How to Always Pick the Right Mobile Messaging Channel

Mobile messaging provides a valuable opportunity for app developers and marketers to communicate with their users. You may want to alert your users about anything from a new feature update, to a sale, or a new product.

Situation One: Flash Sale

Best Channel: Push Notification

Push notifications are a strong option as they communicate a sense of urgency. Push is valuable for reaching people in the moment and providing timely, relevant information.

Your message could be further strengthened by including personalized information, such as a user’s name or a specific item they might be interested in or viewed in the past.

Runner Up: News feed

News feed is a quality runner up because it creates a message that can live semi-permanently in your app. This can be useful to remind active users scrolling along the feed that there’s a sale happening right now.

Push notifications and news feed work well in tandem. Push draws your users into the app, and news feed offers one place inside the app where users can access the latest content — such as your sale.

News feed can also be a successful channel for those users that aren’t opted-in to receive push notifications. Sixty percent of users opt-out of push, so it’s important to use other messaging channels to reach your users in different ways.

Situation Two: New Feature Roll out

You want to announce a new feature inside your app.

Best Channel: Email

Email is a great tool for inactive users — those who haven’t opened your app in the last month. With email, you can be more detailed about your new features to entice dormant users, rather than using a brief push notification. Use email to engage external users with important announcements and lure them back to your app content.

Runner Up: In-App Message

You can also use an in-app message for active users who haven’t opened the app since your new feature launched — maybe in the last week or so. This is the perfect opportunity to A/B test your message to maximize engagement and retention.

Sophisticated mobile product teams rollout new features and content gradually first to a small percentage of their customers, and then step-by-step to 100% of their user base. Using this method mitigates the risk of any new release negatively affecting your user experience.

Situation Three: 5-Star Rating Request

After all, the best way to acquire new users is by encouraging your engaged users to boost your reputation.

Best Channel: In-App Message

The key to asking for five-star ratings is to target your most active users after they’ve shown loyal behavior. Loyal behavior could be anything from buying an item in a retail app, booking a flight in a travel app, or beating a level in a gaming app.

The in-app message would trigger after this loyal behavior and ask the user for a favorable rating. As a best practice, you should also leave an outlet for users to privately express complaints with developers, turning negative reviews into constructive feedback outside of the App Store.

Pro Tip: High average app ratings are a driving force behind gaining more organic and viral installs of your app. Low ratings can hurt the adoption of your app. If you are running paid marketing campaigns low ratings can significantly increase your overall cost-per-acquisition. To optimize for the highest rating, try using an in-app message to direct happy users to your rating screen.

Runner-Up: News feed

Alternatively, you could choose to leave a reminder about leaving a rating in the news feed, so that when users actively scroll through your app, they see a reminder to leave a happy review.

Whichever you choose, some things to experiment with to guarantee favorable ratings are: strong headlines, background images, and calls to action. To measure your results, check for total five star ratings received, and the time spend in the app per daily user.