How many push messages should you send?

Recorded March 31st 2020 – watch the full episode on YouTube.

You don't want the user to forget about you, but also you don't want to spam them saying basically, “please delete me,” because that gets you nowhere as well. So what is a healthy level of push for non-messaging apps?

Kaya Thomas: I honestly think once per day. I don't think an app that's like a non-chat app or something should be sending more than one notification per day, unless I've opted into that. So for example, like a news app, right? If you're a news app and I have alerts set, send me all notifications for this particular topic. Or if there are articles on this thing, send me all the notifications. Okay, there happened to be three articles that day on that topic. That makes sense for you to send those notifications. But that should only happen if the user has opted in.

So if you're sending multiple notifications per day, but they haven't opted in on like setting those preferences, I don't think you should do that, right? You can send one notification and then maybe in that notification, you could say something like, if you like to receive more like this go your notification settings or something like that. You don't need to send them more than one per day if you're not an app, like a chat-based or something like that. Unless they've opted into it.

“It's always better to scale up and allow them the power to opt in because people are more likely to feel like, “Oh wow. I like this.”

Paul Hudson: Once again, amazing nuggets that you just blasted out there. When they respond to your pushes, if they find one they like, at that point, you can say, “hey, do you want more like this?” So you can scale up till they find the point that works for them rather than sort of releasing the hose of push messages all over them and then making them shut down your app or even worse delete your app.

Kaya Thomas: Exactly. It's always better to scale up and allow them the power to opt in because people are more likely to feel like, “oh wow, I like this. They're asking me, they're asking my permission, right.” Versus if you just go ahead and bombard, they're like, “what the heck? I didn't say I wanted this.”

Paul Hudson: One thing I would throw in here for folks who are listening is a lovely thing you can do is you can detect whether push is enabled or not. So they said no to you previously, you can say this folks, “by the way, you've got push turned off, which means we can't tell you about amazing offers in your area,” whatever it is you're actually trying to push to them with.

Kaya Thomas: Yeah. 100%.

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