Catapush was selected among the most innovative startups at the Ecommerce Forum in Milan. We showcased our innovative reliable, traceable, delivery guaranteed push messaging solution who attracted a lot of people eager to learn more about our innovative messaging solution.
So what exactly do service / transactional push notifications look like?
It depends on your industry, but here are some real examples of how these can be used in your app.
Service communications
Banks and credit card companies can leverage push messages to keep customers apprised of account transactions. They can notify customers when there are withdrawals, transfers or any other important account changes. Push notifications can also help combat fraud and identity theft. With real time notifications, customers will know right away if there are unauthorized transactions on their account. Transportation businesses can provide info related to the estimated time of arrival of a bus. An online publisher can push breaking news and headlines.
Not all push messages are created equal. It’s important to know the difference so you can send the right type.
There are two main categories of push messages – operational/service and promotional.
Operational or service push messages refer to ones that communicate real time, one-to-one information that is necessary to use your products or services or to notify customers of a change in process status. These could be anything from account balance notifications to package delivery status updates. In many cases, customers can even reply to share or confirm information.
Imagine you own a business and need to communicate with your customers.
They could be patients at a hospital, so you hire a receptionist. Or they could be clients at a bank, and you hire a teller. Either way, that person is the voice of your business.
That person talks to your customers all day long. These interactions are extremely important. If handled correctly, you can win customers for life. Otherwise, you could lose customers quickly.
But you can't directly control these interactions. You’re not always there to hear them. And you certainly can’t record everything or know what was said and to whom.
Now imagine your business has a mobile app, and you need to communicate with yours customers. Push Messaging is how you do it. It is the most effective way to reach the consumers who downloaded your app but either have not yet opened it or are not using it when you send them a message.
Strategies to recover users that have optedout.
No matter how effective your optin optimization strategy, you are always going to have a group of users that still choose to optout of receiving push notifications. It’s significantly harder to win back these users, but it is possible. Here’s how to do it:
So how exactly do you convince users to optin to your push notifications? It all comes down to clearly showing them that your push notifications are extremely useful and valuable.
If your app sends push notifications, Apple requires you to request permission first. You can give users a preview of the kinds of messages they will see, but if you don’t the standard push permission request will be presented to the user on the first app open. They will see a popup request like this:
Push notifications are a valuable tool. They can help you communicate important information to your users. But in order to do that, you need to get past a big hurdle: the push notification permission request. According to Doxa market research, the good news is that about 21% of mobile users will choose to allow push notifications when they first launch your app. The bad news is that the other 79% is up for grabs. Of that group, 31% percent say that they will optin for push notifications if they understand the type of message they are going to receive.
If you’re developing or managing an app, you’ve probably run into this problem before.
You need to send transactional push notifications to the users of your app. Maybe you’re shipping orders and need to give an estimated time of arrival for a package. Or you’re a bank and need to deliver notifications for credit card transactions.
A few days ago, Parse announced they are shutting down the servers next year. There has been panic among developers, looking for exit strategies and alternatives.
Those who were using Parse for its storage features are now probably looking at Firebase or Couchbase for a Parse alternative. Those who were using Parse for its Push Notification API are probably falling back to pure FCM/APNs solutions.
