Advantages of Push Notifications

In a world of constantly changing marketing trends, companies go out of their way to differentiate their offerings and find a way to reach their target audience. This is precisely where push notification marketing comes in handy.

Push notifications are messages that pop up on the screen. This type of communication is essential for companies offering goods and services online, as it allows instant contact with customers even if they are not currently using the app or website. When an alert appears, they are prompted to check your service and perform the desired action. With push messages, you can either retain regular users or attract the attention of those who downloaded your app or visited your site but stopped engaging.

Unlike lengthy emails that often get caught by filters and sent to spam, or somewhat outdated and often ignored SMS messages, push notifications are brief, concise, and nearly impossible to miss. That’s why they are perfect for targeted and time-sensitive communication, including flash sales, sports scores, event updates, health reminders, and much more.

According to research results, push notifications can increase 90-day app retention by 190% for companies that are not yet sending them. Additionally, it was found that approximately 15% of iOS users and 30% of Android users received no notifications within 90 days after downloading an app. As a result, only 5% of them continued using the app after that period.

So, as you can see, push notifications can be an advantage in the ongoing battle for user acquisition and retention, but if used carelessly, they can do more harm than good. Therefore, in this article, we will explain push notifications in detail and provide recommendations on how to use them properly to achieve higher revenue and customer retention.

Why Are Push Notifications Important for Advertisers?

You already know that push messages are a powerful marketing tool. The benefits of this tool exceed all expectations, as confirmed by various reports. According to the latest data, about 60% of mobile device users choose to enable push notifications on their devices. In a survey about the overall usefulness of push messages, 57% of respondents said they find them useful. For web notifications, that figure is halved: about 30% of users accept browser-generated alerts.

Another study showed that personalizing push messages can yield even more promising results. Users admitted that they use an app more often if the notifications they receive are based on their preferences (49.2%), location (42%), "real-world" actions (37%), in-app behavior (32.5%), or are addressed to them by name (26.8%).

With statistics on the effectiveness of push notifications in hand, let's discuss how they can benefit your business.

Increasing Engagement

Based on the data above, we see that push notifications are messages with a strong re-engagement capability. So it's no surprise that companies often use them in their marketing campaigns to boost customer engagement.

Sending push messages allows you to stay in touch with customers by informing them about special offers or reminding them of upcoming events. Using push notifications for breaking news is also a way to increase engagement. Users receive short, personalized, and appealing updates that encourage them to return to the app or website and see what's new. If they feel interested, a quick tap on the notification takes them directly to the service without any extra effort.

To make push messages even more effective, you can use a deep linking strategy. This is a smart method that allows you to control and optimize user interaction with the app. For example, if you release an update or a completely new product, you can create a deep link in the notification so that it directs the user not to the main page, but to the relevant location. By simplifying the user's path this way, you increase the likelihood of them downloading your product.

Improving Customer Retention

With the dynamic development of mobile technologies and the increasing number of web and mobile services, users have many options for action in the digital sphere. Therefore, it is very common for customers to download apps or visit websites, but simply forget about them as soon as something new appears.

A study of the impact of push notifications on user retention showed that companies that carefully analyzed their audience and sent well-thought-out messages increased retention rates by 3-10 times. User retention increases brand loyalty because it shows that you care about your customers. It also positively impacts ROI, which is very important for a company's success.

Increasing Conversion Rates

Tips that appear in the notification tab have a big impact on conversion rates. Although this statement is especially relevant in the case of e-commerce, it can also apply to sports betting, FinTech, and other industries. Push notifications provide a guaranteed impression because users start acting immediately after they appear.

Online stores or bookmakers introduce time-limited special offers to create a sense of urgency among customers. Push notifications are a great way to inform about such offers because they can be sent in real time, allowing customers to take advantage of the offer before it expires.

However, push messages are most effective when they are personalized. This means that if you send a customer an offer that doesn't match their interests, the likelihood of them taking action is low. According to a study of the Southeast Asian e-commerce market, push notifications configured according to user attributes resulted in a 22% increase in conversion rates. Needless to say, the higher the conversion, the greater the company's profit.

Audience Segmentation

To succeed in marketing, you first need to determine your customers' preferences and then adjust your strategy accordingly. Thanks to web push notification systems, you can divide customers into groups based on attributes such as location, operating system, and browser. This information is provided when the user agrees to receive push notifications.

With segmentation, you can adjust the content of the message and send different versions of the same notification to different target groups. For example, you can target a campaign only to iOS users or only to US residents. As a result, your marketing efforts can lead to increased user satisfaction and higher traffic.

Improving Customer Service Quality

Push messages have great potential to improve customer service strategy. They are much less intrusive than SMS or emails and have a higher open rate than both.

Pop-ups with valuable content personalized according to users' requirements and expectations can positively impact their customer journey. For example, you can enrich the app onboarding process by highlighting the most notable features and showing users the app screens. Additionally, if you track the user's path and see that they are encountering problems, you can direct them to the relevant FAQ section or suggest possible solutions.

Effective Upselling and Cross-Selling Strategies

These two marketing tactics are often used to boost online sales and maximize profits. Upselling is the practice of recommending consumers services or products that are more expensive and of higher quality than the ones they selected. On the other hand, cross-selling is offering additional products that might be useful to the buyer who has added items to their cart.

Incorporating upselling and cross-selling offers into push messages can yield unexpectedly good results. When a shopper browses your store and clicks on a specific product, a pop-up message immediately suggests a similar but more expensive item. As soon as the buyer adds it to the cart, a concise notification appears with relevant products. With these attractive offers at hand, the customer is more likely to purchase additional items and spend more money, generating higher profit for the brand.

Best Practices for Creating Push Notifications

Every day, users receive dozens of notifications on their devices. To achieve good results and be noticed by your customers, you should leverage best practices of push notification marketing.

Personalization

Most, if not all, notifications should be tailored to the specific customer based on their age, origin, OS, location, and service usage history. With such data, you can divide customers into subcategories and send personalized messages.

Suppose you have a sports competition app, and your customer, John, is interested in women's tennis and has been using your product for two months. Instead of cluttering his notification center with football-related information, you should use previously collected data and focus your notifications on tennis topics. Furthermore, imagine John has placed bets on matches involving specific athletes. How pleased would he be if your app informed him about upcoming sports events of the players he follows?

Timing

To optimize user engagement, it is crucial to choose the right time to send notifications. You can determine the optimal sending time based on John's location (if you have access to it). For example, you might know that every Thursday at 8:00 PM John stays home, meaning he may have free time and thus be more likely to use your app. Sending him an alert at that time can increase the likelihood of a direct response.

Content

Based on John's interaction with your app, you can also determine which other sports might interest him the most. If he has been browsing recent volleyball results, it would be a good idea to send him a special offer on a current volleyball event. Use all the information you know about him to tailor the message content and increase the chance of him taking a specific action.

Although this sounds simple and obvious, the feeling that each notification is created specifically for the user is key to increasing engagement and boosting your business revenue.

iOS vs Android vs. Flutter

For Flutter apps, implementing push notifications may take more time because you need to set up a push system for each platform. Another challenge for cross-platform apps is that each new update of native systems, both iOS and Android, appears in technologies like Flutter with a slight delay. This is not uncommon but can delay your product launch.

On Android, notifications are enabled by default. This changed in the recently released Android 13, where the user must opt-in to receive notifications. All push messages remain on the lock screen and on the notification panel, which can be pulled down from the top. In iOS apps, the user must opt-in to receive notifications—this requires requesting permission within the app.

An additional feature in iOS is the scheduled summary. Instead of receiving notifications instantly, iOS saves all alerts to show them together at a specific time. This is a suitable place to display non-urgent content that might interest your customer without cluttering their instant messages.

Benefits of Push Notifications in Your Industry

Web and mobile push messages can be successfully used across various industries. Thanks to their versatility, conciseness, and customizability, push notifications give companies the ability to reach and engage a wide range of audiences. Let's look at how they are typically used in iGaming, FinTech, and healthcare.

iGaming

Online casinos, sportsbooks, lotteries—all these services use push messages in their marketing strategy. By adding a push notification service to your iGaming development project, you can create a campaign that effectively promotes your product.

Thanks to timely alerts, a bookmaker can inform customers about hot deals, encouraging them to place a bet. In the case of mobile pushes, the app can re-engage users by sending them reminders about upcoming events that might interest them or information about a new type of casino game. Any transactional updates, such as withdrawal or deposit messages, are also handled via push notifications.

If you have a sports gaming app, to boost user engagement it would be a good idea to add the ability to display live streams with match scores and latest bets in such notifications! Currently, this feature is available in iOS 16, but it may soon appear in the Android OS as well.

FinTech

Against the backdrop of rapid FinTech development, many financial companies have decided to enhance their offerings and provide customers with more capabilities. This approach has led to the emergence of numerous financial apps, currency exchange services, payment platforms, and blockchain solutions.

It turns out that push notifications are applicable in all of these cases. They are used to inform customers about major account upgrades, security issues, and transaction updates. Additionally, banks use push messages to maintain direct communication with their customers and provide them with support and investment advice. Based on the user journey, they can also remind the customer to complete a procedure they started, such as opening a deposit account or ordering a debit card.

Healthcare

Due to the massive growth in the number of people caring about their health and fitness, mobile apps and web services for healthcare remain in demand. Considering that such apps can send push notifications to popular and widely used fitness trackers, including this feature in your software can be a huge step forward in terms of user engagement. To learn more about how your healthcare mobile app can benefit from push notifications, visit our blog.

What Are the Types of Push Notifications?

Push notifications can be divided mainly into mobile and web notifications, but pop-up messages on wearable devices are also possible. Mobile notifications are sent by installed apps and displayed either on the smartphone or on a connected device, such as a smartwatch. Web notifications are sent by browsers and can be displayed not only on desktops but also on mobile devices. Let's take a closer look at each type.

Mobile Push Notifications

Push messages are often included in mobile development projects. Mobile apps use push notifications to make the user return to the app. They can be sent even when the app is closed, which is a huge advantage of push notifications in general. Such a message usually appears as a banner at the top of the smartphone screen, where the user can tap it to launch the app or swipe it to dismiss. However, depending on the operating system, the placement of delivered push notifications can be changed.

Push notifications in mobile apps come in various types: from reminders about upcoming events based on a calendar or medical app to timely offers from food delivery, hotel, or transportation apps. The user can disable them in the settings.

Web Push Notifications

These include all alerts you receive from a website or web application on both desktop and mobile devices. Web push notifications are sent by the browser and can appear as pop-up messages when viewing a specific site or as notifications appearing in the notification tray. Unlike mobile notifications, which can be sent regardless of circumstances, web push notifications are messages to users that require the browser to be open, at least in the background.

The advantages of web push notifications exceed all expectations, but the best aspect is their easy integration with web services. To send notifications through the browser, simply install the web push code on your site. Thus, companies without dedicated mobile apps can use the push notification system in their web development projects and benefit from it.

Push Notifications on Wearable Devices

Push messages can also be received on wearable devices, such as smartwatches or fitness bands. When a wearable device is connected to a smartphone, it also receives notifications from mobile apps. Of course, their format adjusts to the screen size.

Given the nature of push messages, it makes sense to send them to devices that users wear almost constantly for an even faster response. However, it’s important to remember that this can backfire. Too many notifications can distract the user and consequently irritate them rather than engage them.

How Do Users Accept Push Notifications?

The process of accepting push notifications differs depending on their type. In the case of web notifications, the user must accept the request generated by the browser in order to receive them. Typically, this is a white box displayed in the upper left of the site, with options to allow or block notifications. Interestingly, you can specify when the permission dialog should appear. So instead of bombarding users with pop-ups as soon as they enter your service, allow prompts to appear based on their behavior, for example, when they click a specific button or perform a particular action.

To increase the opt-in rate, you can precede the browser prompt with a so-called "soft question" that explains the purpose of push notifications on your site or web app. If the user indicates in the "soft question" that they want to receive such messages, then the browser request will appear. However, to receive notifications, the user must confirm their consent through the browser form, since the "soft request" serves only as an introduction to the actual request.

As for mobile push notifications, they must be allowed by iOS users and, as has recently changed, also by Android users. Before the release of Android 13, mobile apps running on the Android operating system could send push notifications to users by default, meaning without asking for consent.

Now, both iOS and Android apps must give users the option to choose whether to receive such messages. This is typically done through a standard notification that appears when the app is first opened. To encourage users to enable push messages sent by your app, you can provide a special onboarding series that introduces the app's main features and highlights its value to customers. However, if a user decides to block notifications, they can enable them later in the settings.

Mobile push notifications are displayed as headings, entries in the notification tray, badges on the app icon, or all three.

Increasing Engagement in Applications and Conversions with Push Notifications

After such a thorough analysis, it can be stated that push notifications are an excellent marketing tool regardless of the industry. A well-designed push message campaign can allow you to increase your business revenues by developing direct relationships with customers. There are many push notification systems on the market, so choose one of the ready-to-integrate solutions and start sending personalized push messages to your customers today.

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