Urban Airship Shares Results Of Its Most Expansive Good Push Index (GPI) Study

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Third Good Push Index study offers first-available vertical opt-in rates, as well as engagement and retention data comparing industries

The Good Push Index (GPI) study evaluates the engagement and retention lift that push notifications deliver to mobile apps. Six-month analysis from more than 2400 apps and 500 million push messages found that users opted in to push notifications are retained at nearly double the rate of users opted out and are much more engaged with 26 percent more average monthly app opens per user. Results were even greater for many of the six industry verticals categorized from the sample—Retail, Media, Games, Entertainment, Sports and Gambling—with significant engagement and retention differences highlighting unique characteristics of push messaging across different industries.

While push messaging tools, like Urban Airship, have advanced to offer marketers self-service capabilities including delivering customized in-app pages and multimedia campaigns, developers still play a critical role in the entire process, from the initial opt-in request to supporting sophisticated messaging segmentation.

First off, most apps are missing a huge opportunity to get more users to opt in to push messaging by displaying Apple's standard Allow/Don't Allow request immediately on first open of the app. Imagine a storefront asking you to signup for their emails on your first footfall inside their door. Just like many apps are starting to offer walkthroughs of functionality on first open, apps should clearly explain the value they'll provide to users that opt in to push messaging and then ask for permission. The same goes for asking to use the user's Current Location. The opportunity to have a directly addressable audience and know more about users than ever before, along with the longevity and greater app use push notifications generate, are too important for these requests to be treated casually and with only Apple's default language.

Developers also play a crucial role in enabling rich preference centers for apps, where users can explicitly state what they are interested in receiving and when. From quiet times, when no messages should be sent, to being able to tailor messaging to department, product or topic affinities, will help ensure every push is a Good Push.

Inferred interests can also be leveraged in to deliver highly targeted messaging and developers are key to a smart tagging strategy. They need to understand what marketers want to do with these behavioral tags as you don't want too many tags being set that offer limited value for messaging. As an example iHeartRadio, sets tags to understand the radio station and music genre that users are most interested in, but they don't set tags on artist or song as the messages that would be sent with that level of specificity are too few and far in-between. Some common tags beyond department, product or topic affinities that marketers get a lot of value from are Registered/Non-registered, to understand if they have the user's personal information, as well as Shared, which enables reports on how many users are sharing app content socially. Some brick-and-mortar retailers are now leveraging in-store barcode scanning to set department and product category tags, which is another opportunity for better message segmentation.

Developers also play a key role in helping marketers direct users to the right pages within an app as a push regarding a specific product should land on that product page versus the app's home screen. By helping marketers with deep-linking through key-value pairs, developers can help ensure an optimal user experience and robust analytics.

Complete results of Urban Airship’s latest GPI study, as well as an info graphic, are available for download.