PUSH NOTIFICATIONS

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The most important reason that causes people to delete mobile apps is bad push notification UX. But there is an easy way to turn this anti-UX pattern into something useful and valuable for you and your user. Push notifications get the direct attention of your users. If you design your push notifications right and send them at the right moment to the right target group, they are a valuable tool. Yet 71% of users uninstall apps because of annoying push notifications.

This means there is a misunderstanding between the designer of the notifications and the user. Before I start to write the push notifications, these are things that I learned throughout the process:

What to say?

Use your words wisely!

You have limited words to write down what you want to tell your user. You have to make them interested and motivated to react to your notification and to make an impact.

Create a short, motivating, and brief notification. Make sure that your text is completely readable on the push notification.

notification

The landing page

When your user opens the push notification you should lead him to the right page or the right part of your app. Your user will probably be annoyed when the notification just opens the app or opens a page that is not related to the notification.

Using deep links is a surefire way to engage users with our app, and with the use of a powerful call to action, it causes users to perform the required action.

When to send a push notification?

Definitely NOT when the user is sleeping.

First, they will be annoyed if they haven’t set their smartphone in a not-disturbing-mode. Second, most of the users don’t read all the push notifications they get during the night. Moreover, you have to look at the local time zone the user lives in. The app’s user peak is about 8 p.m. It’s best to use the time slot from 6 pm to 10 pm for your important push notifications to be seen by the user directly.

There is one exception concerning the time to send push notifications. If something very important happens during the night, they don’t want to know this the next evening. But make sure that the information you call urgent is considered to be urgent for your user too. Take in mind that notifications should be sent during the day or in the evening. And important notifications (10% off coupons are not an urgency) whenever they are important. Furthermore, care about the timezone of your users.

How many notifications are okay for a good UX?

This depends on which kind of app you have and which content you provide. If you want to inform users about new products in your shop, you should set a limit per day. If you spam your users, they will be annoyed and delete your app.

Try to imagine how important the notifications are and how important it is that your user sees this on his start screen. Your user gets no value if you offer them a discount notice on products that they already bought hours or days ago. They’ll feel as if you send these messages randomly or don’t care about them at all.

Send the user a coupon for their next purchase, discount notice on a complimentary item for the product that they bought will be a good idea too.

notification 1

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Test your push notification UX

A simple way to find out if your created push notification UX fits the needs of your target group is testing.

You can just test your push notification or you can make an A/B test. You can send two different versions of your notification to a segment of your users and see which version generates more revenue. This can help you to find the most effective version of your notification. Moreover, it prevents you from sending a lot of notifications which generate no or just a very small revenue.

Another significant benefit of push notifications is that they help to track our users' behavior. Push notifications offer complex analytics with data on delivery receipts, open rates, open times, and engagement. With push notifications, we can get valuable insights into user behavior including interaction times and click-through rates to see which messages are more likely to be opened. These are the example for our A/B testing copies.

notification 2

Don’t limit yourself to push notifications!

The push notification UX is important when you get in touch with your user. There are more ways you can try it out. Select your notification method based on the urgency of the information and the target group.