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Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

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Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#151

Post by rcxdude »

xivzgrev wrote: post #82

Marketer here. I’ll add how my company does it (10m+ list size) 1) we limit promotional notifications to one per user per day. All campaigns that target a given user are ranked based on expected monetization or engagement. This involves a large batch scoring job that runs overnight 2) we also limit promotional messages to one every x days, where x is personalized to the user. The more you open/click, the more you get…

It's worth playing the "what if everyone did this" game: I have ~20 apps installed on my phone. If everyone sent 1 promotional message a day, I would be getting 20 per day. Which would mean more than one each waking hour. That's about as many notifications that are actually of use to me each day, and that amount of spam would effectively render notifications useless to me. I'm very thankful I can disable notifications for apps.

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#152

Post by rcxdude »

smoe wrote: post #74
kkarpkkarp wrote: post #16

Two years ago I learned from some Twitter post a new habit: every time you install an app on your phone, you must do one more step: block its notifications. You don't need any notifications from apps as long as this is not an instant messaging app. (You can make additional exception for your banking app, but that's it for 90% of users) My phone is now so silent.

Instant messaging apps don't need notifications either. It upsets some people at first, but it is for the most part perfectly fine to just check and respond messages in your own preferred frequency.

For me this becomes worse: If I don't get (reliable) push notifications for things I want updates on, I tend to become obsessive over checking it. The more different things I am checking this way, the worse it becomes in terms of disruption to my focus. Push notifications unify multiple streams together and let me go 'I don't need to check this, I'll get a notification if there's any update'.

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#154

Post by rkagerer »

I practice a "1 strike you're out" policy.

As soon as I get a single unwanted notification from an app, that's it, I kill all its notifications privileges. Any other annoyances, and the whole app gets uninstalled. My attention and focus are too valuable a resource.

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#155

Post by chris-orgmenta »

IncandescentGas wrote: post #96
chris-orgmenta wrote: post #53

This interested me, as it would be a nice concept to build a manual around. On the face of it, it could have suited me ("What to push: Being helpful and engaging") But looking into it, I feel the writer has a more cynical worldview than me, and I found this a bit distasteful. I think that this resource is not useful to me, because it is undermined by greed. The end goal with this article is, IMO, people's pockets - n…

They must know this right? It seems the "Be helpful and engaging" is a bit of self delusion to pretend they aren't having such a wide negative impact on all of humanity with this kind of research. If the premise is to determine how many alerts the user will tolerate before taking action to silence them, it's known up front the alerts are unwanted and harm the user. The alerts are intended to drive product addiction.…

Concur. And,

I think a lot of it is simply "other people do it, so I have subconsciously justified it"

Similar to how easy it is for our society to eat meat from factory farming.

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#156

Post by JohnFen »

TylerE wrote: post #149
JohnFen wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easier to just disable them all by default, really, then I don't have to bother with micromanaging on an app-by-app basis. This is particularly true given that the majority of push notifications are spam.

The problem with off by default is that 99% of users will never even think that is something they can turn on.

I wasn't talking about OS defaults. I was talking about my personal use of my machines. I don't allow any push notifications by default because the benefit of them is tiny compared to the hassle of dealing with them.

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#157

Post by daxelrod »

stackskipton wrote: post #129
IncandescentGas wrote: post #95

These regularly spaced and frequent junk notifications are so important to tech companies because they drive product addiction. Interrupting your day 16 times forcing someone to decide to scroll their feed yet again today, until they're as helpless as Pavlov's dog. How is this kind of computer science any more ethical than the chemists who worked to modify tobacco to be more addictive? Apple and Google are complicit…

I'm shocked Apple hasn't tried to fix it and use it as selling point. Smartphone companies don't need to hook the user anymore, almost everyone is high on the smack at this point.

Part of Apple clearly wants to do that with Focuses giving more control around what notifications people get in which contexts.

Unfortunately other parts seem to think the opposite. For example, Apple News by default sends notifications for puff pieces like years-in-review rather than just urgent breaking news.

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#158

Post by rockskon »

detourdog wrote: post #70
pluto_modadic wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, I was like "you check the user's notification settings, right? right?"

The problem starts with low opt-in rates. The assumption becomes the low response was due to the user not understanding how to opt-in.

By that same logic the present state can be described as most users not knowing how to opt-out which is predatory.

Given the history of online advertising it can readily be inferred that ads do not provide enough value for almost any user to want to opt-in.

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#159

Post by Irishsteve »

JohnFen wrote: post #113
Irishsteve wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say its a grey area in our case. The user isn't using a "tell me when discounts happen" feature, but rather a favourites feature where some of our marketing said to favourite things to get a discount. Another instance but via notification was that someone would lose their product if they didn't complete the transaction (24 hours notice). This wasn't a lie - we reserved inventory for 24 hours for a buyer as it was…

> The user isn't using a "tell me when discounts happen" feature Then that's a plain abuse of push notifications, in my view. If the user didn't ask for marketing messages, they shouldn't be pushed.

I'm in Europe. They have to tell us they want marketing messages otherwise its against the regulations and would result in fines. We followed those rules!
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