But actually, as impressive as these statistics are, there is much room for improvement. One look at your phone and you realise how bad apps actually are at communicating with you via push notifications. This only serves to demonstrate the opportunity for the apps can take their app push notification strategy to the next level.

Providing an opt-in experience

The best push notification strategies include a sound opt-in experience for the mobile app user. Notifications do distract users from their daily routines. Therefore, your users must expect this to happen from the first moment they open your app.

The last thing that you’ll want to do is annoy your users. That’s why it’s important to explain your push notification strategy. You only have one chance to get this right. Explain your push notification strategy badly and none of your users will opt-in. Lack clarity and your users won’t be happy when they receive notifications they weren’t expecting.

A note on spam

One of the worst things that you can do is to spam your users with push notifications. The entire point of this article is to help you to craft a push notification strategy that puts the user experience at the forefront.

Mindlessly spamming your users will lead to huge disengagement – despite many push notification services saying otherwise.

Remember that everything you do with your app and everything that you want to achieve should create value for the app users. Fundamentally this is the best way to think when creating any kind of mobile strategy.

Relevancy is key

That leads me on very nicely to relevancy in push notification strategies. Whether you’re sending ios push notifications or android push notifications, you need to think about one important factor – relevancy.

This involves understanding your app users. A good push notification service will deliver you with valuable insights around your app users each time you push to them. This way you can very quickly build up a complex persona of what your user wants and how they interact with your app. But more on that later.

Relevancy means communicating with your users in the best possible micro-moment.

That means delivering push notifications only when it is relevant for the user. Place your user experience at the center of everything you do. Figure out the optimal micro-moment, and ensure that notifications are only used at these relevant times.

There are multiple methods of figuring out what these moments are for your users. But the best way is using data.

The more complex your push strategy is – that is the more powerful the targeting options, the more powerful the app insights that you’ll get from the service.