According to a recent study conducted by BusinessofApps, the average US smartphone user receives 46 app push notifications per day. That's a lot. With only 31% of users not finding them helpful, CX practitioners are reminded to use push notifications to produce value and address customer's needs.
Although customers are accustomed to receiving these messages, sending silent notifications is however often overlooked by organizations. Let's first define what they are and how you can use them in your engagement tactics.
Silent notifications are messages that do not make any sound, have no visible content, and don't show any alert when they arrive on users' devices. These notifications are not to be confused by those quietly delivered when users don't want to be disturbed. Although users agree to receive notifications, silent notifications are delivered in the background with no alerts.
Given what they are, you may now wonder why you would send notifications if users can't even see them on their devices? Here are three business use cases you may want to apply to your tactics and how they will help you build better customer experiences.
According to research done by Singular, the average rate of mobile app uninstalls was recently measured at 36.4%. In other words, for every 100 times a mobile app is installed, 36 uninstalls follow. This stat confirms that if an app does not deliver on its promise during the first hours or days of its first use, users won't think twice before uninstalling it and considering the next best option to address their needs.
As CX practitioners, we are obsessed with measuring the impact of our efforts and their effect on the overall customer experience. Mobile app usage shouldn't be any different, and using silent notifications can help. I always recommend brands to add these notifications as part of their engagement tactics in a couple of ways:
— On each journey where push notifications are used. This provides insights into the uninstall rate resulting from each individual journey.
— As an overall journey that runs regularly (e.g., every day or week). This helps measure the uninstall rate across all journeys.
Here's an example of an Order Confirmation journey in which a silent push notification is used. As consumers place their orders, their behavior data is collected and processed by the brand in real-time. This information becomes an event used to trigger an Order Confirmation journey where the objective is to acknowledge the order and communicate that to consumers. As such, a couple of confirmation messages are sent - one being an email and the other one a push notification. To measure whether this journey drives any consumer to uninstall the brand's mobile app from their devices, we send a silent push notification within the hour after confirming the order. Note that the choice of waiting an hour is arbitrary as you will have to determine the time that makes more sense to your business. I personally think that an hour is a reasonable time frame to attribute any uninstall decision to the journey that caused it (please comment on this post to let me know what you think and what that time-lapse is for your business). To measure the mobile app uninstall rate, all you need to do is look at your journey report and compare the number of silent push notifications sent with those delivered. In this example, less than 4% of consumers uninstalled the app within an hour after receiving the order confirmation notification.
Measuring uninstalls and understanding why they drive customers to do so is essential as it helps organizations create better experiences and lasting relationships.
Another research to consider is from AppDynamics, in which the report highlights that over 60% of consumers abandon a mobile app after one usage if they face any performance-related issue. One performance consumers can't miss is how fast apps load their content, and the time it takes them to browse without paying too much attention to how long they'll wait. This is particularly critical for brands with fast-changing content, such as when a new collection of products is ready for launch, when dated content needs updating, or if the app runs seasonal themes. Silent push notifications can help ease this issue. These notifications will carry instructions (payload) on what content the app needs to update and where to fetch it. The content then updates in the background. The result is a much faster experience as consumers won't have to wait for the content to refresh when they go back into the app.
This use case is quite similar to the previous one, but I want to call it out separately as its business justification is different. It applies when brands use personalized offers to tailor experiences to their customers. Given the fact that these offers may vary depending on historical, behavioral, and real-time contextual data, it might be more productive for brands to pre-load these offers in the background so that consumers don't experience any delay as they're using the app. Think of it as pre-fetching or staging offers ahead of time, so you're not wasting any time when the experience runs for your customers. A few business examples for which this use case can be used:
— A retail bank detecting a customer near one of their branches and pre-loads personalized offers before the app is used.
— A D2C brand noticing a high propensity for a customer to churn and pre-loads retention offers in the app for when they go back to using it.
— A hospitality brand detecting a customer in a different city/country and pre-loads contextual offers relevant to their new location.
— A home improvement store notices customers' proximity to a nearby store and readying the latest digital coupons in its mobile app.
As push notifications don't distract mobile app users from whatever they may be doing, they provide a great way to understand potential friction points during their experiences with brands and help organizations create more meaningful and lasting relationships.
Let me know what you think by posting a comment below.
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