Emails vs Push Notifications: What to Choose When?

With so many mobile apps on the app store, keeping customers engaged with your app is getting harder. The users sign up on your app, they’ll use it for a while, then they’ll churn. The higher churn rate or the uninstall rate is a nightmare for any app development firm.

Keeping your users engaged throughout the journey of your mobile app is the utmost solution. However, the task to keep the users engrossed is yet another chagrin to be solved. Introducing new features and promotions that can capture the attention of the users is an essential way to decipher the engagement of the users.

According to Harvard Business School, even just a 5% increase in retention translates into a 25-95% increase in profit.

Yet, the loop of predicaments keeps on churning. The next question to snap in your mind would be how to update your users with the new features or promotions in your app? Notification bridge that gap. Push notifications and notification emails are the problem solvers. The only concept to understand is when to use which method.

Key differences between Push Notification and Emails

Length

The most obvious difference between push messages and emails is the length. While emails can vary in length, push messages are often less than 50 characters! While you never want to take up too much of your customer’s time, with push notifications, hitting that short and sweet mark is even more important.

Most users simply won’t engage with long push notifications that look more like prose than alerts – keep your messages short, clear, and to the point.

Content vs. Alert

One major difference between these two communication channels is what they are used for.

Both emails and push notifications can be used to alert customers to a special sale or new features. However, while emails can serve directly as content, push notifications don’t really have this ability, except in a very limited capacity. In an email, you can provide users with a full blog-post-length piece of content if you’d like. You can give a complete message with no additional action needed.

Push notifications, on the other hand, are almost always acting as a middle man, trying to get users to click into your app or take further action. This isn’t to say there aren’t exceptions – weather updates and transactional notifications are a few ways to deliver content directly via push notifications. Still, for the most part, the push is used to drive additional action, rather than serve value by itself.

More Rewarding A/B Testing With Push

There’s no denying that A/B testing is vital for pulling off a successful marketing campaign, and that’s true for email and push alike. However, A/B testing with push notifications is unique because you have such little content to work with.

This means that even the tiniest changes can reap huge rewards – whether that involves adjusting just one or two words, mixing up the punctuation, or switching a smiling emoji for one that’s crying for joy. Because even tiny changes can have big effects, some may find A/B testing with push a bit more fun and exciting than with other mediums like email.

Measuring Notifications for Push and Emails

Open Rates

Whether email or push, it’s important to know how many users are opening and looking at your message. For push, this would apply to those notifications which you can expand to consume the whole message.

Click-Through-Rate

Push notifications and emails also both rely heavily on CTR as a metric to measure. Who is clicking through on your messages and being sent on to the next step in your campaign path?

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is another metric that’s essential for both push and email. Was your message effective at driving a conversion?

Time in App After Notification

This is an additional metric to help measure the engagement that resulted from your push message. Some users may not click through on your push notification but may go open your app later as a result of your interaction.

Choose IndiaNIC for Expert Mobile App Development Consultation

IndiaNIC is an award-winning mobile app development company since 1997 having delivered end-to-end services based on almost every business requirement. Depending on your custom business needs and target audience, we will research and make suggestions that are completely feasible, trending, innovative, and scalable for the future.

We will recommend using email notifications and whether to go for static or interactive push notifications. Interactive push notifications will help to trigger the actions over the mobile app in the most engaging way your app users will simply love. This will also help to increase user retention and time spent on your app.

Contact us to hire mobile app developers now! We know the success mantra to build and launch native iOS apps, native Android apps, hybrid & cross-platform mobile apps.