How to Significantly Boost Consumer Engagement With Mobile Notifications

Breaking news. Offers. Traffic, weather, and flight check-in data. You must have received all of these notifications and more on your mobile phone.

Like you, millions read such notifications daily. After all, the number of smartphone users worldwide today surpasses three billion. This is forecast to grow by several hundred million in the next few years.

What’s more, there were over 250 million daily app downloads between 2019–2020. 2% of app users open an app over 100 times per day.

These numbers are why you should look at mobile notifications as a powerful way to boost engagement. These are delivered instantly to the consumer’s mobile device, regardless of whether it is locked or unlocked. Or whether the user is using the app or not.

Mobile app notifications work across devices. There’s one big difference between the two most popular operating systems, though. In Android apps, such notifications are the default setting. For iOS, the user has to allow notifications when an app is first opened.

Here, we’re going to take you through:

• The benefits of mobile notifications
• The types of mobile notifications
• How to activate and use notifications

Studies show that:

• sending mobile app push notifications can boost app engagement up to 88%
• 65% of users return to an app within 30 days when push is enabled
• Sending push notifications can increase app retention rates by 3-10x

Shopo, an open C2C marketplace from one of India’s leading e-commerce platforms, reaped the benefits of this.This case study shows how relevant pushes were sent to users at regular intervals. The results: a 35% boost in user engagement and a 10% increase in CTRs.

Read on to discover how you, too, can take advantage and provide value.

The Benefits of Mobile Notifications

Mobile notifications effectively enable seamless communication between apps and users. For mobile marketers, they provide several advantages.

1. Engagement and Retention

Consumers download apps with the intention of using them. However, many times, this slips their mind, or they use it only infrequently. In such a scenario, push notifications are a great way to remind them of the value your app provides.

Further, studies show that more than 1 in every 2 apps that are downloaded is uninstalled within 30 days. To prevent this from happening, you need a retention strategy in which push notifications play a large role. Data shows that frequent push notifications increase app retention rates — the more frequent, the better. App users receiving daily push notifications had 820% higher retention rates than those who received none.

Using these principles of mobile notifications, Century 21, a well-known real estate brand, increased application usage, and optimized reaction rates among customers.

2. Revenue Increase

If you increase engagement and retention, there’s one clear result: app revenue goes up. In fact, one report states that 48% of mobile app users made an in-store purchase after receiving a push notification.

To do this, the messages have to be relevant to the consumer segment. Discounts, offers, and other incentives have to be pushed at the right times. With an effective strategy in place, this will lead to revenue increases.

For example, Dinda, a Brazilian e-commerce site for children’s fashions, achieved a 25% increase in revenue generated from app purchases compared to desktops, in under a year.

3. Enhance Consumer Experience

With proper push notifications, you can make your app play an important and vital role in the consumer’s life. For example, utility notifications such as those sent by digital retailers about deliveries, purchases, and so on are immensely useful. Fintech companies, too, can convey information about investments and opportunities at just the right time.

Further, a notification can also contain a link to a webpage that the consumer can be guided to. You’ll see many such uses in the section below.

Moneylion, a leading US banking app, increases customer delight by using push notifications for instant transfers, deposits, cashback announcements, credit scores, and real-time spending notifications.

The Types of Mobile Notifications

As you already must know, push notifications can serve a variety of functions. Here are some of the most popular.

• There are informative push notifications with timely messages about updates, alerts, reminders, and events. Many e-retailers, finance companies, and other online businesses find that these are the ones that consumers most respond to.

• With location-based push notifications, consumers can be informed of local promotions and activities, the weather, transport, and other relevant information. Several brick-and-mortar stores with apps have used this to their advantage. They have proved to be very effective, with a 45% click-through rate.

• Many apps have achieved success with personalized progress notifications. These are based on data to do with consumer behavior. For example, a fitness app could send a notification about the consumer’s goals. A travel company can send a notification about booking a trip based on past trips. An investment app could send a notification about the consumer’s retirement goals.

• Also common are promotional notifications, which alert consumers to deals and offers that could be valid for a limited period. Again, these are very effective in increasing engagement.

• Some notifications also allow consumers to accomplish actions without opening the app and sometimes defer tasks. For more such cases, see these five great examples.

For a deeper dive into the types of notifications and the many ways you can use them to your advantage, do see this informative and compelling piece.

How to Activate and Implement Mobile Notifications

As we mentioned, in Android phones, push notifications are on by default. In iOS, permission has to be requested first. In this case, with some product categories, over 60% of users turn off push notifications. In others, a mere 20% do.

Either way, whatever the category or the device, it makes sense to:

• Showcase your app’s best features in an attractive way the first time it is opened.
• Let users know what to expect and the value they can gain from notifications

Once they fully understand the value of your app and how mobile push messages will benefit them, they will be more likely to opt in.

It’s also important to understand that if the notifications don’t provide value, they will be ignored or turned off. Some may even uninstall the app if the notifications are not relevant over time.

Identifying consumer segments, effectively targeting them, and using personalization are some ways to do it right.

Conclusion

Finally, these aspects of mobile notifications should not be ignored. Marketers should be considerate of consumer needs and time. Mobile notifications should be sent according to optimized times and in keeping with the overall strategy and goals. This way, you’ll significantly improve user engagement, retention, and revenue.