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

eugeneyan.com

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

#71

Post by iamdbtoo »

seszett wrote: post #45
rochak wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have the Uber Eats app installed and I don't receive unwanted notifications. I think I only enabled the channel for notifications on a current order, and I don't get anything else. Maybe they are more careful because I'm in the EU?

Possibly. I'm in the US and UberEats is easily the worst offender on my phone. I get multiple notifications a day nudging me to order things.

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

#72

Post by bostik »

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.

Or turn that around: the service was providing insufficient value for the user to bother looking at how to opt in for their notifications.

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

#73

Post by satvikpendem »

anticorporate wrote: post #65
brazzy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Most customers will tolerate quote a lot of this form of advertising just like other forms. Enough to make it profitable to spend significant effort on it.

Whether customers will tolerate it has no bearing on whether it is acceptable to bake an antifeature into an application.

In your opinion. In marketers' or app developers' opinions, it continues to make them more money so that's what they'll do, regardless of whether a small minority of consumers complain about it. Of the people I know, only technical people have turned off notifications, most average users simply have long lists of notifications on their phone, that they may or may not look at, ironically making the value of each notification from some random app a lot less.

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

#74

Post by smoe »

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.

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

#75

Post by bgro »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #11

> 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.

But but our notification policy is just “Do you want notifications, including security alerts, new messages, emergency information about your account, and promotional messages and advertisements, and you agree that we can sell all your data”?

There’s literally no way we could break that down! How can we guess what the user wants when they REFUSE to tell us! I guess we better just leave it so they can opt out if they successfully navigate all 6 toggles, but if they do that we better just flag their account for suspicious activity because I don’t know why anybody would ever opt out. Seems suspicious to me.

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

#76

Post by mercurialsolo »

While we think of push more in context of notifs - this same logic can be applied to any recommendations that come over a channel where intent is to be inferred based on past behaviour versus determined based on user input - be it on email, or any messaging channel or even on a subsequent visit to a page.

While we can debate the merits/demerits of push - for practical commerce, a large part of the world still switches on push, and relevant push will deliver more concrete and better ROI.

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

#77

Post by ok123456 »

forgingahead wrote: post #7

Banking apps are the worst. They make us switch on notifications, else we can't get any confirmation notices for us to confirm transactions, then they proceed to spam me with credit card offers and other rubbish I'm not interested in receiving.

Just turn on SMS notifications of any transactions on the account and disable any "app" notifications.

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

#78

Post by mad182 »

rmholt wrote: post #27

Nothing. Everything. Never. /article In all seriousness, I recommend the app FilterBox, it allows you to set fine grained rules for notifications for each app

TBH I don't need "fine grained rules for each app". There is only one rule I care about for most apps - block all notifications.

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

#79

Post by georgel »

rochak wrote: post #19
saagarjha wrote: post #2

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.

Instacart was abusing push notifications with advertising. I disabled their notifications and forced them to use SMS. They haven't sent me any ads that way, because SMS would cost them a trivial but non-zero amount.

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

#80

Post by carlosjobim »

TylerE wrote: post #33
londons_explore wrote: post #31

I'd much rather the OS have a "report spam" button on notifications, and if more than 5% of app users report spam then the whole app gets all notifications blocked by default. Both Apple and Google have strong controls on the apps identity, so it won't be like email spam where the sender can just send from a new email address to get around the filter.

Seems like that would be a cheap way to destroy a competitor. Pay a bunch of people on some sketchy freelancer site to install the app, do whatever easily trigger notications.. and then report every single one. Sort of a spin in the concept that it’s much easier to create bullshit than debunk it.

Why is this argument always used against any kind of improvement beneficial for the end user? Let's at least try to improve things before giving up.
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