Forge a meaningful connection with your customers through app’s Push Notifications

What is a push notification?

It’s a powerful communication channel of a mobile app. Push is a pop-up message sent to customer’s smartphone, can be viewed from the device lock screen. It’s designed based on a real-time event and tends to trigger immediate engagement.

Push notification is a permission-based channel. Your customers only receive notifications when they’re opted-in during the app installation. This makes push extremely a powerful engagement / communication tool.

How do they look like?

Native iOS push notification design

iOS push notification

Why you want to leverage on push notification?

Push message engage customers based on their interaction/ event– triggered. While emails drive 624 percent higher conversion responses for the same number of sends as compared to “batch and blast” emails. Even more staggering, triggered mobile push notifications drive 2,770 percent higher conversion rates.

The cost to send each push notification is $0.0005 only (excluding the development and support costs), while the costs to send an SMS is $0.10.

In today world of social media and smartphone cultures where we’re more connected than before, push notifications enable real-time communications to boost engagement with your customers. Through timely and personalised messaging, your business can–

• keep customers engaged, updated, and connected with your brand that drive retention and increase task conversion, and ultimately boost your ROI growth.
• Create seamless customer experience by reducing frictions in the moments that matter along the customer journey.

Notification types

There’re two types of push classification based on the intends and messaging– service and marketing.

Service notifications

They’re messages sent based on customer’s interaction with your app, or real-time event. Its natures are factual, informational for administrative purposes and not promoting or selling any product/ service.

Often, service/ transactional notifications are part of a task / process triggered by user action. The intend of this messaging is to reduce frictions for customers and improve connected experience by engaging them– providing important info in timely manner. Service/ transactional push messages include

• password reset
• one-time-password alerts
• card delivery status updates
• payment/ deposit

Marketing notifications

These are messages sent for promotional, advertising and generating revenue purposes. Marketing notifications often use fluffy words and fancy images. Marketing message examples–

• new features showcase (utilisation messages)
• new interest rate promotion
• special offers, flash deal

How your customers feel about push alert?

Admittedly, push notifications have a high impact on an app’s ability to engage customers. It’s our collective responsibility to use push alert wisely because its nature of being more intrusive to the customer mobile phone experience with its possible distracting sound/ vibration and direct engagement.

Frequency matter is crucial

According to one survey, 46% of participants would disable push notification if an app sent between 2–5 messages in a single week. And 32% participants would stop using the app all together if they received between 6 and 10 messages in a week’s time. Hence, big corporations like banks avoid using push alert for marketing purposes to prevent customers tuning off push notification on their device.

Eight push notification best practice

I put together a list of the best practice I learned from the banking industry I’ve been working for currently.

1. Personalisation

Personalisation can increase engagement and improve the user experience. Personalise push notifications with customer’s name, preferences/ interests, behaviour, status, location.

2. Timely

Send messages that are relevant and timely, based on customer action, consider the recipient’s time zone, such as avoid sending notifications when users are likely to be asleep at night.

This also means frequency count, don’t sent too many messages because customers could unsubscribe your notifications. Frequency of messaging need to match customers expectation, potentially we need their inputs to understand their preferences. Focus on the quality over quantity of your messaging.

3. Actionable

Keep your messages clear and concise to ensure your customers understand the purpose of the notification, i.e., use a clear call-to-action to encourage them to take action for the next step.

4. Write succinct messaging

To get the best click rate, keep the message length 10 or fewer words (50 characters) with 8.8 % click rate. Follow by 11–20 words with 4.9% and greater than 20 words is 3.2%. The key takeaway is a succinct and clear push message has a higher click-through rate by a large margin.

A push notification has limited real-estate of displaying the full message and count in characters (chars). This limitation is depending on the screen size of a smartphone, and differentiate between iPhone and Android.

The ideal character length for a push notification as of 2022:
headline: 35 chars
Body copy: 120–150 chars

On the latest iPhone and Android, the number of characters for a full display before a message got truncated are

• iPhone, headline: 48 chars, body copy: 256 chars
• Android, headline: 65 chars, body copy: 240 chars

5. Add values for customers

Ensure that your push notifications provide value to the recipient by explaining the intend of notifications. This can include

• a deep-link to the exact location you want to take your customers and to reduce frictions in their experience
• a reminder to guide customers to complete the task/ meet criteria so that they can receive maximum bonus interest
• loyalty rewards
• Security purposes such as keeping their account/ money safe from fraudsters

6. Marketing opt-in/out setting

• Decouple account management, security alert functionality from marketing notifications
• State explicitly how and where to opt-in/out and make it easy for them to do so. It will help to build a trust in your brand.

7. A/B testing

Use A/B testing to test or experiment different push messaging with different segments of customers, and track the results to understand what’s working and what’s not. This can help optimise your push notifications for better results.

8. Have a clear guidelines between service vs marketing messaging

• Define the messaging principles and guardrails for each notification type. This include determine the language such as trigger words and tone of voice of the message’s headline, call-to-action, and body copy.
• Set the intend, framing and have the right tone based on the notification types
• Consider your audience according to the intend you’ve defined and target the relevant segments of customer
• Continually reviewing the messages you send to align with legislation changes and changing customer habits by consulting your team and/ or the industry experts early

References

1. Westpac’s Push Principles, 2019
2. Westpac’s Service vs Marketing
3. https://venturebeat.com/marketing/study-shows-triggered-push-notifications-are-2770-better-than-batch-messages/
4. https://uplandsoftware.com/localytics/resources/blog/the-inside-view-how-consumers-really-feel-about-push-notifications/
5. https://uplandsoftware.com/localytics/resources/blog/ideal-push-message-length/