Don't Push your Push Notifications

Google recently recommended push notifications as an indispensable marketing tool not to be ignored by marketers anymore. Push notifications are the perfect alternative to unwanted emails or messages and an effective outreach channel to get customer attention. Customers tend to be busy, and they may forget the great offers and deals you emailed a few days ago. If you would like to remind them about the abandoned items in their cart and your latest offers, push notifications can be a great way to catch your customer's attention. Sounds pretty cool, right?

However, the attention-grabbing nature of push notification can get nosy if it is not done the right way. The consequences of overdoing it can lead to frustrated customers who can turn off the notifications or simply get rid of your app by uninstalling it. According to research carried out by Braze, 60% of iOS users and 40% of Android users opt-out of push notifications. There are a variety of reasons for a customer to opt out. It depends on how frequently you send the message and the way you use push notifications. Some customers opt-out because they find it distracting while others find these notifications to be irrelevant.

Another challenging situation is pushing notification delivery. Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) is responsible for push notification delivery on android. When a user is not connected to the internet GCM is unable to send push notifications. In the case of iOS, there might be a possibility that notifications are blocked by users on the OS level.

To deliver users an adequate app experience you need to thoroughly test your app’s push notifications. You can obviously test this manually but the tendency of human errors will add to the complexity and instead of weeks, eventually, you will end up spending months on the release cycle. While on the other hand, automated testing will require you to write end-to-end UI tests which are expensive to create and maintain.

On the other hand, setting up push notifications can be complex. There are a number of steps that need to be followed to get the push notifications working. Both for iOS and Android, push notifications must be sent from the backend. It includes; what notifications to send, who to send, and how to send the notification. Sending push notifications along with emails and messages is a popular marketing activity though it can violate iOS app guidelines.

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