Best Practices

Recently Brad Feld, managing director at Foundry Group, wrote a great post about the importance of comm channels for audience engagement.  Summarizing the post, Brad refers to email as the perfect comm channel for online social media.  Mobile requires a different tool for social to be most effective.  Push Notifications are quickly proving to be the perfect social media audience building comm channel for mobile.  We are seeing hundreds of apps including Gowalla, Ditto,  Soundtracking and Pose, using Push Notifications to promote social engagement.

Brad has a strong position on how to think about implementing comm channels,
“My message to all web developers – if you are serious about what you are doing,
focus on your app. Don’t waste precious development time on all the activities
around the app. You likely no longer sit around with a screwdriver setting up a
server in a datacenter – instead you are using a cloud provider like Rackspace
or Amazon.  Don’t spent your time coding up an email notification infrastructure
– use SendGrid. And if you are a mobile developer, don’t waste your time writing
a bunch of code for push notifications – use Urban Airship.  Most importantly,
don’t ignore the thing that will actually make your web app get adoption and
retention – comm channels!”

Fred Wilson, Principal of Union Square Ventures, started the conversation with his great point of view on the subject.  We couldn’t agree more Brad and Fred.  Thanks for the prospective guys.

We would love to hear from developers who are using Push Notifications to create social loops in their mobile apps.  If you are interested in sharing your story we could love to hear from you.

As we continue to help thousands of developers send notifications and fulfill app purchases, some best practices begin to emerge. So this week, we did a guest post over at Mashable to cover some best practices for Android In-App Billing. Some highlights include:

• Make sure if you’re selling additional features and content in your app, that you’re still providing value as-is without the add-ons. People are much more likely to buy you from you if you prove your value within a free app already.
• Don’t overlook the opportunities to re-use archived or previously unavailable content. Musicians can take advantage of live recordings or outtakes to turn old material into new revenue.
• Take advantage of In-App Billing as a way to keep your app underneath the app size restrictions. Even if the in-app purchase is free, it allows you to allow the user to download content in stages, choosing what information he/she wants on the phone.

Read the whole article to get lots more information and best practices on Android In-App Billing.

I’m giving a talk at Where 2.0 tomorrow entitled Why your marketing app will fail which highlights some of the key issues we’re seeing in mobile today.

We have been hearing from many companies, “we need a location based social app for our brand”.  When we hear these words we try to pause the conversation and find out if this app is going to solve a problem for consumers or if it’s simply a mobile marketing brochure.  Although social, local, and mobile are the hottest buzz-words in marketing, they are not stand alone strategies.  We have found that pretty marketing apps just don’t work.

To be successful in mobile it is important to remember that this platform is not for brochure-ware.  Mobile is, by its very nature, an intent-driven platform. To succeed, you have to think about the ways to drive engagement and create a conversation with your users. So often we see customers that are building “marketing” apps that are one-time use or have little on-going value. The question becomes how much marketing do you want to spend on your marketing app? Mobile devices are personal devices and stand-alone marketing messages alienate customers, inserting your brand into a customer solution, makes you a hero.  What problems do your products help to solve?

Working with our customers here at Urban Airship we’ve come up with what we call the “7 Levers of Engagement” on mobile:

1. App Updates – Updating your app keeps you top-of-mind (old school push)
2. Push Notifications – Literally create a conversation even when the app is not open
3. In app purchase – New features drive revenue and usage
4. Focus – Do one thing really well, don’t try to replicate your website
5. Content, content, content – Think “Angry Birds” and constant free content upgrades.
6. Coax quality feedback – Get reviews by asking after the conversation is started. If the user gets to Level 4 in your game, then you can ask for a review.
7. Start a conversation – Mobile != marketing. Blasting marketing messages at users will only make them turn of you off.

Think hard about your mobile app strategy and remember that sometimes just having a mobile version of your website is enough. If you don’t solve a specific problem for users with your app, it might not be worth the effort and could have a negative impact on your brand.

Fred Wilson writes a great post about the potential for mobile notifications (which ironically I noticed from my mobile notification bar on my Android phone).

It’s been 18 months since we sent our first push notifications for Tap Tap Revenge 2 on iOS (then iPhone OS 3.0). And over those 18 months we’ve sent over 2.3B notifications to over 100MM devices on iOS, Android and BlackBerry and we’ve learned quite a bit about what it takes to be successful with mobile notifications.

The first use of notifications we saw from publishers were them looking to reach out to their users and drive engagement. They weren’t pushing, but rather, trying to shove their users back into the app. Unfortunately this doesn’t work like traditional forms of notifications (phone, SMS, email, etc). Your mobile phone is an intent driven device. You pick it up to take action: make a call, check your mail, look for notifications. This means you can’t just blast away at users with your messages and expect them to be delighted at your interruption. You have to start a conversation with them and think more about how to send the notification at the right time, to the right user when they are ready to see it–all with the right content.

If you do blast users with notifications they will silence you, or worse, delete you from their phone. We’ve seen some of our customers learn the hard way from this. When a user disables notifications they’re turning off the life blood of your app; engagement. Given the intent-driven nature of mobile devices you have to carry on relevant and timely conversations with users. (The only caveat here being sports notifications; sports fans have an insanely high tolerance for notifications–like in the hundreds per day. But again, this is relevant content to them which explains their high tolerance.)

Dictionary.com is a great example of Push done right with their “Word of the Day” notifications. Those daily updates are a natural extension of their app and brand, and a great way to keep the app top-of-mind. Other examples include Mashable sending out notifications on trending stories (instead of say every single story for the site), Groupon or Living Social sending out the daily deal, Tapulous doing in-game challenges or opt-in notifications for opt-in content. All of these are about creating a relationship and slowly dripping relevant content to them over time.

Another potential example came up during my recent conversation with Rob Woodbridge over on Untether.tv. So many app developers are still trying to replicate the functionality of their website on mobile. That’s missing the point. Take the Toyota iPhone app. You can fully configure your new Toyota, then get a quote for your vehicle all within the app. Now, call me crazy but I can do that on my laptop, and with a better experience. The app doesn’t add anything to the conversation, nor takes into account how a user may want to interact when their phone is the only computer near them. However, with your app in the customer’s hand, you could create value and conversation with that user. What if instead you could enter your VIN and have detailed information about your car? What if you could tie that to the tune-up and oil change records (instead of how most people track via receipts in their glovebox)? Now, hook in mobile notifications and you’ve got the ability to tell the user that their car needs an oil change and oh, by the way, there is a service bay that is open just a few blocks from you right now. Stop by in the next 20 minutes and we’ll give you 15% off. Now that would be an effective conversation with a user of a mobile app coupled with notifications.

Where we are really starting to see interesting possibilities are when look at a large volume of notifications. We’re starting to see trends across apps on when users consume messages, on the types of messages that users respond to effectively, and most importantly being able to aggregate this data anonymously for use by all of our customers. We’re combing through mountains of data to help make sense of it all. Imagine if Groupon could know the best time of day (for that specific user on that specific day) to send a notification because of anonymous data aggregated from how other users use other apps? This is where we see mobile notifications going along with much more sophisticated tools for publishers to send and understand their impact on usage of their apps.

The challenges are many. Each of these mobile platforms behaves differently and there is anything but feature parity across them. Being able to understand the effectiveness of notifications between iOS, Android, BlackBerry and now Windows Phone 7 is only going to get more difficult. Having a view across all of them will be essential.

We are in the early phases of mobile and just like we saw with the early days of the web, people are trying to apply traditional models to a new medium. Just like print ads didn’t translate directly to the web, the same will be true with mobile and notifications. Learning to harness behavioral data in aggregate will be the real magic I think that will unlock the potential for mobile as a successful channel for publishers to reach users effectively.

There is an article out on TechEye and a number of other places pointing to Windows 7 being the fastest growing mobile OS for 2011. Our own 2010 Mobile App Developers Survey backs this up in terms of developer support of that platform. While only 5.9% of our developers responded that they supported Windows 7 in 2010, 24.4% indicated that they will be supporting it in 2011 showing an impressive 414% growth rate this year.

That said, measuring growth rate certainly doesn’t tell the story of mobile OS success. 24.4% support in 2011 pales in comparison to iOS’s 90% and Android’s 73.8% support numbers. 2011 will certainly be important for Microsoft to gain and accelerate traction in a market for smart phones that has been passing them by, but it’s important to remember that intention does not equate to adoption.

What do you think? Does Windows 7 matter?

Mobile app growth is no secret as apps are being downloaded more than ever; a recent TechCrunch article reports that a typical iOS device has downloaded an average of 60 apps per device, up from 10 in 2008. What the article doesn’t say is how many of these apps are free vs. paid or whether or not the app publishers are making money off apps. Yet as businesses look to monetize mobile apps, in-app purchases are becoming increasingly important to their strategy.

Our recent 2010 Mobile App Developers Survey found that an increasing number of app publishers are looking to generate revenue from their app. While in 2010 a full 33% of the developers we surveyed indicated that they weren’t making money off their app, only 13% indicated that their apps wouldn’t provide revenue in 2011. Although a large number of app developers still intend to make money from downloads and advertising revenue, in-app purchases showed the largest jump in importance to developers. The percentage of developers who plan to use in-app purchase as a revenue source will grow from 8% in 2010 to 31% in 2011.

This trend was further backed up this week in an eMarketer article, “In-App Purchases Become Major Mobile Revenue Stream.” This article highlighted the growing importance of in-app purchase to mobile revenue:

“Within the realm of apps that are directly monetized, whether by paying for the app itself, paying for items within the app, or both, in-app purchases are becoming much more important to developers. They more than doubled their share of iPad app revenues, from 12% to 29%, between June and December 2010. Over the same period in-app purchases on iPhone applications increased from 36% to 49% of revenues—now taking half the market from traditionally paid-for apps.”

If you are evaluating your mobile revenue strategy, whether you have a paid app or are exploring a freemium model, be sure to include in-app purchases in your discussion of how to build a profitable app.

We cannot emphasize it enough: If your app users are turning off push notifications, you have lost a huge opportunity to engage with them. Engagement is a key element of success in mobile, and you don’t want to miss out. As we discussed in our last post on implementation 101, getting users to opt-in to push notifications in the first place can take some persuasion. Once they do, you need to stick to your end of the bargain and send only messages that contain the compelling content your users have agree to accept, and at an acceptable frequency. A misstep on your end could close the door to future engagement with that user.

When you think about push, don’t think in the same terms as you think about email or SMS. Losing an opted-in push user is not just a  “-1” to your marketing list. It undermines the utility of your app, and by extension, the power of your brand. The consequences for losing an app user are far greater, i.e., your app becomes less effective and may not function as intended. Because your app icon lives in your user’s hand, you don’t want it to serve as a reminder of a poor experience.

So to measure your push notification effectiveness, you need to understand how your users are reacting to your messages. One way to do this is to evaluate how many of your users turn off push notifications.

How to Figure Out if Your Users are Turning Off Push Notifications

What you need to do is compare active device tokens against total device tokens. When a user opts in to receive push notifications from your app upon install, our service collects a device token. An active device token is receiving your messages. An *inactive* device token means either the user deleted the app or turned off push notifications from the app (opted out).

What you can do is compare your active device token (ADT) against your disabled device tokens (DDT). We call this the Push Retention Ratio, and it’s one of the most reliable indicators of your push notification effectiveness. We have some customers with Push Retention Ratios as high as 98% and some as low as 65%. Obviously the higher the ratio, the better engagement you have with your users.

Granted, this is a sort of rudimentary process. We are working on tools to provide more meaningful insight into your app’s Push Retention Ratio but for now the ADT / DDT comparison is most useful. Now, the most likely reason for a disabled device token is that the user uninstalled your app. Why would he or she do this? Because your app is not providing compelling content. You may trace this perception to ineffective push, no push at all, or other for some other reason, but the areas you can control are around push and how well you deploy your mobile messaging.

So go ahead and check your ADT / DDT numbers to get a baseline ratio. Then continue to check it after you send push notifications. As you track this number, pay specific attention to how the rate changes directly after push notifications and how it changes during dormant times. As you fine-tune the best practices for your specific app, you’ll have a better understanding of how your users are responding, even when they aren’t telling you directly. If the ratio is going down you may have a problem. You might be sending messages too frequently, with content that is not compelling or with annoying messages.

Sending Push Notifications to an Inactive Device Could Violate the ToS

Once a user opts out of push notifications, you are not allowed to continue to send them messages. This is against Apple’s Terms of Service. Apple has a service called Feedback Service that outlines this in detail. The feedback service states that Apple APNs monitor developers for their diligence in checking the feedback service and that they refrain from sending push notifications to nonexistent applications on devices.

Blackberry and Android don’t publish such specific details in their ToSs, but we highly recommend you follow the Apple guidelines across platforms.

If you’re using Urban Airship as your push notification provider, you need not worry about violating this clause. Our mobile services provide compliance and automatically removes any inactive device token IDs so neither the user nor the Apple server will receive messages from you, post opt-out.

Please visit our resources on feedback service for a better understanding of how Urban Airship provides compliance with this policy and for further detail on how to view your Push Retention Ratio at any given point.

This post is part of an ongoing series, Push Notification Best Practices. We’ll look at different aspects of push and provide guidance on effective tactics. Up next, we’ll cover Incorporating Push Notifications into the App at the Design Stage.

Before you can successfully send push notifications, you first have to convince your users to accept them. When they are asked, upon the install of your app, whether they wish to accept push notifications, you want them to say “yes.” For them to agree, users need to understand why they’d want to receive messages from your app. I’ve installed too many apps that ask if they can send me push notifications, but offer no glimpse into why I’d want them to, or what kind of notifications I would be receiving. If you want your users to opt-in (and you do), you need to make it very clear in the description of your app (inside the app store and upon install) how and when you’ll be engaging users via push notifications.

Then, you have to ensure they do not opt out of your notifications. To keep your users opted in, we highly recommend you make it easy for users to manage their push preferences within the app itself. Make it simple to turn notifications on and off, to set up quiet hours (times when no alerts will be received on the device), and let users decide for themselves which method of push-notification alert they wish to receive for which types of message. Some users will want audio and / or video alerts for more important information and badge updates for less crucial or less timely messages. Ideally, you’ll have a strategy for managing push methods yourself. There’s no reason to treat all push notifications equally.

Finally, analyze user behavior after you send your notifications. If you notice a decline in active users, or an increase in opt-outs, you are probably pushing too often, or without enough value.

In the end, you have to demonstrate value to the user or they’ll opt out of your push engagements——or worse, they’ll delete your app. By allowing your app to notify them, potentially interrupting them in the middle of something they are doing on their device, users are trusting you to communicate with them on their terms. Use push notifications successfully and you’ll have a priceless channel for user engagement; provide insufficient information, and they’ll turn you off.

This post is part of an ongoing series Push Notification Best Practices. We’ll look at different aspects of push and provide guidance on effective tactics. Up next, we’ll cover Measuring Push Notifications Effectiveness.

I came across an article this weekend titled “Android wins devs’ hearts and minds.” It takes a look at some of the statistics regarding developer plans for 2011 in terms of which platforms they will be supporting and developing for. They make a point that Android may have more attention from developers and may be poised to unseat Apple’s iOS as the top platform for developers.

They go on to say:

“When asked about their plans for 2011, however, developers said that 29 per cent of their new-platform efforts would be devoted to Android devices, versus only 8 per cent for the iPhone.

Of course, since the iPhone already holds a lead in developers, its developer growth would naturally be lower than that of Android. But still, such a large disparity indicates that next year may see Android overtaking iPhone in the battle to win the hearts and minds of the all-important developer cadre.”

This may be true, but ultimately it misses the point. The key for today’s app developer is that iOS and Android isn’t an either/or decision. Android has proven itself to be a popular platform that the public is adopting, and the iPhone obviously has a massive user-base, and all customers are expecting quality, feature-rich apps regardless of which phone they have. This leaves developers with little choice but to support at minimum two platforms, however, that comes with some specific challenges.

At Urban Airship, we work with app developers regularly. Typically we see three key objectives they have when it comes to cross platform support.

• Create a consistent experience – Ideally, app developers would like their mobile apps to have a consistent experience across all the mobile platforms they support. This is an issue we are continually helping our clients with. Whether it is consistent in-app purchases, enabling content subscriptions, or delivering push alerts and in-app messaging, developers want these things to be experienced the same across their different platforms. This is especially important when planning for new features and measuring app satisfaction.
• Reduce the porting burden – Mobile app developers have the same goal as other developers that support multiple operating systems. They want to reach as many people as possible while minimizing the headache of supporting apps in different environments. Ideally they would have one product, with one feature set, and one experience across all the platforms they support.
• Consolidate app evaluations – Ideally businesses would like to view the success of their applications not independently for a given mobile platform, but across all supported environments. For their key metrics, whether it is click throughs, engagement, uninstall rate, etc. they would like this to be something they could easily see as a whole and not in platform silos.

While iOS vs. Android certainly makes for interesting press and arguments, the real story is how they will support the top mobile platforms in a way that is most efficient and best for their business.

Form Follows Function

One of the questions we routinely get from our customers is, “What is the right amount of Push?” How often an app sends push notifications can help determine the success of the app. App publishers use push because they want to increase engagement with their users, but they don’t want to overwhelm users.

Often this question is posed as, “How many push notifications can I send before users get annoyed?” This is based on the wrong premise. Publishers should not be thinking, “How much can we get away with,” but rather, “How can I give users the best experience with my app?”

So. What is the right amount of Push? A good rule of thumb is: “The right amount of push.” By that we mean your usage of push should align specifically with the purpose of your app and your usage should depend on user preferences for how and how often they receive notifications. Think about why your user downloaded your app – they like your content. So the right amount of push means you are matching their interest with additional content or information.

For example, a very popular — and successful — app sends out push notifications with the word of the day. Users of this app have downloaded it and opted-in for push notifications announcing the word of the day. So the right amount of push for that app is “daily.”

With apps that deliver “breaking news,” the right frequency is more subjective. Is this really “news?” Is it really “breaking?” News organizations have been evaluating these questions since they started cutting into regularly scheduled television programming. Like network executives, app publishers will make an editorial call. So the right amount of push for that app is “every time there is breaking news.”

Apps that send push notifications with updates on friend check-ins and whereabouts market themselves for this purpose. Users who download this app, for the most part, are signing up for notifications on the whereabouts and activities of friends. Again, the right amount of push is exactly what the user reasonably expects.

Let Users Set Preferences

That said, another best practice is to allow your users some control over how, and how often, they receive notifications. Make sure your app lets users set preferences and make these controls easy to find and use. Allow users the choice of receiving notifications as audio alerts, as pop-up boxes, or as the more passive application badge updates. Allow users to set quiet times and give them fine-grained control over what content they receive.

Using our examples above, the breaking news app could allow users to set some parameters on which breaking news they find worthy of a push (this can be content-specific categories such as “sports scores,” “general news,” “business”). The check-in app would ask users, every time they add a new friend, if they want to be notified when that new friend checks in.

Don’t make assumptions on how and when users want to receive your push notifications. In the end, the work you do upfront to give users control will pay off. Your users will want your app to engage them, and they’ll be satisfied when it does.

We advise our customers to let their app dictate the frequency of their push, then give users fine control over the details. Form follows function follows user desire.

This post is part of an ongoing series Push Notification Best Practices. We’ll look at different aspects of push and provide guidance on effective tactics. Up next, we’ll cover Measuring Push Notifications Effectiveness.