We recently worked with a large customer of ours on a push notification campaign that worked really well so we wanted to share the process and results here.
Our customer has an ios and android app, and users around the world, and recently introduced some game-like features (streaks). As part of that release they wanted to send up to 2 simple push notifications to each user, at the same time every day. The push needed to be sent to users who had previously completed a specific action, and needed to include some personalization like their first name, but also information about their current game state.
The first step was creating a segment of users who had completed the specific action. Our customer tracked this action with an event first_day_complete which they sent to Laudspeaker (as well as to their main product analytics provider).
The second step was creating the push notification campaign
The first message looked similar to this:
Hey {{first_name}} only {{2-streak}} more days before you unlock yyy
the second similar to this:
Hey {{first_name}} don't lose your {{streak}},
We have recently updated our sdk to include user timezone, and with our customer we set up a simple journey in our visual builder like this:
The key here is a user is sent the pushes at the same time everyday in their timezone, and to not overwhelm users by sending too many push notifications, otherwise people will opt out and the channel becomes over all less effective.
We ran the initial campaign for 1 week, and compared it to a hold out group with similar segment characteristics and found substantially better activation. The users who received the push reminders were 2.5x more likely to return to the app within a week compared to the hold out group. It was pretty surprising how such a simple notification campaign performed so well, and we are now working with the customer on more variations to squeeze more juice out from this result.
Some of you here might be familiar with duolingo, and we learnt later that this was one of their best performing campaigns years ago. The main idea is creating a habit. What was surprising beyond this simple campaign still working well is how not simple this still is to implement your self. Firebase doesn't make it easy to schedule push messages (https://www.reddit.com/r/Firebase/comments/1778c6r/need_help_with_scheduled_notifications/) and if you do end up writing custom code to build this for a single campaign it isn't easy to experiment with, making it harder and slower to iterate.
If any companies here are interested in setting up scheduled push notifications feel free to book a time with us here
