Top 5 reasons to use push notifications

As you develop a mobile marketing strategy, you should consider using push notifications to increase engagement and retention for your app. These notifications help you build a relationship with your customer in a non-intrusive way. Below are the top five reasons to use push notifications for your app.
1.  Push is Actionable.

Push and email are delivered instantly. However, a push notification pops up for instant viewing right on the user’s phone screen versus the user having to log into their email, most likely at some later point, to find the notification. In its essence, email is much more asynchronous while pushes facilitate synchronous communication (i.e., click the notification to be instantly taken to the app and make immediate use of the info provided in the push to increase mobile engagement with your app.

2. Push Doesn’t Require the User’s Email Address.

Once you set up a push notification platform for your app, you can obtain users’ device tokens as soon as they download your app. This is all that’s required to send users a push notification versus email, where you explicitly need to request users’ email addresses.

(below also on what makes push notifications better than SMS Notifications)
3. Push Doesn’t Require the User’s Phone Number.

Once you set up a push notification platform for your app, you can obtain users’ device tokens as soon as they download your app. This is all that’s required to send users a push notification versus SMS, where you explicitly need to request users’ phone numbers– personal information they would be unlikely to provide willingly.

4. Push Offers Easy Personalization.

With SMS, you are limited to 160 characters for your message apart from rigid formatting constraints. You can get creative with push notifications. For instance, iOS allows you to get creative and add a custom sound to your push, while Android allows you to add an image to your push, among other things.

Importantly, our CleverTap push capability allows you to personalize your push notifications with information we gather from the user profiles we build, as well as user action/inaction information. For example, let’s say that the sales of a particular product are waning among users of yours in a particular location (say Colaba, Mumbai, India). With us, you can send a push notification targeting those users (we have hyper-local targeting) who added that product to their cart (action) and didn’t purchase it (inaction).
5. Cost

SMS would be costlier for the sender since it requires a dedicated telephone network for its delivery versus push, which uses the inexpensive, shared resources of the Internet. SMS adds cost for the sender (and receiver, if they’re charged for incoming messages) when they’re trying to reach users spread globally. However, with push, there’s no additional cost/effort required to make it work globally.

With CleverTap’s out-of-the-box and custom push notification campaigns, we’ve had customers double their users’ monthly activity and increase user retention by at least 25%. Give us a shot and let us know what you think! Sign up for a free demo account here.