumers often stay comfortable with an app that gives them limited yet timely push messages. A survey by localytics suggests that users will disable the notifications if they are receiving between 2-5 messages in a week. In addition, a considerable proportion would simply stop using the app if they received more than 6 messages in a week’s time.
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Information and Image source: localytics.com

How can you become more relevant with your push targeting?
It is straightforward; a mere reliance on in-app behaviors is insufficient to target your prospects appropriately. Sending push notifications based on in-app behavior may be most disturbing to people because of poor targeting and remarketing.
The most effective way to make your messages relevant to the prospects would be through tracking multiple human conducts in relation to different demographics. Do not settle on single demographics. Try utilizing multiple factors for targeting the users with different A/B testing methodologies:

1. Experiment with one or two behavior-based pushes in a week
There are still the 90% of people who would not mind receiving 1-2 behavior-based notifications in a week. You can experiment with your behavior based messages in this period and observe the reactions against the same. This makes the trialing comparatively safer than merely pushing without any study on the performance metrics.

2. Provide as many preferences
As a significant population of users favor preference-based pushing, it is always a safer option to ask for as many preferences. Instead of randomly pushing location and behavior-based triggers, offer them choices to receive specific types of notifications. For instance, a flight-booking app might consider offering preferences like fare-drop alert, new offers on the selected route, flash sale of tickets and questions related to specific destinations.
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Source: skyscanner.com

Just do not forget to keep an account of all the notifications sent according to a particular user-behavior or preference. Because, the survey also found that, the more notifications you send, the more likely people will deactivate in-app push notifications or bounce-off completely.

3. Experiment with geolocation-based targeting
Location-based pushing is one of the most preferred types after the preference-based notifications. However, not all businesses are suitable for such kind of push notifications. You should deploy this category only when your business is available in multiple physical locations. If you are in a business with physical locations, geo-triggering is worth an experiment.

This is how Uber maintains the relevancy by pushing location-based offers in only the areas where these offers are applicable. Just imagine the scene if it pushes an US-based offer in London.

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Source: engadget.com

Check out this amazing geofencing at the airport, which no user can afford to block. Who would not want to receive a useful location-based notification like this? Start pushing informative content like this and you will never be irrelevant with your notifications.
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Source: medium.com

4. Try notifications for resuming on something that users left-off
People often get distracted while using an app, and start doing something else in the process. Let us say, you open the Netflix app to watch a movie, but then something distracts you. The phone rings, and you get into overlook on the phone. By the time you disconnect the phone, someone calls your name, and I walk out to check it. During this whole process, I completely fail to overlook what I was watching and get distracted over other things.

That scenario often pops out when we are using apps. However, Netflix is one app that helps me remember to finish a movie. This example explains how the idea of making life easier for your users can make your notifications appropriately relevant.

When you are designing reminder notifications, you might have to consider few things in your mind like ‘are they still busy with distractions? Would your reminder help them or just disturb them? ’Answering these questions would aid you in determining a precise time for sending the reminder messages.

On what ground should you target the audience?
To work out an additional relevancy in your pushed information, you should segment the audience on distinctive profiles before sending the corresponding notifications. You can create segments based on the demographics like –
  • Time zone
  • Geo-location
  • Purchase history
  • Browsing history
  • Type of browser
  • Type of device
  • Type of traffic: Direct or referred traffic
  • Type of visitor: New or Repeat

You can utilize different kinds of push notifications to target users on all types of devices. For example-
  • Target your app users with in-app notifications.
  • Target mobile users with Mobile push notifications.
  • Target desktop users with Browser Push notifications.

Based on the audience segmentation and type of your business, you can feed the information like-
  • Live score
  • News Flash
  • Price drop of a product
  • Weather forecast
  • Change in flight schedule
  • New Episode uploaded and many more

Considering consumer benefit as a priority, you can also utilize push marketing for achieving your promotional goals at the same time. You can use push notifications for achieving the marketing goals like-
  • Promoting  new products on an eCommerce site
  • Promoting flash sale on products, flights and hotel booking
  • Notifying readers about a new blog post
  • Reminding an user of abandoned cart
  • Pushing a Back-in-stock alert and many more

Whether you are pushing a new content or a location-based alert, users cherish something that is interesting for them. These points to the idea that publishers should get to know their audience first. Doing so imparts a deep knowledge of what users want to see and what is meaningful to them. Ultimately, it should be something that makes them return to the app.
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Author bio:

Marry Ann is a branding consultant for PushMaze, a service that lets you send trackable push notifications for users. She mainly passionate about building brands in all aspect of online marketing.
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