How to Use Push Notifications in Your Project Development: 70+ Ideas to Help You Get Started
Push notifications are streamingly becoming the gold standard for reaching out to customers. Without much effort, your app users can get timely and relevant messages that will catch their attention and encourage them to take a certain action.
Multiple options available to customize push notifications in your app development project can boost your users’ engagement rates by 88%, so they keep returning to the mobile app or website. Not sending push notifications means leaving numerous customer acquisition opportunities out.
As a business owner, you simply can’t ignore this channel while building your app. To help you choose the right push notifications for your web or mobile app we created this detailed article with use cases based on Apiko’s development experience.
What are mobile push notifications used for?
Push notifications play a vital role in communication between a mobile app and its users. They beat all the other traditional ways of promoting content such as emails or SMS, but why? How do push notifications work? They:
- deliver relevant messages in real-time
- drive more engagement
- receive high response rates.
The opt-in/opt-out options in mobile app push notifications give users greater flexibility and control to choose what messages and alerts they want to receive. SMS on the other hand often comes unwanted and users can’t control it.
Push notifications let users become aware of the major updates, news, deals immediately and appear at the center of their smartphone screens. If on Android they are opted-in by default, on iOS users will be asked each time when they download a new app whether they want to receive push notifications or not.
Web push notifications: How do they work?
Though on some mobile devices, users allow apps to send push notifications by default, it is different with websites. To send web push notifications, sites have to ask explicitly for your permission and only when you click the button “Allow” you will start receiving them.
When you opt-in to get push notifications from a certain website, they will arrive in real-time. Messages include title and main text, which are customizable, plus URL, which will take users to the specified webpage. Web push notifications can reach users who left your website and bring them back.
Push notifications: 70+ ideas
Retention push notifications
When your users sign up for the app, it is just half the challenge. Nearly 1 in 4 people abandon the app after the first use. To boost the retention rates, remind your users why they downloaded the app and what’s in it for them. Keep them coming back with such push notifications as:
- Inactivity push notifications. Notify you users about new features, deals and updates. Let them know what they are missing out and how to catch on!
- Not finished action push notifications. Encourage your users to finish an action they have already started. Send them a message that will provoke more activity by pointing out what there is still to do, e.g. complete a purchase or post an update.
- Reminders. Tell your app users about another chance to do something, remind them that there is still time. There may be an item back in stock or on sale. The registration for a webinar ends soon. Don’t let the users lose opportunities!
- Exclusive offers. To achieve the highest conversion rate with push notifications, make a limited-time exclusive offer your app users wouldn’t like to miss.
Engagement Push Notifications
Adding push notifications is a great way to raise the engagement. Encourage your users to interact more with your app and turn their app experience into a fun and interesting time.
- In-app messages for every situation. Convert more with personalized in-app messaging. Keep users updated about what is happening within their app.
- New features and tips on how to use them. Give your users additional information on how they can get more from your app. Bring more value by introducing new features.
- New activities push notifications. Has someone liked your picture or mentioned you in a post? Are your friends starting a live video? Is there a new event your friends are going to attend? We all wouldn’t mind engaging notifications that keep us up to date.
- Goal hit notifications. When users hit a goal or earn some points, drive more engagement by celebrating it with them. Stimulate users to come back for more!
- Ask for a rating or a survey completion. Engage your users into an app life. Ask them to share their experience.
Transactional Push Notifications
Transactional push notifications deliver extremely useful information to the app users and make their customer journey smooth and hassle free.
- Transaction update notifications. Update your users about the status of their transaction. Is it in process, shipped or delivered?
- Payment updates. Don't let your users worry about the payment process. Use push messages to notify them that the payment has gone through.
- Bill payment notifications. Remind your users to pay their bills in due time.
- Abandoned cart push notifications. Some carts never make it past checkout. Push notifications make it possible for your website or mobile app to retarget such customers highlighting a sale on the added products. Send them an offer they can’t say “no” to!
Customer journey push notifications
In your app development project, come up with a plan on how to best use push notifications to keep your users engaged and get them to come back.
- Welcome. Tell new users how good it is that they opted in and highlight what’s in it for them.
- Main steps completion. Encourage app users to complete the onboarding steps, such as adding the profile information, filling out their preferences, trying out all the features.
- Interest-based push notifications. You can easily reengage inactive users by prompting them to try or see something new they may be interested in.
- Updates. Notify users about updates that are happening in the app, new activities, new messages from their friends. Also you can ask users to update their information.
- Thank you messages. Let your users know that you are glad about their purchasing, rating or sharing sth. Also you can offer them a gift such as a coupon or a sale for their loyalty.
Push notifications: 8 industries guide
- Travel apps development
Push notifications can connect travel brands with travelers more effectively than any other way. From the planning stage to the end of their journeys, these messages can reach travelers in an instant and provide the most important information to keep users up to date.
The mostly used push notifications in travel apps development are:
- encouragement to book flights or hotels
- new deals on car hire or hotel bookings
- offers to fill out hotel or transport gaps in users’ itineraries
- expiration of a free cancellation
- flight cancellation
- flight delays
- risk alert
- immigration security issue
- answers to the popular questions
- Ecommerce: B2B, P2P, B2C marketplace development
As an e-commerce marketplace, you can use push notifications for numerous causes. They’ll prove to be extremely valuable in driving more sales. Users will appreciate your support during every aspect of their customer journey in an ecommerce app.
Use push notifications to alert your customers about:
- new products added
- price drop notifications
- flash sales / limited time offer
- seasonal sales
- personalised offers (unique coupons, money off the birthday)
- abandoned cart reminders
- stock alerts (whenever a desired item is out of stock)
- products they might like
- wish list products status
- order and delivery updates
Abandoned cart reminders can really increase your sales rates, especially combined with unique discounts or coupons. Below you can see the most popular reasons for abandonment during the checkout. Knowing why they left will really help you personalize your push notification message and retarget the users most efficiently.
- Finance app development
According to the research by Think with Google, 92% of people find finance notifications useful. They help users to get information about:
- possible account privacy concern
- questionable transaction
- low balance alert
- reaching a credit limit
- new features added to the app
- appointment reminder
- recommendation of a product or service
You can also customize push notifications so you get an alert for transactions over $200, or foreign transactions. Take a look at the most popular activities, which may help you choose the right push notifications for your finance app development.
Source: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/advertising-channels/apps/app-marketing-mobile-banking/
- Fitness app development
Push notifications can be helpful to users in many ways that enhance your fitness business. We’ve gathered some popular examples of what they can do:
- Welcome new users and encourage them to keep on
- Remind users about workouts / payments
- Send diet reminders and suggestions
- Offer personal discounts
- Keep client’s on track with motivational messages
- Encourage users to book classes / do workouts
- Congratulate clients on their progress
- Re-engage with inactive users and inspire them to start again
- Online food business app development
Online food businesses strive to catch the attention of customers because of the constantly growing competition. To grab more orders, push notifications can be really useful. You can use them in the following ways:
- Notify app users about special offers
- Location based deals
- Encourage to return to the abandoned cart
- Update about the delivery status
- Offer to try out new dishes
- Collect feedback from customers
- E-learning app development
Now building relationships with learners is becoming more important than lectures and textbooks. Connections between people inspire, motivate and guide the learning process.
In e-learning app development, teachers and students can get more conversions with the help of smart engines and powerful tools. Being reminded by push notifications can boost motivation, personalize learning experience and lead to more productive learning. So what push notifications can you use in e-learning apps?
- Reminders to finish courses
- Reminders of up-coming events
- New content notifications
- Motivation notifications
- Progress tracking
- Rewards
- Discount or coupon messages
Source: https://appinstitute.com/what-is-a-push-notification/
- Live events
In-the-moment push notifications can drive your app users to the live events, instant messaging with their friends or webinars.
Popular push notifications are:
- Friends updates
- Events recommendations
- Booking details
- Getting ready to go live
- Going live
- Reminders of an event
- Thanks for joining the event
- Ratings requests
Source: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/instagram-live-with-a-friend
- Social media
People love being connected with their friends and knowing what’s happening in their lives. Social media is the most engaging place for people to interact. Push notifications can only add to this entertaining experience.
- New friends
- Friends’ activities
- Profile updates
- Direct messages
- Mentions
- Recommendations
Source: https://appletoolbox.com/facebook-push-notifications-working-fix/
Best push notification services you can use for web or mobile app development
The right push notification service is going to make the setup as well as the time of use really easy and smooth.
As a web and mobile app development company with years of experience, Apiko has tested different push notification services and two of them have proven to offer the most functionality needed for the projects.
Here are the push services we are going to look at:
OneSignal
OneSignal is one of the most popular and widely used push notification services. It is a free service for startups or small businesses to get started, but it also offers paid functionality for scaling businesses.
With OneSignal you can send mobile, web, in-app and email notifications. It is a reliable, easy-to-use, constantly supported and cost effective solution for websites as well as mobile apps. Push notifications for mobile apps are available for iOS and Android platforms, or even react native - a cross-platform development framework.
Read more on how to implement push notifications for iOS and Android in React Native.
Google Firebase
Google Firebase is another great option for integrating push notifications into your web or mobile app. It’s easy to use and does its job well.
Google Firebase allows you to send messages to any device, customize them and use A/B testing to try out different versions of your notification messages. It is also integrated with Google analytics, which gives you access to detailed engagement and conversion tracking.
Push notifications: Apiko use cases
Let’s take a look at some of our app development cases.
InList
InList is a mobile app that helps you to discover and book exclusive parties, sporting events and concerts in over 45 cities across the globe. It handpicks new special events daily, which makes the service highly curated and reliable.
To perform its functions well, our team of developers enabled push notifications using OneSignal service. Their main goal is to keep users updated with timely information such as:
- new messages in a chat
- booking details from host about an event
- booking requests user notifications (declined or accepted)
- any updates (so that users are informed whenever there is a change)
As InList is a nightlife guide, it is a must for its users to receive notifications with:
- recommendations for new events
- encouragement to try out something new (such as new events categories)
- proposals to visit new regions
In-app messages also play a vital role in creating an engaging user experience. Some of them duplicate the push notifications’ text, while others provide information according to the current location of a user. Such messages notify users about the events which are happening in that region.
Events by BigDayMade
Events by BigDayMade is a portfolio app for professional event photographers to show their work and reach more clients. The functionality of the app allows users to create an event and add all the team members, drag photos from the computer, organize them in collections, and share events. To make the user experience for photographers smooth and convenient, Apiko team made it also possible to schedule posts in advance.
When app users create a post with photos and schedule its publication for a specific time and date, this post is saved on the server. While with Facebook there are no problems in sharing a post from the server automatically, in Instagram you can’t do this. That’s why photographers need push notifications to remind them to share their post manually at the specified time.
In the case of Events by BigDayMade app, our developers used Firebase Cloud Messaging to enable push notifications.
Source: https://appadvice.com/app/events-by-bigdaymade/1500254130
How do push notifications work: Get started
Push notifications are a must for your website or mobile app development project. What push notifications you are going to choose depends specifically on your industry and app goals. There are a variety of ways you can design and organize the user flow which will best suit your business strategy.
If you need any help integrating push notifications into your website or mobile app, feel free to contact us!