Push notifications are products too
I believe a user’s journey on a mobile app is strongly influenced by the app’s push notifications. As such, many companies, naturally, get a dedicated team to manage and evolve their app push notifications.
The primary goal of a push notification is to draw the user’s attention to the app, by reminding them of things that the app can do for them. These reminders are usually sugar-coated, funny, nostalgic, and they end with a nudge for you to perform actions like open the notification to the app, clear it, or at least consider the information that it is providing in such a short text!
Push notifications begin with a hook, leading into the offering, and finishing off with a call-to-action. If I were to represent these, I’d put the hook and the offering + CTA in two levels-
Level 1: Hook
Level 2: Offering + CTA
This simple two-level template packs endless possibilities.
Thousands of dollars are spent to ensure push notifications are constantly innovated on.
Data suggests that push notifications lead to improved, increased app launch.
With this template, a resultant push notification usually falls under one of the following scenarios-
Scenario 1: linked levels 🪢
L1: Hook are mapped to emotions
L2: Offering to remind of above emotions followed by a call-to-action (CTA)
Scenario 2: unlinked levels 🦦
L1: Hook is totally random, a pun, something that simply surprises the user, makes them chuckle
L2: Offering directly means business and ties to the CTA
Scenario 3: no CTA 🤷🏻♂️
Scenario 4: no level 2; just an extended level 1 😌
Scenario 5: check-in levels 🙃
Even though push notifications are seen mainly as a marketing communication channel, I see them as full-fledged products.
They can be of many different styles. They carry a purpose – moving a metric, sticking a message, testing the parent app, etc.
Also, they definitely build up on first principles.
I’d probably call push notifications as Occam’s Razor entities. Push notifications are simple solutions to bring customers back to an app, hence they are some of the BEST solutions to address customer retention problems, if done right.
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