One big advantage a mobile app gives you is the opportunity to communicate regularly with the user via push notifications. These snippets of text, images, or links are perfect to communicate with the app user for various uses. For instance, you could use them to tell the user about an upcoming sale, the status of their order, the latest news snippets, or even the current weather or selected share prices.
Though these are a useful way of communication, they can be an irritant if you bombard the user with notifications or if you send notifications too fast, too soon. There’s a thin line between the number of push notifications an app can send and how many notifications the user would like to get.
Though the users can control push notifications, about half of app users do not find push notifications annoying or bothersome. Though the other half do find push notifications annoying, they wouldn’t mind receiving a few important notifications from time to time. This depends on personal preferences though. Let’s see the main reasons why people mute push notifications.
Messages sent too often
Too much of something is always bad. No one would like to keep scrolling through their notification bar to search for important notifications when you’ve flooded it with notifications about an offer, discount, or sale. Sending too many notifications is seen as a desperate effort to get the user to use the app. This could just drive the user to uninstall the app if they’ve had too much.
Irrelevance
Sometimes, some apps send generic messages to all of their users without looking at the relevance factor. No men would like to receive beauty and makeup discount notifications when they’ve got nothing to do with makeup. If there are too many irrelevant messages sent, the users would be compelled to uninstall the app as soon as they get a few irrelevant notifications.
Unimportant messaging
When your important messages are buried with unimportant notifications, many app users would rather remove the unimportant apps rather than choose to not receive the unimportant messages. For instance, if an e-commerce app regularly sends too many promotional notifications, even if the user has chosen not to receive them regularly, that user would simply choose to uninstall the app.
How to discourage app users from muting notifications?
Though muting notifications is a personal choice, you could discourage users from muting notifications by sending them a relevant and optimal amount of notifications.
Don’t overdo it- Choosing the right amount of notifications to send can be quite daunting. A rule of thumb is to send notifications based on the app’s niche. For instance, you could send 2-3 notifications per day for a news app while e-commerce apps should send about 1 or 2 per week. What matters is how many notifications the user expects from each app. After all, he should be able to control how many notifications he receives.
Personalize the notifications- Generic notifications are no less than annoying SMSs. Notifications allow you to personalize them for better impact. For example, if a user has expressed interest in buying T-shirts, a personalized push notification could be used to show the user the various options available and offer personalized discounts too.
Send valuable notifications- App users always appreciate push notifications that have value. This could be order status notifications, news, weather, or anything that the app user will find useful. Too many notifications that the user finds useless would drive the customer to mute push notifications.
In the end
Push notifications are an ideal way to communicate effectively with your app users. However, you have to make sure you don’t overdo it or risk getting your app uninstalled from the user’s device.
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