5 Ways to Increase Your Push Notification Click-through Rate

It’s up to 25x more expensive to acquire a new app user than to retain an existing one.

One of the crucial metrics for mobile apps is retention rate. Thanks to the power of push notifications, you can keep your users engaged and make sure they keep returning to your app.

If you’re not sending push notifications, you’re missing out on a key benefit of mobile apps.

Frequent messaging via push notifications can increase app retention anywhere from 3x to 10x according to an Urban Airship study.

A higher rate leads to successful conversions for your business goals. Without a solid push notification strategy you sacrifice valuable user growth.

What is the Average Click-Through Rate For Push Notifications?

The average click-through rate for push notifications is 28%, according to a study by Airship.

This can be as high as 44% in certain industries.

For perspective, the average CTR for email is just 1-2%.

However, just because this is what the data says regarding push notification CTR, doesn't mean you can send push notifications on autopilot and automatically get the same results.

It's important to know what contributes to a good push notification click-through rate, and craft our messages in a way to make them stand out, catch attention, and really speak to your users.

Further reading: the Ultimate Guide to Push Notifications for eCommerce

5 Key Factors Influencing Push Notification Click-Through Rate

To get better CTR from your push notifications, you should understand how people consume push notifications, what they find engaging about push notifications, and what turns them off.

We can point to five important factors at play with push notifications, which you need to get right if you want your users to click and take action when they see your push messages:

1. Transparency
2. Brevity
3. Tone
4. Emojis
5. Timing

Let's examine these factors in more depth, and discuss how this can help you run better push notification campaigns and get a higher push notification CTR.

1. Transparency

Now that you understand how important push notifications are, how do you get users to opt-in and receive them?

Well, here’s where the bad news comes in. A large percentage of mobile users don’t opt-in to receive these messages.

Only 67.5% of all app users opt in to push notifications.

The reason?

People don’t want to deal with the chaotic barrage of messages from companies all over their screen.

The best way to overcome this uphill battle is to be transparent with what content you’ll give to your customers.

You’ll want to illustrate a crystal clear picture for what your customers can expect out of your push notifications from the moment they start using your app.

2. Brevity

You don’t want to experiment with long-form content in your push notifications. They’re great for reminding customers about your product or service, but brevity is key.

You would be annoyed if your phone buzzed with rambling messages all day too, right? Annoyed users will opt out of your notifications. When they opt out, you lose relevancy and your hard work begins to fade away.

Localytics data found that the optimal range is under 10 words long.

While there is no ‘perfect’ length for a push notification, there are a few key things you should keep in mind according to Urban Airship:

• Make your notifications short
• Frontload the most important content
• Test on the devices that the majority of your audience use

Your audience don’t want their time wasted.

Design your push notifications to be bite-sized snippets of valuable information. You want your users to see high-quality messages when they take a look at their screen, therefore keeping them engaged.

3. Tone

A little personalization can go a long way for your open and click-through rates.

Throw in some humor or emojis to give your customers the impression they’re receiving a text from a good friend (it it makes sense given the message context!).

If the context is right, your audience will be more engaged and more inclined to follow through your notification messages.‍

8tracks used humor as part of their push notification strategy which reduced their app user churn by 8% and increased user engagement by 23%.

Humor won’t work if it’s used at the wrong times – but do it right, and you’ll be able to bring back more users to your app than you would without it (and if you do it really well, your users might praise you on Twitter).

4. Use Emojis in Push Notifications

A Clevertap study found that the benchmark click-through rate for all industries is 2.74%.

With emoji’s, the average CTR is 3.48%, giving an industry-wide average increase of 38%. Mobile apps in the business and finance industry that use emojis in their push notifications receive a 128% boost in CTR.

Check out this infographic for a quick rundown of the best performers for these industries.

Select your emojis carefully and make sure you test them – you don’t want to be sending them to an audience who isn’t receptive to them, or in messages that are on serious topics.

Emojis aren’t a magic wand you can wave to bring a higher CTR. You must strategically implement them into your marketing messages, and keep the other key factors mentioned previously in mind.

It might surprise you, but the three industries in which emoji usage negatively impacted marketing efforts include entertainment and events, travel and hospitality as well as health and fitness.

Adding emojis to your push notification messages is an easy way to make them stand out more than others that your users may be receiving from their other apps, and should help you boost CTRs

5. Timing

You can send the most engaging push notification, with a charming emoji, speaking your user's language, but if it comes at the wrong time, it may get lost or ignored.

Data shows that certain days and times have a pronounced effect on push notification CTR.

Each industry has their own times when CTR is highest and lowest. For example, for retail apps:

• The best CTR is between 8-9am or between 6-8pm.
• The lowest CTR is between 4-5pm.
• Monday and Tuesday are the days of the week with the highest CTR, while Saturday is the lowest.

For business & finance apps, the hours of 3-5pm, 1-2pm and 7-8am deliver a better CTR, while sending notifications at later times correlates with worse CTRs.

Check out CleverTap's push notification report for more data.

Part of your strategy can be to avoid peak times, and send push notifications at a time when users aren't barraged with notifications from 100 other brands.

• 77% of push notifications are sent between Monday and Friday.
• 17% of push notifications are sent on Fridays, making it the most popular day of the week for push.
• Sunday is the least popular, with 10% of all push notifications sent.
• The most popular times to send push notifications are between 6-8am and 10pm-midnight.

Alternatively, you could take this data to mean the most effective time to send notifications.

Either way, you'll want to test for yourself. Try a few different timings, measure CTR for each campaign, and see which one comes out on top.

Learn more: see how MobiLoud's OneSignal integration makes implementing push notifications a breeze.

Wrapping Up

Used correctly, these Push Notifications tips will help increase your click through rates and improve your app user retention rates.

Remember: Craft your push notifications to urge your customers to take action. Then, present them with straightforward and high-quality content.

Your push notifications are the medium to help beat your app retention issues, so use them wisely!

Remember, testing is crucial. Every business today must be tuned into the key metrics driving business growth. Without the ability to measure the success or shortcomings of various strategies, those that don’t work will continue to do so.