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

eugeneyan.com

21–30 of 159 posts

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

#21
post #19

If you send me a push and I can’t explain why I’m seeing it (for example, if it’s not time-sensitive or I haven’t done anything to indicate I want it) then I consider it spam. This is doubly so if you’re using it to send me an advertisement. That’s the easiest way to ensure your app is going in the trash.

Uber's Apps are so shit when it comes to that. I can rarely recall a time when I opened the app and closed it without finding anything useful and it didn't send me a notification within minutes.

Indeed. I still use Uber from time to time and don't want to have to wait around reinstalling it, so I took the time to go through the settings and disable this crap. The Uber eats app got the boot, though. I only ever used it like twice anyway.

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

#22

> But with pushes, we have to guess what the customer might be interested in given triggers such as events, promotional offers No, you don't have to guess. You can correctly know that the answer is "no". If you're going to blatantly send unwanted marketing to the user, at least be honest with yourself and your audience about it.

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

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

#23
post #5

One detail not covered as much in this article is that many options are now available to users and apps to control the push notifications they send and receive. For example, on iOS, when prompted for notification permission, users are now asked to choose if they want the notifications sent to a summary view. iOS will also invite users to disable notifications from apps they haven't interacted with recently. Here are…

Permissions don't matter much. Of course you need to be able to disable permissions for specific apps, but if you want to receive e.g. user messages but not promotional spam, there is nothing you can do.

https://support.apple.com/en-ke/108302

iOS has a "Time Sensitive notifications" type that will popup immediately, even when user assign the app to summary view. But the type is assigned by sender alone. It is still possible to spam it.

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

#26

> But with pushes, we have to guess what the customer might be interested in given triggers such as events, promotional offers No, you don't have to guess. You can correctly know that the answer is "no". If you're going to blatantly send unwanted marketing to the user, at least be honest with yourself and your audience about it.

I think what they really meant there was

> But with pushes, we have to guess what is the upper limit of unwanted marketing the customer will tolerate

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

#28
post #19

If you send me a push and I can’t explain why I’m seeing it (for example, if it’s not time-sensitive or I haven’t done anything to indicate I want it) then I consider it spam. This is doubly so if you’re using it to send me an advertisement. That’s the easiest way to ensure your app is going in the trash.

Uber's Apps are so shit when it comes to that. I can rarely recall a time when I opened the app and closed it without finding anything useful and it didn't send me a notification within minutes.

[deleted]

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

#29
post #26

> But with pushes, we have to guess what the customer might be interested in given triggers such as events, promotional offers No, you don't have to guess. You can correctly know that the answer is "no". If you're going to blatantly send unwanted marketing to the user, at least be honest with yourself and your audience about it.

I think what they really meant there was > But with pushes, we have to guess what is the upper limit of unwanted marketing the customer will tolerate

[deleted]

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

#30
Something I wish Apple and Google would support is notifications that are only delivered if you’ve opened the app during the last 2 hours. Taxi and food delivery services for example have a reasonable usecase for push notifications, but only around the time when I’ve opened the apps.

I think adding such dials to the operating system could help align the user interest of not being spammed with the engagement metrics used to motivate the spamming a tiny bit.

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