Push Notifications: 4 Tips to Increase Your Click-Through-Rate

In recent years, there's been a lot of talk about the decrease in push notifications efficiency. At Pushwoosh we've seen during COVID-19 the demand for this communication channel has grown significantly. Why? Push notifications are pretty cheap and allow companies to establish engagement with less resources than with any other channel.

In addition, the attitude towards push notifications has changed dramatically. Before COVID-19 developers were looking for stable solutions that will allow them to send the necessary communication in the most reliable way. Today, many of them are asking for a solution that will help increase the efficiency of their marketing or product department. In this article we've collected 4 features that make push notifications more efficient.

1. Push Notifications with Custom Sound

Push notifications can be used with different goals: to inform, acquire, engage or retain users. In most cases, whether its marketing or transactional campaign, the metric that defines their efficiency is the conversion rate (CR). The sound that accompanies your push delivery plays an important role in this and can significantly improve the metric. All notifications play the default sound when they are received. However, both Android and iOS allow developers to experiment with sounds and send custom ones.

Imagine sending a push with the sound of imperial march announcing the premiere of the next Star Wars or informing users that money transferred with a coin sound effect.

In the example of our clients, we've seen it makes your communication more interesting and can improve your conversion rate by 5-10%.

How Can You Do It?

For iOS: add your custom sound file in the main bundle of your app and use the “ios_sound”:”filename.xxx” parameter in the the createMessage API request. Make sure the file name contains the extension.

For Android: add the sound file in the “res/raw” folder of your project and use the “android_sound”:”filename” parameter in the createMessage API request. In the Android case you don't need to include the file extension.

2. Silent Push

What is a Silent Push? It's basically a hidden instruction sent to your users' devices with no alerts, sounds, or badges. It quietly delivers the needed data to your users application and allows your app. to act upon that data in the background.

With it, you can send information that doesn't require your users' attention and gain valuable information about them.

• Track how many users are uninstalling your app because of the push notifications 
• Clean up the user base. Each time a silent push is sent, all invalid or non-existent push tokens will be removed from our database
• Know how your users are reacting to the push notifications they are receiving

3. Behaviour-based Push Notifications

Customization and personalization become super important when we talk about successful push notifications. There's nothing new in the fact that user-focused and well-timed messages result in higher engagement rates and increase customer retention. Today's solutions allow developers to automate the whole communication process and send the needed notifications automatically each time the event happens.

This means that each time your users perform a particular action that you labelled as an event, they will receive a push notification. All these makes messages more relevant, contextual and timely.

In the end, it helps to:

• Boost cross-selling;
• Increase opt-in;
• Onboard users more effectively;
• Recover abandoned carts; and
• Collect positive reviews

4. Geo-targeted Push Notifications

Geo-targeted push notifications allows you to establish a kind of virtual fence around the specific geographic area. Each time your app's users approach, enter or exit this area, you can send the needed push message to them.

This feature is most relevant to marketing/sales departments of shops, restaurants and other offline businesses. As to the radius settings, big businesses usually go big. Small businesses that target a specific, narrow audience typically establish their business location as a milestone. 

You can also set a duration for your geofenced push notifications to be sent out. If you want to start a campaign to promote a product or a service, maybe targeted at a specific audience during a specific time of the year, this tool can come incredibly handy.

For example, if you work with a Starbucks brand, you can set up Geo-targeted push notifications each time your potential customers pass by their locations across the country and inform them about your special autumn menu or new flavour.

Conclusion

Push notifications still play a big role in mobile and web app's product management. They can perform notify, engage and convert users into customers. To make it work for you, just note several of the tips and monitor your users reaction.