Push Notifications To Increase Mobile App Users Engagement and Retention
The mobile application development industry is getting more competitive day by day where the task of retaining users have become more and more difficult. Successfully developed and launching your app is great.
However, it is also important that your app will get noticed, downloaded, and actually used by users. An effective marketing strategy for your mobile application will not only involve getting more users on-board but also to keep them engaged and becomes a loyal user of the app.
A - OVERVIEW
One of the most common reasons leading to the failure of an app is due to high app abandonment and churn rate which means that users don’t find your app useful or worthy, and they abandon or completely stop using the app after downloading.
The critical task at hand is to increase app retention rate by incorporating various methods such as: optimize for an easy onboarding process, email marketing, offers and incentive app program, or push notifications etc.
It’s always said that it costs less and is easier to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones. Push notifications is the one method that can certainly be implemented to effectively engage and retain app users.
Statistics have shown that implementing push notification (in a correct way, of course) can help increase app retention rate by 56% [1] to as much as 180% improvement [2].
However, it is worth noting that push notifications should be implemented in a way that users will find them relevant and useful. Drowning users in push notifications will make them turn off notifications instead.
Also, push notification should improve the app experience for users and help you understand their interests based on the way they respond to the notifications. Thus, it is important that you have a well-defined plan on how to incorporate push notifications to achieve your goals of retaining app users as well as increase engagement.
In this article, we take a look at some key points which will help you successfully implement push notification to achieve the maximum benefits which it can bring to your app, as follow:
User segmentation
The first thing to do when you start planning to implement push notification should be to segregate or segment your target users. Your app target audiences consist of many different people who belonged to different demographics. Each demographic on its own would have different interests and requirements.
Therefore, a one-size-fits-all approach wouldn’t be effective. Push notifications should be customized and sent to users based on their own preferences and app using behaviors.
After segmentation, you can easily choose what kind of notification content is more appropriate to send to each particular demographic group, thus, generating more traffic to your app.
Marketing expertise and economics knowledge is useful and should be applied here. Additionally, Push Notification is also known to improve the lead conversations as well.
Personalization
As mentioned above, notifications should be customized according to app users’ interests and behavior. By personalizing the message, you are making it more relevant to users. With advanced mobile technology, push notification can be easily personalized in order to derive maximum benefits out of it.
For example: with an eCommerce app, a push notification sent to customers about a promo/discount regarding their abandoned shopping cart items is a great way to re-engage customers to use the app as well as increasing retention rate. The message through push notification should be highly personalized and relevant.
Furthermore, it’s also important that you keep track of how app users responding to the message for their own benefits. Once you have the result based on data collected, you can customize and make the messages to become more specific and relevant. Additionally, you can also incorporate rich notification in your plan of using notification to engage users.
Rich notification is a more interactive way to deliver notification by incorporating other elements such as images, media including audio and video into the messages.
App users would be provided with a more pleasant app using experience when receiving more attention, and as a result, app engagement rate will also increase.
Quality vs. Quantity
Implement push notifications incorrectly by sending app users too many irrelevant messages or notifications will have an opposite effect as users will deem the notifications annoying and turn off push notification for your app instead. Therefore, push notifications should be relevant to the category as well as the service and products which your app provide.
Besides, it’s worth mentioning that sending push notification at random intervals is an improper way to implement it. Hence, you should conduct user behavior research and have a well-defined, consistent frequency of sending push notification. As a general rule, regardless of the frequency and time which you send out notification, your message should always add value and be useful to users.
Re-engage users
One of the most noticeable benefits of push notification is to bring back users on-board and lower app churning rate. It has been found that over 50% of users come back to the app within one month if push notification is enabled.
For instance, in an e-commerce app, sending users push notifications with messages about promotions program and discount can help re-engage users with the app. This is one of the effective marketing tactics which is widely incorporated for mobile app development.
App Metrics Tracking
Based on the results collected from users’ response data, you will get an overview of how well your app performs with all the necessary metrics. Furthermore, based on the results accumulated, you can perform A/B testing and other testing and determine which strategy would yield better results to follow and bring improvement in push notification. This would help increase users’ loyalty.
Let’s go back to the example of an e-commerce app – from the data gathered on the user’s behavior – you should have a detailed picture of how users using your app to shop. Another example is: some customers only shop at a specific time span, delivery to the same location, or if users mostly just purchase items belonged to a certain category etc. All these insights gathered can help you customize and personalize the messages to be more user-centric and improve push notification services.
Conclusion
Push notification is considered as one of the most effective ways in mobile app development to engage with new app users, gaining their attention and make them become loyal customers. It is also an effective strategy to re-engage with abandoned users. However, it is important that you have formulated a plan to implement notifications with relevant content and timing to make them useful as well as attractive to customers.
Sidenote:
TP&P Technology is a top mobile app development company in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Contact us today to know more about our software development outsourcing services, specifically the Mobile App Development service (iOS and Android), and see how we can help you effectively implement your mobile development and marketing strategy requirement.
References:
- https://marketingland.com/mobile-app-push-notifications-drive-90-day-retention-rates-by-as-much-as-180-134026
- http://info.localytics.com/blog/app-user-retention-improves-in-the-us
