Email or Push? Please, Not Both! — The App Entrepreneur — Medium

Email or Push? Please, Not Both!

A framework to think about mobile notifications

This year, 212 billion emails will be sent and received every day, a majority of them machine generated. For decades, email has been the most abused communication channel. Despite sophisticated anti-spam tools and services like unroll.me, our inboxes are flooded with emails we don’t want.

Although push notifications aren’t as bad, they’re getting there. Lured by increased engagement and retention, developers are pushing the gas on push notifications, sending more than 50 notifications per month.

A lot of it is from enthusiastic marketers who take a ‘spray and pray’ approach to marketing, but many household products are generating more notifications than necessary.

For example, when someone follows you on Twitter, you get a push notification and an email. Now, a new follower is interesting, but does it need both push and email? I don’t think so. It’s redundant and extra work to clear two notifications when one is good enough.

It’s not just Twitter. LinkedIn, Facebook, Quora, etc. all send a push and email for most events — new connections, tagging, messages, receipts, etc. Of-course, they all allow you to adjust your notification settings, but making an unfriendly default and expecting the user to change it is not good.

It’s not intentional. Given the variance in opt-out rates with email and push, it’s simpler (and safer) to send notifications on all channels than to pick and choose what goes where. I haven’t seen many people complain about this behavior. Maybe because the long exposure to email spam conditioned them to live with it.

But that’s no excuse to flood them with unnecessary notifications, especially when you can segment notifications, track subscriptions and engagement.

In general, there’s three types of notifications:

• Transactional Notifications: These are user-triggered events such as buying something, booking something, selling something, changing password, sending or receiving money, etc.
• Informational Notifications: These are non-transactional user-triggered events such as social interactions (following users, tagging photos, liking things), messaging, etc.
• Promotional Notifications: These are service-triggered marketing-driven events such as deals, promotions, year end sales, etc.

Before we go into which channel (email or push) works best for each notification type, let’s look at some differences between the two channels:

• Email is content-rich, persistent, and noisy. You can send good looking, long form emails with html, images and video. They stay in the inbox and can be retrieved, unless they’re deleted. Engagement rates depend on the content, but in general it’s a noisy channel.
• Push is context-rich, non-persistent, and relatively less noisy. You can send short messages with an easy call-to-action. They disappear after the user clears them and cannot be retrieved. It’s a less noisy channel — even though both channels deliver the message instantly, push has more “real-time” appeal since it’s less noisy than email.
• Text messaging is persistent, feels more real-time, and relatively less noisy as well. 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes. But this costs users and is the most sensitive channel of all — tolerance for unwanted messages is low.

The biggest difference is context awareness. You can send push notifications based on the user’s location, activity, proximity to something, etc. Email does not have that rich context. And push interactions are more light-weight than email interactions.

So what’s the best channel for each of these notifications? That depends on your product and your users (and requires A/B testing), but some general thoughts:

Transactional Notifications

For ‘for-your-records’ type events such as order confirmations, purchase receipts, booking confirmations, password changes, etc., email works best, and is good enough. These are things the user might want to keep for records and refer as needed.

For ‘status updates’ related to a transaction like shipping status, delays, etc., both email and push make sense. These are notifications you don’t want the user to miss — the cost of a missed notification outweighs the cost of a redundant notification.

For ‘time sensitive updates’ especially related to on-demand services that deliver services within minutes, text messages make most sense. Text messages have the highest open rates.

Many on-demand services today send these on all channels, that’s probably unnecessary. Using text for ‘for-your-information’ and email for ‘for-your-records’ may be good enough. Text is the most sensitive channel — tolerance is lowest.

Informational Notifications

For most of these events, push is good enough. There’s no need for the user to refer back to these events. The common argument for sending both is that email is a richer extension to the push — for example, in a typical ‘new follower’ case, push can tell me that there’s a new follower and email can show their detailed profile. But I think the good-will from being less noisy can outweigh the cost of an additional click to view profile from the push.

Promotional Notifications

For promotions that can leverage user’s context such as location, activity, proximity, etc., push works best and is good enough. Examples: sending a local Starbucks coupon when I’m near a Starbucks, sending a deep discounts for items I might purchase during a year end sale, etc.

For promotions that don’t need user’s current context, email works better and is good enough. Examples: weekly coupons, generic year end deals, etc. I know e-commerce marketers will hate me for saying this, but look at the downtrend of push opt-ins for retail apps.

Some more thoughts on earning good-will:

Proactively Unsubscribe From Emails

Let’s say the open rates on certain types of emails are very low, consider automatically unsubscribing the user from those emails, and send a “we noticed that you’re not reading these emails, so we automatically unsubscribed you. Happy inbox!” email. Your users will love you for it (I will), and might tell their friends! Just don’t tell your marketing department.

Be Polite With Sound

Lately I’ve seen many apps that don’t let me turn off sound — that’s bad. If you turn on sound by default, provide a way to turn it off. Use subtle sounds — louder is not better. Find ways to turn off sounds at night. Use local time zones.

Sync Web and Mobile

If the user views a notification in your mobile app, mark it read so when they visit your website, they don’t see it again. Twitter has this problem — the Twitter app and website don’t sync up on notifications.

Sync Email and Push

If you do have to send both email and push, then find ways to sequence them, i.e, send push first, if the user reads it within X minutes, skip email.

Learn From The User

Measure and understand how users engage with notifications, what’s interesting and what’s not, and tune them appropriately. Send timely, relevant notifications.

A good notifications design looks at the big picture on what users care about, how and where they interact with the product, how they engage with notifications and delight them with the right notifications at the right time on the right channel. Done right, it can do wonders to your engagement and retention.