CX Beats: Push Notifications. How to Make Them Work For Your Business Every Time
Push notifications are an effective tool for businesses to reach customers on their phones, but there are several considerations to make them work. Free push solutions still require maintenance and technical expertise, while opt-ins differ between Android and iOS devices. Apple’s iOS 15 introduced features like focus mode and notification summary, impacting how push messages are delivered. Personalization, relevance, and customer control are crucial to prevent churn. Push notifications offer advantages over email, including higher visibility and quicker turnover.
Episode Transcript:
Sveta: Hi! Hope you are all having a good day. As promised, we are back with another of our live sessions with Dima. Dima is Product Owner and Business Partner here at edna with extensive experience in the filed of digital communication. Hi Dima, how are you doing?
Dmitry: Hi Sveta, I am good thanks. So what do you have in mind for today’s discussion?
Sveta: Well, I have been really looking forward to having this discussion on push notifications with you. You know how push is increasingly gaining traction as a tool for businesses to reach out to their customers directly on their phones. However, there are many companies that want to use push but are not sure how to start their journey. Also, with push there are free as well as paid solutions in the market. How do companies know what works for them?
Dmitry: See the thing is, not all push notifications are the same. There are both free as well as paid push solutions. But the so-called “free” ones are not really free – businesses using them will still need to consider not just the design aspect and segmentation of push, but also the technical nuances, say for example, the number of pushes sent per second. This is a limit to how many free push messages can be shared per second using one single connection to the cloud – about 20. If companies need to send more push notifications than this limit, they will need to maintain numerous connections, network quality, scalability in case of pick loads and keep tracking that IP addresses are not blocked. So to be honest, there is no such thing as a “free” push message.
Sveta: Right… what about customer consent? As far as I know, for most B2C messaging, customer opt-ins are needed, where they explicitly agree to receiving notifications from the business before any message is sent. How is it with push?
Dmitry: You know when it comes to opt-ins, there’s a big difference between Android and iOS devices. Android devices are a little more push-friendly in the sense that push notifications are enabled by default. Customers, of course, always have the option of unsubscribing. With iOS, things are a bit more difficult. Explicit user consent is required before a business can share any notification. Also, on Android they may be grouped by user, whereas for iOS devices, push notifications are grouped by time and app.
Sveta: Has iOS 15’s release last year impacted how push messages are delivered in any way?
Dmitry: Oh yes! You know, Apple has made quite a few changes to how notifications can be received and has given a lot of control to users by introducing the Focus mode and a notifications summary. Earlier, push notifications were always displayed instantly upon receipt, but starting with iOS 15, the user can use the Focus mode to schedule times of day when they don’t want to be disturbed by any notification, and they can only see them after they turn off the Focus mode. These notifications are placed within the Notification Summary, which is a summarized digest of all the incoming messages throughout the day. Once the user comes out of the Focus mode, they can see the messages in the Notification summary.
Sveta: Wow, these features really give control to users. However, this does raise the question of how businesses can reach users with time-sensitive messages like delivery notifications and other critical updates?
Dmitry: Good question! To get around this, Apple has created a Notification Interruption Level. They have introduced four levels of urgency: Active (default), Passive, Time-Sensitive, and Critical. The first two can’t break through the focus mode, but Time-Sensitive and Critical messages can. The Time-Sensitive urgency level is best for transactions and one-time passwords – they are shown immediately after the receipt of the message. The active level, which is subject to snoozing rules, is suitable for marketing notifications. I think it’s a great thing Apple has done, but marketers must ensure that the content they are sharing fits the urgency level. After the first time a Time-Sensitive notification is shown, iOS asks users for permission to continue showing such notifications, so marketers must send only urgent notifications under the Time-Sensitive level to increase the chances of getting the user’s permission.
Hey, let me also tell you having a paid platform gives businesses the opportunity to check if your push messages get into the Notification Summary or not.
Sveta: Wow, those are some major changes!
Dmitry: Oh yes! Also, you know what, iPhone users can open push notification for the full screen with a long touch. This gives brands an opportunity to create engaging custom designs. Custom design can be tricky for Android because of a great variety of devices, screen sizes, brands. If companies choose free solutions (like Firebase), they need to do a lot of testing to make sure that their push notification looks good on all the devices.
Sveta: Got it. Dima, I also wanted to understand, how can push notifications prevent customer churn in a world where gaining and retaining the customer’s attention is becoming more difficult than ever before?
Dmitry: You know the thing is no company today can ignore the power of cross-channel communication. Customers are on different channels and brands that also maintain their official presence on those channels gain a significant edge over peers. Cross-channel communication capabilities is no more a “nice to have” option, it is an absolute must-have. Businesses need to unify all their communication channels to ensure all bases are covered and customers get a frictionless experience. The good thing about push is that it can be easily integrated with existing channels like SMS, Viber, etc. Another advantage of push is its deliverability. Brands can set a cascade to ensure that the messages they send via push e are delivered via a fallback channel if the primary push fails to deliver, for example as a cascade like push > Viber/WhatsApp > SMS.
Oh! They also need to make sure their messages are actually relevant and helpful for their customers. You know how we are all inundated with push messages on a daily basis and don’t even bother to open most. This is because many brands still do a generic blast that goes out to the entire customer database without taking into consideration the customer’s profile, interests, and so on. No wonder customers don’t bother engaging with them. While some customer-focused brands do understand the need to personalize their messages, they don’t go much further than referring to the customer by their first name, or sending them a discount on their birthday! But this just isn’t enough. Customer segmentation is critical. Brands need to segregate customers into different groups based on different criteria – such as their:
location, interests, in-app activity like purchase and browsing history, demographics, their place in the user journey, etc. and then target these groups with messages at the right time and in the right frequency to actually see engagement. Messages sent in this way will actually increase conversions.
Sveta: Understood. I think another way to prevent churn is to give customers more control over what type of notifications they want to receive. Don’t android devices have a way to do that?
Dmitry: You know Android allows developers to create various push categories. Customers can go to an app’s setting and choose the category of notifications they want to receive, say some customers only want to receive transactional notifications while others don’t mind receiving product recommendations as well. They can go to the app setting and select the category of notifications they want to receive.
Many a times, app owners neglect to create these different categories, but they should never skip this feature. They should not make the mistake of lumping all different kinds of push content under a single category due to lack of proper settings. Else, customers will have no option but to disable all notifications, although maybe they are tired of only one kind of message but don’t mind receiving other kinds.
Sveta: What about iOS devices? Push notifications are not enabled by default there. What steps can brand take to make people subscribe to their notifications?
Dmitry: Good question. To make people enable their push notifications on iOS, brands can show in-app messages with a short instruction on how to enable it. Also it’s important to remember that the system notification to enable push notifications is only shown one time. So companies need to tread carefully when it comes to onboarding users, they should show the in-app message with the offering to enable pushes at the right time, and only if the user agreed to it they should share a link to system notification.
Also it’s nice to have a ‘notification center’ in any app to collect the history of all the notifications (omnichannel – not only pushes but sms). In this case, users can go to the notification center and pick up the last discount or promo code and proceed with the purchase.
Some of paid push notification tools have this feature, developers need to create the page no need to take care about the backend developing.
Sveta: How do you rate push as a marketing channel?
Dmitry: See besides the obvious advantages of reaching out to customers for sharing transactional, promotional and other updates, push notifications have the added advantage of helping companies understand how well their campaigns are working. They can track key engagement metrics for understanding push success – they can measure deliverability speed, deliverability rates, influenced opens …
Sveta: Oh, you mean when users do not immediately open an app after receiving a push message, but may plan to revisit an app later in the day in close succession to receiving the app’s reminder?
Dmitry: Yes, that’s right. And then direct sessions. A direct session is registered when the user opens the app or site by clicking on a push message, while an influenced session is registered when a user opens the app within a defined attribution window.
Sveta: Got it. Dima, I also wanted to ask you, how does push fare as a channel when compared to a more traditional and time-tested channel, say the email?
Dmitry: See email has and will always have its place as a company’s communication channel. But push messages are definitely more impactful compared to email in a number of ways.
For one, it’s easier to secure permission for push.
Two, deliverability is ensured. They pop up on the user’s screen almost instantly after being sent and users almost always see them, even when they don’t engage with them. Also, emails sometimes go to the spam folder, but there’s no such risk with push messaging.
Three, the turnover is quicker as it takes lesser time to create a push message. Email requires careful planning around the design, messaging, and so on.
Four, push messages are more visible as they pop up in the front screen. They are crisper and to the point and users can read the whole message at one go.
Five, push is mobile native, it was designed for the small screen, whereas email is not always designed for the small screen and can look cluttered.
Six, marketers can send geotargeted campaigns with push, but not with email. However, companies need to remember that using user location can be tricky because the majority of users don’t allow companies to track their location as a background process. Say a local bakery wants to reach out to users who are passing by, but can’t do so because the customers have not given permission to allow the business to track their location on a constant basis. However, geo-targeting is good for some other industries – like for renting cars, or gas stations (if it’s a network). They have a bigger time window – if a person travels to another city for a two-week vacation, it’s easier for the app to catch him during that time frame. Sveta: Well, thank you so much Dima for sharing these valuable insights. We hope you enjoyed today’s session on push messaging. We’ll be back soon with another session on what’s hot in the digital communication space! Stay tuned!