How to get users to opt in for push notifications

Push is one of the most effective channels to engage and retain app users. Push notifications are reducing the user journey significantly compared to email, and can bring the customers back in the app faster. Users are able to interact with push straight from their device screen, and by leveraging deep-linking users can land directly on the product page in the app.

To further demonstrate the effectiveness of push, we looked at the engagement of users who have push enabled and receive push notifications, vs users who don't receive push. The graph below presents the average number of sessions per user per month during a 12-month period, splitting the audience in users who have push enabled and receive push notifications (blue line at the top), versus users who have push disabled and do not receive notifications (red line). It's quite clear that users who receive push notifications are significantly more engaged and have more sessions than users who do not receive push messages.

However, the biggest hurdle for marketers is getting customers to enable push notifications. This challenge is mainly affecting iOS apps, as Apple uses an “opt-in” approach as opposed to Android’s “opt-out” approach. On Android devices, when users install an app for the first time, push notifications are enabled by default. In iOS, users have to give their consent in order to receive push.

So the way we approached push opt-in for our iOS app initially, was by displaying the Apple native form when a user installed the app for the first time. Within a few seconds from opening the app for the first time we would automatically show them the native form.

When looking at the opt-in rate a couple of months later, we noticed that it was very low, only a handful of new users have enabled push. We realized that most likely the low opt-in rate was caused by the fact that we were asking users to opt-in for marketing push too soon, before we had a chance to prove our value to the customers.

We then started testing different strategies, targeting users at different times and adapting the message based on their behavior.

Additionally, instead of displaying the native push opt-in form, we first displayed a custom creative with two calls-to-action. When a user tapped the call-to-action “ALLOW PUSH”, on the next screen they would see the native iOS prompt where they would click again "ALLOW", action which would automatically enable push notifications for our app on their device, while the user would remain inside our app without taking any additional steps.

When a user would tap "DON'T ALLOW" the creative would simply close. Why we chose to display a custom creative instead of just showing the Apple native form? Because once a user taps on "DON'T ALLOW" button on the native form, we cannot ask them again later. However if we first display a custom creative, if a user taps "DON'T ALLOW" on our creative, we are able to target them again later, after they get used to our app and are enjoying it, and ask again at a time when they might be more inclined to accept push notifications.

What really worked for us was showing the right message at the right time.

For example, when users just purchased an annual subscription to a magazine, we would ask “Would you like to sign up to be notified when new issues are available?” The value, in this case, was obvious: any subscriber would want to know when they can read their next issue.

Another segment were the users who searched for a specific magazine. For example, if a user was searching for and was interested in Cosmopolitan the push opt-in prompt would say, “Would you like to be notified when your favorite magazine is on sale?”

We found that strategy worked quite well, and the opt-in rate has doubled or even tripled in some cases. 

#appmarketing #pushnotifications #appstrategy #mobilemarketing