Today, many apps offer the possibility to send push notifications to their users. There’s a multitude of different occasions for this. Receiving a message from a messenger app, important breaking news, app-internal behavior, or the current location of a user. But here, too, it is important to find the right amount of messages sent in a certain period. How do you signal constant presence to the user without being too intrusive and even annoying in the worst case, so that he disables push notifications or uninstalls apps? In order to answer this question and to shed light on the general attitude of users towards push notifications, localytics conducted a survey among 1,000 smartphone users in the USA last year and compared the results with a previous study from 2015 to examine developments in this market.
Marketers Have Improved
First of all: an important finding of the study is that the quality of push notifications has improved compared to a few years ago. At 52 percent, more than half of the respondents are of this opinion. However, a different picture emerges when one considers the usefulness of the notifications. Only one in five users states.
The Right Number of Messages is Crucial
Only 10 percent of users say they disable push notifications on an average of one notification per week. However, 37 percent would disable notifications at 2-5 notifications per week, 33 percent would take this step at 6-10 notifications.
In addition, the study shows that 22 percent of users completely refrain from using an app with 2-5 notifications per week. 31 percent would do this with 6-10 notifications.
Not All Ways of Optimizing the User Experience are Appreciated
The study also found that users are most likely to appreciate notifications based on their app preferences and location information. Nevertheless, notifications based on app-internal user behavior are perceived as negative.
Wrap-Up
If you start with sending push messages, you can easily start with a small weekly number of notifications. With an average of one message per week, the risk of discouraging the customer is only 10 percent. Additionally, you should give users the opportunity to set their own preferences in a self-service center to tailor the app experience to their own needs. Furthermore, send location-based push notifications, as the study found these to be particularly useful to users.
Source: Localytics, Marketingprofs
Infographic: Push Notifications