What’s the Best Time To Send Push Notifications?

Push notifications are one of the most powerful and underutilized tools in marketing today. 

The ability to reach your audience with timely, personalized notifications, with significantly higher visibility and engagement rates than traditional channels like email, at an extremely low cost, can make an enormous difference to your bottom line.

But like any tool, they need to be used the right way. Timing is particularly important for push notifications; send push notifications at the right time, you can capture the recipient’s attention immediately. Send them at the wrong time, and your push notifications may fall into the abyss.

In this article we’ll help you understand the best time to send push notifications, and share some more insights on how to optimize timing to get better results.

If you don't have an app, you won't be able to access the full power of push notifications. Luckily, if you've got a website, converting it to an app is easy with MobiLoud. Get a free preview of your app to see how it works, and learn how you can start driving revenue on autopilot with push notifications.

What Data Says About the Best Time to Send Push Notifications

The first thing we want to do to figure out the best time to send push notifications is look at data, and see if there are any clear insights from what the data says.

Data from Smartech shows that push notifications perform the best when sent between 10am and 1pm, while the hours of 1am to 6am, understandably, are the worst.

This data is perhaps too broad, though, not taking into account the big differences between industries (the ideal time for a shopping app to send a notification may be a lot different to a productivity app, for example).

In 2019, CleverTap studied more than 300 billion push notifications, giving some great insights on the best and worst times to send notifications.

They looked at various industries and which time slots had the best/worst performance (in terms of CTR) for push notifications.

Here are some of the results:

For Business & Finance apps, the best time was between 3pm and 5pm (for a 3.92% average CTR), and between 1pm and 2pm (3.07% CTR). Notifications after 3pm didn’t perform as well.

Retail apps had best results between 8am and 9am (3.98% CTR) and between 6pm and 8pm (3.48%). The worst performing time was between 4pm and 5pm (2.36%).

Education & Training apps performed best between 12pm and 3pm (2.50%) and between 4pm and 5pm (3.05%), and worst after 8pm / before 10am (1.71%).

Health & Fitness apps had a big difference in performance for best time vs worst time. Notifications sent between 5am and 7am had an average CTR of 5.33%, compared to 1.26% when sent between 11am and 12pm.

The report also looked at the most common times overall for sending push notifications.

They found the majority were, predictably, sent between 8am and 10pm. Between these hours, the most popular slots were 12pm to 1pm, 7pm to 8pm, and 11am to 12pm, with a lull around the mid-afternoon.

This doesn’t necessarily indicate that these times are the best time to send push notifications though, and it may be better to choose a quieter time, when there will be fewer apps competing for attention.

Check out CleverTap’s full report here.

How Important is Timing with Push Notifications?

Though every situation is unique, timing your push notifications correctly often makes a huge difference.

A lot of the value of push notifications comes from their immediacy. You can reach your customers wherever they are – on the sofa, on the bus, even on the toilet – and get them to open your app and take action with a well-timed, well-crafted push notification.

Yet if you send it when your customer is busy, or unlikely to be looking at their phone, your notification can easily be missed.

It may be lost in the shuffle with notifications they get from other apps (people get an average of 46 push notifications per day), or the user will just swipe it to the side, where they will almost certainly forget about it.

In the worst case scenario, your timing could anger or annoy your customers. Imagine someone gets a loud notification from your app in the middle of a meeting, or in the middle of the night, waking them up.

Poorly timed push notifications can cause your user to turn off notifications, or even delete the app altogether.

At the very least, sending your notification at an inopportune time will lead to lower reaction rates and clickthrough rates, and a lot of revenue left on the table.

How to Find the Right Time for Your Push Notifications

The data we shared earlier gives some idea of the most effective time to send push notifications. But honestly, there’s no single best time that works for every brand, every push notification, and every end user.

You’ll need to do some work to figure out the ideal time and maximize engagement from your notifications. Here are some things to consider when working this out.

Industry

There’s a big difference in the ideal time to send push notifications for different industries or types of apps.

You generally want to send push notifications at a time when it’s convenient for people to use your app.

For example, a stock trading app, an eCommerce app and a workout app may all have different low/peak times.

That’s why CleverTap’s report showed that Health & Fitness apps have a significantly higher CTR early in the morning (5-7am) and in the early evening (5-8pm) compared to late morning (11am-12pm).

Most people work out either first thing in the morning or after work, while a lot less people work out in the late morning.

Think about your industry, and when might be the most convenient time for your users to open your app.

Day of the Week

Consider that the ideal time could be vastly different depending on the day – most notably, weekdays vs the weekend.

With an eCommerce app, it might not make sense to send push notifications at 3pm on a weekday, when most people are at work and likely busy.

Yet at 3pm on Saturday or Sunday, it’s a lot more likely that they have free time and therefore be able to browse your newest collection.

Type of Notification

Optimal timing may differ depending on the type of notification.

Some notifications you want to send right away, no matter the time (except overnight, when you generally don’t want to send any notifications).

These include breaking news, score updates and other “alert”-type notifications where the value to the user is in getting them immediately.

For others, such as promotional notifications from a shopping app, the timing is more flexible and it’s better to play around with the time to figure out when engagement is highest.

Consider the User’s Time Zone

Remember that you might have app users in different time zones, and you’ll need to account for this when scheduling a time to send push notifications.

Most push notification services should give you the ability to automatically adjust the sending time to account for the recipient’s time zone.

OneSignal, for example, makes this easy. They also provide an “intelligent delivery” feature which lets you automatically target users with notifications at times when they’re most active.

Dead Times

As we’ve mentioned earlier, there’s potential to do real damage to your brand if you’re sending push notifications at 2am that wake people up.

These times are less likely to be effective for generating engagement as well, so it doesn’t make much sense to schedule notifications to be sent overnight.

However if you have any notifications that get sent immediately, like breaking news alerts, you may want to set it up so that your notifications don’t get sent to users between the hours of 10pm to 8am, for example.

The exception would be any particularly urgent notifications, such as transaction alerts for a banking app for instance, where it’s important that the user gets the notification right away, no matter the time.

Test & Analyze Results

FInally, instead of blindly trusting third-party data and opinions from others, you should test different times and gather data specific to your audience and your app.

For a shopping app, for instance, you might believe that the best time to send a notification is after work, between 6 and 8pm. But it pays to test a few different time slots. By doing so, you might actually find that people respond better to notifications earlier or later in the day.

Drive Revenue and Engagement on Autopilot with MobiLoud

Push notifications are a hugely powerful tool for today’s brands. And as organic reach on social media platforms and search engines declines, traditional messaging channels like email and SMS become more crowded, and your customers spend more of their time on mobile, push notifications will only continue to grow.

Push gives you a way to reach your customers where they are, and drive traffic with a click of a button (perhaps not even that, when you set up automated push notifications).

If you don’t have an app yet, and you’re not already using push notifications to grow your brand, MobiLoud is the best way to do it.

MobiLoud converts your website into mobile apps, with none of the effort, cost and overhead of traditional app development.

You’ll get high-quality apps to connect with your customers on multiple channels, with no major overhaul to your current workflow.

Best of all, you’ll unlock the power of push notifications. The new revenue you get from push notifications may even pay for the app by itself, as push has done for many of our existing customers.

Click here to learn more about our process, or get on a call with us to get a free preview of your app now.