What Are Push Notifications? What We Learned from Sending 40 Billion Messages

In today’s mobile-first environment there is an app for nearly everything and everyone. When a user downloads a mobile app they tend to gloss over the standard sign up process and, much like on the web, ignore reading the privacy policies and terms of service. One of these inconspicuous pop-ups is the privacy request from mobile apps to send notifications. Either accepting or denying these push notifications has a big impact on customer engagement and subsequent retention.

Push notifications are the alerts and other messages sent by the application’s admin team that are shown on the phone’s lock screen, similar to SMS text messages. Push notifications have been found to increase user engagement with the app and overall retention rates. In fact, users that agreed to receive push notifications were 23% more likely to engage the app after three months.

If you are curious how mobile app users in your industry interact with push notifications you will be interested to see the results of the intensive study below. In this piece, CleverTap analyzed 40 billion push notifications to spot trends in industry and time specific push notification open rates.

They discovered, for example, that business and finance related apps have the highest open rate of 5.47 percent. Although you might think this number is surprisingly low, compare it to the retail industry with a dismal 0.89% open rate for push notifications.