How to Make Android Push Notifications Work Efficiently for Your App

When you are looking to create the right kind of engagement for your app, android push notifications can help you in a big way. However, one of the most challenging parts of getting a higher app engagement is getting your users to opt-in your push notifications. Besides, since an average user has multiple apps installed on their Android phone, the number of notifications they usually receive is quite a few. Hence, it is concerning for the app developers or brands to grab the attention of the users among all the digital “noise” that is present around them.

When you are looking to strategize your android push notification plans, you must be thinking about these challenges too. Moreover, you might also be thinking of finding a way around them and make your users engage with your notifications so that you can boost your marketing ROI and revenue generation.

While formulating your plan, you need to look at the statistics of smartphone users. You would find that around 60% of the global smartphone users are on the Android operating system. The efficiency of sending a notification depends a lot on how the platform deals with them when they receive them.

One of the prominent differences between android and iOS phone users is that the notification opt-ins. While the iOS users receive a pop- up when they receive a push notification on their device and they are offered a chance to opt-in individually, android push notifications ask the user to provide their consent when they are downloading the app from the playstore. However, recently they added a feature for the users to opt-out of the notifications they receive from a particular brand by long-pressing the notification and clicking it off.

Why users turn off notifications?

In a utopian world, we all want our users to install our app, provide their consent for receiving notifications, and keep engaging with them as long as we send them. However, in an ideal world, the case differs immensely from what we expect. People seldom interact with push notifications unless they find them suiting to their needs. Yet, what are the reasons behind this kind of activity? The answers are:

• Receiving too many and irrelevant push notifications on their device
• Multiple apps sending notifications and clutter the notification area
• No actual cause for receiving push notifications as they can visit the app when they want
• Lesser interest in receiving product information due to lack of purchase intent
• Want to save on the battery for longer usage without charging the phone too often

So, if you are looking to overcome these many barriers and improve the acceptance of your push notifications, you need to tweak your strategies a bit. We bring you a few “best practices” that can help you to revamp your push campaigns and get accepted by your users at a better rate in the next section.

Tips to improve your Android push notification opt-ins

1. Timing is everything: The time of sending your push notifications matters a lot when it comes to opt-ins. If you send your notifications at times they are least expecting or least interested to interact with, they lose on value and adds to the irritation for the android users. However, if you are able to send the notifications according to their activity and intent to interact with your messages, you will be able to generate more opt-ins and subsequently engagement. Moreover, the relevance of these notifications would be re-inforced, which would lead to an increase in clickthrough rates and conversions.
2. Make your notifications relevant: Certain platforms allow you to track your user activities on your app and help you create actionable insights that can generate better results for your push campaigns. These activities tell you about the in-app activities of the users based on device identifications so that you would know the products and the categories they are interested in most. Accordingly, you can create your push notifications that cater to their needs and provide the relevant product information based on their preferences. As the relevance increase, the chances of engagement increase too.
3. Personalization and segmentation: Your users are most likely to opt-in to your push notifications if you are using the proper data stack and personalize the content of the notifications as per their interests. Personalization no longer means using the first name of the users, and they expect a seamless customer experience when they interact with your brand, Personalization can be effectively improved by the use of proper segments or categories of users according to their behavior and interests. The users in a certain segment behave almost identical in their choices, and you can create specific campaigns designed to attract them.
4. Using visual and emotional appeals: When it comes to android push notifications you are basically fighting for a piece of real estate on the notification area of your users. Therefore you must convey all the relevant information in the form of text and high-quality graphics to entice them towards engaging towards your notifications. However, sometimes only visual appeal doesn’t work alone, and you might have to put in social validation or product exclusivity in the notification to make them more attractive. Customized android push notifications with carousel feature or product labels can be particularly helpful in these scenarios. These features help you to club and send multiple product notifications in a highly engaging manner so that your users find them really hard to ignore.
5. Repeat and improve: Designing and running your campaigns is just one part done right. However, you might need to scale up or improve the performance of your notification campaigns over certain periods of time. The only way you can do it is to track the performances of your current campaigns, analyze the strategies that aren’t working, and improve upon them. This is a repetition phase and you must find a way to dissect all the user data you collected and understand their engagement towards your campaigns to modify, add, or remove certain components.

Wrapping up

Android push notifications need not be the cause of irritation for your users if you make them relevant through personalization, segmentation, use the right content, and send it at the right time. However, if you are not able to carry out any of these tasks, then you might want to revisit your push strategy and improve upon them. If you are looking for a high performing push notification platforms, or know more strategies, please get in touch with us at marketing@vizury.com.

Varsha Singh is a Digital Marketing professional from Bangalore at Affle India Pvt Ltd. I use my articles to provide quality content & tutorials to assist marketers.