Push Notification Direct Opens Don’t Tell the Whole Story

What if some of the customer messages you send are more effective than you realize? You could be making marketing decisions that have the potential to affect the future of your business based on incomplete or misleading data.

Good data matters. To build, sustain, and optimize a great marketing strategy in today’s mobile-first world, you should know how your brand’s mobile marketing statistics stack up against the rest of your industry and against the mobile landscape as a whole. After all, you need to know where you are before you can make plans to get where you need to go.

To support that effort, Appboy is pleased to announce the release of Digits Volume 1, Fall 2016 Mobile Marketing Benchmarks Report. This new data report provides essential mobile marketing benchmarks based on data drawn from more than 500 apps and 6.5 billion push notifications, giving marketers unprecedented insight into where their marketing stands. The report includes:

• Push notification opt-in rates
• Push notification direct open and total open rates
• Day-by-day user retention rates
• App user average monthly sessions

These are benchmarks that all brands should be up to date on, no matter what marketing platforms you use for customer outreach and engagement. We know that metrics can differ significantly based on industry and business model, so we’ve looked at the data based on vertical and mobile operating system to make it easier to find the information that matters for your business.

How big a difference can knowing these numbers make? How about a 355% difference?

Push notification direct opens and total opens

Appboy has found that while Android push notifications significantly outperform iOS push in terms of direct opens, 6.1% to 2.0%, respectively, that metric doesn’t tell the whole story. That’s because there’s more to push opens than just direct opens.

When a user receives a push notification and taps on it, triggering an app open, that’s logged as a direct open. But what about when a user sees your push on their home screen or lock screen, digests its message and call to action, and then opens your app directly, instead of tapping the push? That kind of action—known as an influenced open—matters just as much in terms of customer engagement and retention, but has never before been included in mobile marketing benchmarks.

When you look at total opens (that is, direct and influenced opens) for iOS push notifications, the rate increases by 355%, demonstrating the real impact of sending push notifications on iOS.

iOS push notification direct and total opens data from the Digits report

In addition, push notification total open rates are far more similar for iOS and Android push than we see with direct opens—when you include influenced opens, the gap between iOS and Android push drops from 255% to just under 19%.