What is a push notification

There’s never been a better time for starting or growing your business than in 2017. All this range of technologies we now have provides us with literally endless opportunities. We can reach the target audience even if it’s located across the ocean, we can engage it without a call or personal meeting, and we can retain it in many different ways. All it takes is to be aware of the recent technologies and know how exactly they can help you with your specific business goals.

One of the greatest yet commonly overlooked technologies is push notification. Not only is it relatively simple to develop and deploy, but it is also a wonderful tool to remind your potential customers about what you offer and why what you’re offering is great. If you made it to this article, you recognize the potential associated with this tool, and we’ll be happy to walk you through all the ins and outs of it. Read on to learn what is a push notification and what are the best practices of using it.

Starting With The Basics: What is a Push Notification

For the starters, it needs to be clearly explained what is a push notification. If you prefer short and concise definitions, here’s the one for you: push notification is a message that pops up on a screen of a mobile phone. This definition perfectly describes the main idea behind the technology.

However, if you prefer a more thought-out and detailed description, you’ll better like the following one: a push notification is a message delivered from a software application to a mobile device without any requests from the user. In other words, push notifications are notifications from a server, and they are connected to particular apps and can appear on mobile screens even if a device is in a sleep mode.

Got it? Then it’s time for some examples.

Now, as you clearly understand what is a push notification, let’s consider some great examples of push notifications to help you get an idea of how exactly this digital tool can benefit your business.

In case you’ve never heard of 12 Minutes Athlete, here’s your 12 seconds intro to what these guys do: it’s a handy app designed to help you stay strong and fit with thanks to high-intensity interval training (also known as HIIT). If the ads don’t lie, you’re going to stay in a perfect physical condition by using this app on a daily basis. Here’s what the app sends its users: “Ready to crush your workout? You’ve got this” Quite a motivating message, isn’t?

It seems like someone from the Neoshop’s team has got it exceptionally right about the triggers associated with consumer behavior. When a person matching the buyer persona of Neoshop comes nearby their retail spots, Neoshop sends this person a push notification saying something like this “Jack, you’re only 100 yards away from our store. Get your 10% discount today using your 5,000 loyalty points.” Needless to say that such a personalized and value-based message is efficient.

  • Push notification from Kayak

Another company that seems to understand the advantages of push notifications is Kayak, a travel search site. The guys from Kayak took it one step further compared to what their competitors do and allowed users to set up their own notification criteria. For instance, you can ask Kayak to send you push notifications when a price for a trip you like drops. Here’s what users of Kayak receive: “Flight from LA to NYC one-way Apr 7- Apr 15, price down to $245 from $399.”

One more example of a smart usage of push notifications tool belongs to OPB News. Everyone with the app gets notified about upcoming live broadcasts. Due to push notifications, OPB managed to increase their audience by 483%. Push notifications work great when it comes to encouraging users to tune in. This is what one of OPB’s push notifications says ‘’Listen to OPB Radio at noon for live broadcast debate between…”

  • Push notification from Swarm

Swarm is a location-based application that gets you notified about current geo position of users you follow. Due to push notifications, Swarm makes you aware if some of your friends are in close proximity to you. Here’s how their typical push notification looks like: ”Hanna B. is at Starbucks on Venice Beach right now.”

The popular blogging platform of today also uses push notifications to encourage users to come back and spend some time on its website. If you follow someone on Medium and this person makes a new publication, you’ll get a short push notification saying something like “James White published “Three counter-intuitive ways to avoid burnout” on Medium.”

One of the most well-known mobile apps for guided meditation sends you cheer-ups and ‘it’s time to relax’ notifications to help you build a positive habit. Isn’t it great to look at your smartphone and see an inspirational quote like “Life reflects our attitude to meditation and our meditation reflects our attitude to life.” Such notifications are neither too salesy nor too pushy, but they deliver on their purpose just greatly – they make people get back to the app over and over again.

The best language learning mobile app DuoLingo sends push notifications to its users to encourage them study harder. However, if the first few notifications fail to make you go back to studying, they send another one “These reminders don’t seem to be working. We’ll turn them off.” What a smart way to grab your attention, agree?  

Let’s sum it up: Why Do Mobile Apps Need Push Notifications?

With so many great companies available on the global market, it’s getting increasingly harder to gain trust and attention of users, as well as generate sales of your app. Given this, it comes as no surprise that business owners agree to spend additional resources in order to give the dust to major competitors in their niches. It turns out, push notifications can be efficient at almost all stages of the customer’s journey. Let’s discuss five major reasons why push notifications are great for your business:

It’s not hard and expensive to develop

In business, it all comes down to time and money. Proceeding from this, marketing tools that are fast and cheap to build appear to be the most popular. Now it’s time to ask you: what is a push notification? It is a feature of a mobile app, nothing more. Since push notifications are a part of mobile apps, it won’t cost you much to ask your developers team to include this feature in the project.

It will help you engage customers

No matter what industry your business operates in, engagement is king. When users are not engaged, they are less likely to make a purchase and recommend your product or service to people they know. Push notifications can help you communicate with your customers and drive them back to your company when you have something valuable or interesting to offer. You have a chance to increase customers engagement by 88 percent by simply incorporating push notifications.

It’s also great for users retention

Catching your customers attention is only half the battle, keeping them with you is also important and hard to achieve. Push notifications can help you achieve better retention rates. They say that the best customers are your current customers. Keep this in mind and use push notifications to keep your users retained. What is a push notification? Another way to keep your users within sight.

It makes your communication more personal

It goes without saying that personalized messages are more likely to make your customers do what you want them to. With a mobile app, you can study and evaluate the behavior of your customers and send them notifications reflecting their activity. Next time you wonder what is a push notification, remember that it’s a magic way to deliver your call-to-action right to the screen of your customer’s phone.

 

It has a perfect opt-in/opt-out dynamic

Hope you know that it’s neither ethical nor efficient to send messages and emails without people’s agreement. With push notifications, users have a total control over their privacy. In a few clicks, your customers can agree for or decline the option of push notifications. This means one thing: you are no longer at the risk of looking too pushy and salesy in the eyes of people who are not ready to receive your updates regularly.

 

So what’s the conclusion?

By now you know what is a push notification, why this tool is great for your business, and what best practices of using push notifications in mobile apps look like. All you need to do now is to think of what kind of messages you’d like your users to receive and hire a team of skilled developers to help you build an app with push notifications. It’s always a good idea to hire the best professionals you can afford and give them the most detailed instructions.

Don’t go any further and contact Adoriasoft mobile app developers today! We are ready to create a best-of-breed mobile app with an effective push notifications architecture, and more for you. Project estimation is free.