The Top Floor Flat

Every Monday, I write about something new you can try this week to drive more downloads for your mobile app and increase engagement with your existing app users, based on what has worked (and what hasn’t) for 23snaps.

I am wary of push notifications, the popups that appear on your phone alerting you or reminding you about a particular app you’ve downloaded. When used ineffectively or to often, they are possibly the most annoying thing on my phone and a surefire way to get me to delete an app.

However when used well, they can engage uses, increase retention rate and introduce new features much more effectively than email marketing. Even better, when used correctly, people actually like them. We recently spoke to a large group of our most active users to learn what they like about 23snaps, what they don’t like and what they would add. On a number of these calls, I was surprised to hear our users specifically (and without prompting) say that they really liked receiving a notification reminding them to add a photo or update of their child, if they hadn’t for three days. Apparently this has been one of the key ways they remember to keep using an app they already love.

Another application that has recently started using push notifications in a new way is Temple Run 2. This insanely popular game has topped app store charts for months, so why are they changing what works? Well to get users like me, who have the app on their phone, enjoy it, but rarely remember to play, it to take another look. Their new notifications alert users to daily challenges and, more significantly, remind users who have been completing daily challenges regularly to log back in and complete that day’s task (as rewards for completing challenges accumulate if completed consecutively).

Notifications should be more than a simple reminder of the app’s existence. They should reference the core reason why users love your application. With 23snaps, we ask what a user’s kids have been up to lately, reminding them of the value they originally saw in building a living timeline for their kids. For Temple Run 2, their notifications say “You still have two hours left to complete today’s challenge,” combining a sense of time pressure and invoking the desire to get a high score that drives the active gamers.

If you aren’t able to build notifications into your app immediately, there are a number of third party tools that help you send push notifications, without coding it into the app itself (although they do require you to add an SDK). One of the best is Mixpanel. They also collects additional user data which can be used to segment, target and customize the push notifications you send.

My Monday Mobile Marketing Tip for this week: determine a key value of your app and the best time to remind someone about that value (is it after a few days of inactivity? When something changes in the app? When a new feature is available?) and set up ONE automatic push notifications to reengage your users.