• What You Must Know To Build Savvy Push Notifications
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How to design accurate push notifications?

It’s been nearly a decade since the smartphone debuted, but founders still claim mobile is the most underrated technology, according to First Round’s survey of startups. Push notifications have great potential on mobile devices. “It’s hard to overstate the potential of push notifications on mobile,” says entrepreneur Ariel Seidman in Fixing Mobile Push Notifications. For the first time in human history, you can tap nearly two million people on the shoulder at the same time and say, ‘Hey! Watch this! ‘” That’s why Noah Weiss of Slack believes the world will get closer through smart devices.

Before Working at Slack, Weiss worked at Foursquare, where it made money from its native advertising service and boldly split into two apps in 2014. At that time, monthly active users grew fivefold. Weiss is also the lead product manager for Google’s Structured data search project. Weiss recently joined Slack to set up its New York office to lead its new Search, Learning and Intelligence project, which is tasked with developing new features to make Slack more efficient for other companies.

In this interview, Weiss charts the dynamic evolution of push notifications — illustrating a key paradigm shift in the era of smartwatches and apps filling the home screen. Here, he also shares some tips for startups looking to develop push notification strategies, investments, metrics, and guidelines. Any startup that wants to control this high-risk, high-reward channel will benefit from Weiss.

A good push notification has three characteristics: timeliness, personalization, and availability.

Evolution of push notifications

Before sharing his strategy, Weiss summarized the evolution of push notification as it relates to three powerful qualities: timeliness, personalization, and availability. He sees their history and progress as a foundation on which to build the future. Here are four stages in the evolution of simplified push notifications:

Email was the precursor to push notifications. The early push notification of the web age was email. “There are a lot of parallels between email and push notifications.” “In the past, you allowed open communication with websites by providing an email address,” Weiss says. Email becomes a reliable primary way to bring people back to the site, not through portals or bookmarks. Also, the email has an unsubscribe option. The equivalent option for notification is to adjust push Settings or, more commonly, uninstall the application.

Evolved to the mobile age. As users invested more on their phones, email began to decline. “It may be hard to recall a time before smartphones when people weren’t used to living in their inboxes. They check their E-mail on the computer several times a day. “Weiss said. “Even companies that have very successful email marketing strategies are using mobile devices. Remember when Groupon offered laser hair removal? Why did you receive it? When do you show an interest in hair removal, or make a similar purchase decision on your phone? By binding to the user, location, and time of day, push notifications become more effective. They have the potential for timeliness, personalization, and availability, but if they don’t do it right, users will get bored.

Compete with SMS, not email. On mobile devices, push notifications are more like text messages than emails. “The content is relevant to what’s happening right now. When you might not expect your content to be read in a few days, you can send an email, which is fine for industry newsletters or abstracts.” “However, the timeliness or attention required for real-time push notifications is completely different,” Weiss said. With push notifications, you can effectively compete with SMS and other personalized forms of communication. How do you personalize other notifications if they come from someone’s spouse, best friend, or mom? They must compete on the same level.

Cut all applications. When people use a smartphone for the first time, their apps can be placed on a 4×4 grid on the home screen. Now, the average American has about 55 apps on their phone. “What you need to know is that you can’t get all of these apps to be used regularly. It’s also hard to build an app today that makes it a daily habit.” “The reality for developers is that your app may not be on someone’s home screen, and users may not have the habit of using it multiple times a day,” Weiss said. That’s why notifications are becoming more and more important. For most apps, push notifications are perfect for providing urgent information: Uber has arrived, a reminder of a gate change or you’ve been mentioned in Slack. If users are inundated with 50 apps, you can’t expect them to remember to use your app at the right time and place, you need to actively direct them to open it.

Build your push notification strategy around the following principles

Deep notification strategies can be used to weigh and organize multiple factors, such as nearby WiFi, personalization, social factors and location captured in real time, all of which can be used to drive push notifications. But for startups just getting started with push notification technology, there are some basic factors to consider. From basic to more advanced tricks, Weiss talks about the basic lessons he learned while developing push notification systems.

Promote retention outside of the application

From a retention perspective, users will return to your app less often when your app exceeds its functional threshold. You can only cram so many features into your app and expect new users to discover them in the first few sessions. “The biggest challenge in mobile is retaining new users, and there are proven tactics to bring in new users: effective app install marketing, social channels, SEM and SEO. What’s really hard, though, is getting new users into the habit.” “Sometimes improvements to your app won’t significantly affect peak retention, but an investment outside of the app, in this case push notifications, will,” Weiss says. Because once someone closes your app, it doesn’t matter that they missed the magical experience on the fourth Tab. Because if they never open your app again, they’ll never know what they missed.

In designing the best user experience for your app, don’t forget that users will only enjoy the experience if they open the app — and then return to your app. “It always amazes me and pains me when I see an incredible amount of time and energy invested in an app and no strategy comes back to me.” “Of course, most young developers don’t think about notifications,” Weiss says. Don’t make this mistake. It’s the biggest oversight in mobile development right now.”

Customer demand drives an app, and retention becomes a business.

Do not download by mistake when you have permission.

Requesting permission to send notifications is not only good form, but also technically necessary. “If you’re developing on iOS, sending notifications is a privilege that users have to grant. Unlike Android, downloading an app grants permissions by default and you have to prompt the user.” “It’s a critical moment,” Weiss says. “If the user refuses authorization, the app can’t direct the user back to the authorization page, which dramatically reduces their chances of becoming an active user. Even if they accept it, it’s not a binding contract.”

If users get tired of your push notifications, it’s best if they can choose which notifications to keep active in the app, but it’s more likely that they’ll go to their phone’s Settings to turn off all notifications or uninstall the app. This is actually irreversible. Note: Improve the user’s first notification experience, otherwise they will close the notification channel.

So the first step is to prompt users to agree to receive notifications in the first place — if they say no, the rest of the suggestions become irrelevant. It involves educating the user, popping up after the user finds something valuable, or applying for a license when the green light turns on, can increase conversion rates. Then there’s the good literature on maintaining trust and maintaining open communication, and Weiss recommends the following:

  • Brenden Mulligan – The correct way for mobile to request user permissions

  • Why do 60% of users disable push notifications, and what to do about it — Andrew Chen

  • The right way to get users to come back to your app — Matt Galligan

Given the high risk of obtaining notification permissions, the default focus of these articles is how to avoid that risk. “If you’re smart, you actually become very cautious when it comes to notification. Create a safety net in all experiments, because any mistakes can have a big impact.” “For example, if I put out a push once a week and all users get it, I would use it as a 5 or 10 percent experiment to cover any potential flaws that might cause users to opt out of notifications,” Weiss said.

Specify three metrics to measure notifications

In order to evaluate your notification strategy, give the following three metrics: 1) the percentage of users who choose to unnotify 2) the uninstall rate and 3) the number of actions per 100 push.

“To evaluate a good notification, you have to strike a balance between active user participation and unnotification. It’s a tricky balance, because you might be comparing a short-term increase in active engagement with a long-term drop in engagement that can’t be re-engaged.” Weiss said. “Start by setting your uninstall rate and notification disable rate. If your app is consumer-facing and your uninstall rate is below 2%, you’re in a safe zone. So if your attrition rate is 1% per week, your growth rate is 1.02% to 2%, that’s not devastating. Monitor all wild swings, as the week-by-week compounding effects can take a toll.”

To evaluate the returns of notification strategies, don’t consider open rates but measure actions. “One approach I suggest is to monitor the time window for push notifications and count the number of actions that arrive bound to the original notifications. For example, if notifications encourage users to rate places they’ve visited recently, analyze the user’s rating score per 100 push notifications within a 2-6 hour window.” “There’s always the question of attribution, but if you define a fixed window of time after you send a notification to evaluate it, the results will be much more acceptable,” Weiss says.

… Calibrate metrics to compare performance on iOS and Android.

For those who want to track open rates as an indicator, Weiss has a few thoughts on the nature of notifications on different operating systems. “It’s easy to track open rates by email, but remember that iOS is much lower than Android; For the same push, Android can show up to five times the open rate of iOS.” “On Android users tend to deal with notifications because they’re only cleared when you manually open each notification, whereas on iOS, once you open one notification from the lock screen, the others are cleared,” Weiss said.

As with any feature, different operating systems behave differently when they receive notifications. “For example, notifications on Android can have images built in, which can increase the probability of interaction by 15-20%. Since most developers usually work on iOS, they don’t think it’s ok to send Android push notifications with images.” “There are built-in action buttons that allow users to operate directly from notifications,” Weiss said. These also increase the probability of interaction. Even as an iPhone user, I have to say that notification development on Android is fundamentally better.

Fill push notifications with personalized content to make them sound like they’re coming from a close friend.

Resist the novelty effect

Run experiments with push notifications for at least six weeks, and 12 weeks is a good choice. Weiss understands that longer tests are necessary to show all the negative effects. “The average user will ignore unwanted pushes for about a month without taking any action, such as changing Settings or uninstalling the app. Once this threshold is exceeded, annoying notifications are quickly cleared.” Weiss said.

Notifications have a strong novelty bias, which delays the user’s true response. Weiss launched an experiment to test users’ reactions to emojis. “We halved the length of the text and added relevant emoticons. In the first two weeks of the experiment, we hit our peak. The operation of opening the application is obvious. Weekly active users (WAUs) rose. It deceptively claims that the future is emoji.” “Over time, as we continue to monitor it, the growth slows and then flattens out,” Weiss said. Finally, the effect is neutral. This is not a bad thing, but if we allocate resources based on preliminary results, it can cause problems. So it’s best to test push notifications over months rather than weeks.

How to test? When will it be tested? Where to test it?

The “why” and “who” of push notifications are fairly straightforward — the goal is to increase engagement for all users. However, there are various ideas on how push notifications should be implemented. Weiss has helped launch more than 100 notification experiments over the course of his career — testing everything from a day to a trigger to a return to the front screen. As with shipping software, there is no “right way”, but here he shares some incontrovertible points:

  • Only the most urgent notifications need to be turned on. “With push, you can control whether your phone vibrates or silences by default. This is one of the highest risk decisions I’ve made in all of my user research. If a notification vibrates the user and she finds it is not urgent, the likelihood of the application being uninstalled immediately skyrockets.” “If it’s urgent — like you’re about to miss your plane or an urgent message directly from a co-worker — a buzz can be a very powerful and commendable tool,” Weiss says. If not, this can be dangerous and unexpected, so do not use vibration to get a like or like from a friend. The average user checks their phone 70 to 100 times a day, and they’re more likely to see your messages within the next 15 minutes.”

  • Match the user’s biorhythm. “Push timing is important, but there is no rule that dictates the absolute best window time. But take a moment to think about how you can monitor your users and avoid sending notifications when they’re asleep because you’ll wake them up or they’ll find a bunch of push notifications coming from your app in the morning.” “Also consider the nature of your content,” Weiss says. “Morning news is good, and commuting is good. Improve your strategy by monitoring user engagement.”

  • Use personalization in your notification copy. “It makes a huge difference. Inserting a user’s name doesn’t count, like ‘Noah, here’s your Daily Deal for Tuesday! ‘Show what you know about your users in your notification copy — or they’ll activate their natural filters to deal with exploding marketing.” “Twitter has a good practice when users check their timelines. The service prompts you to check Evelyn, Marcos, and Lydia’s tweets for the last day,” Weiss says. These are the people you follow and can name. Spotify does the same for new songs from artists you listen to regularly.

  • Think like Uber about your feeds. “If your Uber driver dropped you off on any block in Manhattan, would you be happy when you asked for a specific block on the Lower East Side? This is obvious, but startups can forget to direct their users to the exact interface that is suggested in their notifications.” “If notifications lead users to the interface they want, people will click on it,” Weiss says. If not, they’ll ignore it next time. Many e-commerce applications solve this problem by directing users to a general interface rather than a specific project or page.

The magician moves your chosen card to the top of the deck. Apps with smart notifications will have more leverage to bring their services to people’s phones at the right time.

The future of Notification

Smartphone and smartwatch screens are constantly changing, but the actual real estate on the home screen is always limited, no matter how big or small. This limit is a constraint given the proliferation of applications stored on mobile phones. Here are Weiss ‘thoughts on future notifications from the evolution of mobile operating systems:

Make the lock screen the new home screen. In fact, the only place people see more than the home screen is the lock screen. “Your home screen is usually limited to less than 20 apps that you want to have at your fingertips. Your lock screen lists the latest notifications from hundreds of apps on your phone.” “I think the lock screen is going to replace the home screen,” Weiss said. “There’s going to be a whole new home screen experience that streams apps to you. The final ranking will depend not only on recent use and frequency of use. Notifications will feel like Twitter’s live feed, and the noisy feed will feel like Facebook’s hot feed.

You can switch to an app at any time, but notifications will be your unwavering guide.

Applying the natural phenomenon of binding and unbinding, Weiss sees a tidal shift: the lock screen will rebind them again. “Over the last three years, there has been a gradual, huge fragmentation in the app ecosystem. Applications have become more specialized for a single use scenario.” “But as users accumulate a bunch of apps, it becomes more and more difficult to choose the right service at the right time. Notifications provide users with timely and useful signals. There will be a new paradigm for navigation that intelligently controls applications when users are considering using them.

Rich context awareness. If users increasingly interact with apps through notification streams sent to the lock screen interface, it will be because they are confident that they are being sent the most timely and relevant alerts. This can only happen with a strong sense of context. “The sensors on the phone allow you to build a context-aware service on the mobile device that you would never be able to do on a desktop or email. How do you translate that perception into really actionable, timely, relevant notifications?” “It’s an exciting new field,” weiss asks. “Imagine a service that can distinguish whether someone is parked at a particular place, whether it’s a cafe, an airport or a gym. The unique awareness of context creates a lot of new opportunities for relevant push notifications.”

The best apps will be the ones you don’t have to remember, they’ll remind you. This kind of app will be the only kind of app in the future.

“My favorite feature is Foursquare’s push notifications for new or popular locations in a city. Depending on where your phone is located, it can connect you to where you’re actually visiting.” “It gives you a notification, usually once a week, ‘Hey, here are three hot places in the city that you haven’t been to yet. ‘It’s that magical moment when you realize you’re just walking around with your phone in your pocket, and maybe you haven’t even used the app for a whole week. You don’t have to do anything for it to pull you back into the app and surprise you.”

Fully leveraging sensors on mobile devices is challenging, but you can start in some basic directions. “While most developers can’t easily build this type of location resolution, it’s easy to build a model based on background location that can resolve whether someone is at home or working. These are two very rich contexts for triggering relevant pushes.” Weiss said.

conclusion

While notifications can improve retention and interaction rates, don’t think of them as black tech for growth. They have the potential to be the most intuitive and intimate way to interact with users. In order to establish such reliable relationships, they must be timely, personal, and actionable. A notification policy must request authorization from the user and be weighed based on their outages, uninstalls, and clicks per 100 notifications. A better approach is to customize notifications based on user active input and passive awareness of context.

“We are still in the early days of mobile. Devices will continue to improve, have larger screens, longer battery life or become wearable.” However, no matter how hardware evolves, notifications will be the most intimate feature of your mobile device. Like a close friend or family member, smart notifications remember your preferences and history. They will guide you accurately, keep you in touch with loved ones, and remind you of what’s important at the most appropriate time. That’s probably the power of technology.”