Growth Hack - The Case For Device Push Notifications
We had written earlier about the designing the Resonance Login Experience. A growth hacking optimized login experience can greatly help with increased user acquisition. However, user acquisition (defined as getting new users to download and login to the app the app) is only a one third of the growth hacking landscape - the other two being user activation (defined as getting existing app users to become more active on the app) and user retention (defined as getting the users to keep coming back to use use the app, essentially retaining them over time).
Apps generally use Push Notifications and Email campaigns for user activation and retention - and we had designed and implemented the Resonance Push Notifications and Email Notification Campaigns solely for the purpose of user activation and retention - sending our logged in users daily push notifications and recurring email updates to motivate them to log back into the app. What we had missed was that these push notifications can also help with an increased completion for the user acquisition funnel (More about that in a little bit).
With our design thinking around push notifications solely about activation and retention, we had made a related decision about when to request different permissions (permission to use the media library, permission to send users notifications etc) - delay requesting the permissions to when we actually needed the permissions. We had delayed the "Allow Push Notifications" permissions request to when the user actually logged into the app.
Keeping this context in mind, let’s go through a typical ad campaign's results. We ran social media network ads and search network ads in Feb to acquire new users and measured the completion of different stages in the user acquisition funnel and discovered an interesting pattern.
Our user acquisition funnel comprises of the following stages -
Ad Impressions -> Ad Clicks -> App Install -> ( App Login / App Abandon / App Deletion) -> Invite Friends
In our Feb ad results - we had X number of users install the app. (Number redacted since its not relevant to discussion) Out of these X users, 19% of the users actually logged into the app, 66% users abandoned the app and 15% users deleted the app.
The 66% of the users that were abandoning the app, we had no way of reaching out to them to convert them to active users since we request "Allow Push Notifications" permission and email address on Login. This seems like a big opportunity that can essentially be tapped into - we see this on websites and app all the time where you get nag mails/ messages on incomplete registrations.
This is when we realized that Push Notifications can also help with the completion of the user acquisition funnel. As discussions with a friend correctly categorized the different contexts for push notifications - app context (notification for the app, available wherever the app is available regardless of the device or the user), device context (notification for the device - available on the device) and user context (notification available for the user on different devices / apps etc.)
We made a change to request the "Allow Push Notification" to the onboarding screens instead of on Login and implemented feature to send device notifications to not logged in devices as well. We've pushed out this change at the end of Feb since then the results seem to have been better - install to login rates are up from 19% to 38%.
(full disclosure, there could be a number of different factors affecting these as well such as different audiences and the causality of better results to the device notifications change hasn't been statistically / scientifically validated etc)
The App Login to Invite Friends numbers are still abysmal though :( and we are looking for creative ways on how we can incentivize users to send invitations - any ideas for these are most welcome.
