IBM Cloud

Absolutely! Mobile push notifications are frequently what first catch our attention when we access our smartphones. They serve as the most direct and efficient means of engaging with app users, even after they have left your app. On average, push notifications generate engagement rates that are 10 times higher than email. Incorporating mobile push notifications is highly recommended to ensure visibility to your users and to enhance user retention. 

Even if you don’t intend to send notifications immediately after launching your app, we recommend including push notifications in your initial release so that you can send notifications manually whenever required, and so that you can reach all of your installed user base.

Mobile clients subscribe and register for notifications from their app. When the application starts up, it registers and subscribes itself to receive the push notifications. The backend application configures and sends notifications to the Push service. The Push service manages all of the information that is related to the devices that register to receive notifications. 

There are several metrics that you should be monitoring to get a good idea of how effective your app push notification strategy is. Read our handy blog article on this topic  to learn about these key metrics.

Good push notifications are relevant, useful, actionable, concise, conversational, personalized, and positive. Check out our guide to learn how you can write push notification messages  that hit the mark with your audience.

The following five different types of notifications can be pushed out to mobile app clients:

• Broadcast notifications are general messages that are sent to all devices that have the app installed and configured to receive notifications.
• Tag-based notifications are targeted to devices that are subscribed to a particular tag. This allows app users to limit the notifications they receive to specific subjects.
• Unicast notifications are sent to a specific user or device.
• Platform-based notifications are targeted to reach app users on a particular device platform.
• MIXED-type notifications for iOS display a notification on the device while, in the background, the app wakes up and processes a silent notification.