BEST PUSH NOTIFICATIONWHO HAS THE IN THE CLOUD?

Mobile App Push Notification Services

Push Notification Services are one of the best ways to keep users interested and engaged. Push notification services have come on a lot in recent years. The degree of personalized content you can now push at users is staggering. But as the saying goes, with power comes responsibility. Push notification services have to be used carefully and not fall foul of overly enthusiastic marketing departments. A push campaign that’s too noisey will drive folk from your app, either making them “unallow” push notification services or worse triggering uninstalls.Here are 5 suggestions on how to get the best out of your Push Notification Services.

With any mobile app, push notification services right is critical to drive ongoing engagement and success of your app. Research shows a huge link between the recency and how frequently an app is used and its monetization.

Why are Push Notification Services so important?Well two reasons.First, they can be highly targeted. Many push notification services allow detailed segmentation based on demographic, behavioral or location based targeting. So the information being pushed to the app user can be highly relevant. Offering a special discount coupon triggered by i-beacons – delivering an offer right at the moment the potential customer passes a competitors retail outlet, for example. It can also use cleverly configured analytics to predict when a user’s loyalty could be slipping. Catching them early, bringing them back into the app is shown to have a huge impact on retention. Minimising app attrition is one of the biggest challenges mobile apps face, so even small reductions can deliver huge value.Aberdeen Group research shows that mobile apps using a precision push notification service can drive a 20% rise in customer engagement.

The second reason why push notification services work is they are 100% permission based. The challenge, of course, is to get push notification services enabled at first install. But get this part right and you’ll be in a great position further down the track. Some say as little as 30% of apps are installed with push notification services enabled. But when push notes are on they’re telling you they’re receptive to push notification messages and they’ll stay receptive, particularly if you keep push notes highly targeted.

SO WHO OFFER THE BEST MOBILE APP PUSH NOTIFICATION SERVICES?

Carnival http://carnival.io

Carnival seem to offer one of the best balanced push notification services. It caters for the needs of developers and the marketing team that will be running the push notification campaigns. Too often push notification services are bias towards developers needs, so its good to see Carnival getting the balance right.

The things they are doing with push notification services is very very interesting, rich messaging in particular is cool.

https://vimeo.com/135820313

Here’s a short overview if what Carnival does, watch out for the mock-telephone call rich media push notification – for the right audience, this would be really cool.

Short Overview

https://vimeo.com/113961016

Kumulos http://www.kumulos.com

Kumulos Push is the only Push Notification Service that is purpose built for Mobile App Development Companies. As such it has a range of features that are specifically designed to help make App Developers lives easier, and help them get more apps that they build on monthly retainer. It doesn’t aim to be as full featured as the specialist stand-alone systems.

What it is, is a push notification service that offers a good balance between ease of use, functionality and price. It gives the choice of using it stand alone with an existing mobile backend platform, or already integrated within the Kumulos mBaaS platform. Either option also lets you give your mobile app clients access to their own push notification dashboard that allows them to run their own push campaigns and measure the results.

There is also the option of an automated monthly report. This is typically offered by Mobile App Development Agencies to their clients as a service on monthly retainer.

Streethawk www.streethawk.com

StreetHawks Push Notification Services have good platform coverage iOS, Andriod, Phonegap, Xamarin, Corona, Telerik, Titanium. They say, and it seems to make sense, that if apps don’t use deferred deep linking properly it can lose 70% of its users day 3 from the first install. So StreetHawk put a lot of emphasis on this within their “Growth Offering”. But their real strength comes in their “Engage” offering. It offers impressive features around segmentation and lifecycle management, highly configurable push notification services and rich in app content. Their iBeacon and geofencing functionality is also worth a close look. Possibilities here to keep app users engaged makes StreekHawk a very interesting push notification platform.

StreetHawk lets you focus effort on the most valuable app users with some interesting “viral analytics” and some pretty cool engagement automation tools.

Churn within any app is inevitable, but if you can use push to help reduce churn, particularly among your most valuable app users, or use it to increase use frequency of less engaged app users then its value will be immense. StreetHawk has real strengths here.

https://youtu.be/IKTrwX2WspI

Urban Airship www.urbanairship.com

Urban Airship’s goes beyond what you’d typically describe as a Push Notification Service. It positions itself as a mobile engagement platform offering an impressive array of features including of course push notification, but also a very user friendly message center, fine grain segmentation configuration and location technology including beacons, geo-fencing, location history and location targeting.

This makes Urban Airship a pretty powerful in app marketing automation platform that allows highly targeted (if done right highly relevant) real time customer experience. Also the message configuration settings help prevent spamming the app user with too many push notes.

The analytics package is pretty impressive too. It can give a real insight into what activities, push, in app messages or whatever, are driving the desired behavour. Knowledge is power after all, but its how you use it that counts, of course.

https://vimeo.com/107640090

Push Woosh www.pushwoosh.com

Push Woosh positions its push notification services more at the development community. Highly configurable, loads of great features, but not that friendly out the box, compared with other push notification services. But it comes with a big user community amongst mobile app developers so your not going to be short of programmers to help you out.

With a technical solution you won’t be surprised to hear that there is a huge list of platforms and formats that push woosh works with – it covers 19 platforms in all. By far the most comprehensive of any Push Notification Service platform. Android, Blackberry 5-7, 10, Windows Phone & 8, Nokia Asha, Amazon, OS X, Chrome, Safari, WordPress, Cordova (PhoneGap), unity, Adobe Air, Marmalade, Corona, Appcelerator Titanium, Xamarin, PhoneGap build and Trigger.io.

Catapush www.catapush.comCatapush’s push notification services feels a bit raw around the edged but could be an interesting option for the smaller mobile app projects. It offers a narrower platform choice than some of the more established players with SDK’s for just Android and iOS. It has a RESTful API. That said it does offer some interesting features. For example delivery status tracking and failover to SMS when the app user has lost data connectivity. This gives the option to send an SMS using the standard protocol even if the app isn’t currently installed on the phone. Pretty useful if you’re trying to win back lost app users. That said, not sure how this fits with permission based push notes and how invasive this would feel to the user, so best used sparingly.

As for analytics, this isn’t integrated but accessed through an API. The stats appear to be very centered around note delivery, so less useful to analyse and drive more granular campaigns.

Want to know more?

If you want to know more about push notification services check out this recent blog.It reviews what we see as the 8 best push notification services for mobile apps. It looks at the 5 reviewed here in a bit more detail and also gives information on 3 other push notification services you may want to consider.

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