Push notifications: how not to turn into spam

A push notification is the only channel that delivers a message free and instantly straight to the customer's phone screen. It is also the only one the user can switch off forever with a single gesture, with no way back. The balance between those two facts defines the entire strategy.

Why people switch them off

The reason is almost always the same: the notifications carry no value for the recipient. "We miss you, come back to the app" is a message about your needs, not theirs. Switching off happens fast: after several irrelevant messages in a row, most users either disable notifications or delete the app. There is no way back — asking them to re-enable is practically impossible, since the system dialogue is shown only once.

How to ask for permission properly

The main mistake is triggering the system permission prompt on first launch, before the person has understood the value of the product. At that stage only a minority agree. The right order: let the user get some benefit first, then at a suitable moment show your own screen explaining a concrete advantage ("we will let you know when your order is ready"), and only after they agree call the system dialogue. If they decline your own prompt, the system request is not spent and can be shown later.

Scenarios that work

• Transactional: order accepted, courier on the way, payment went through. Expected, useful, almost never irritating.
• Triggered by user action: an item from favourites is back in stock, the price on a tracked product has dropped.
• Reminders with genuine value: your appointment is tomorrow at 15:00, your certificate expires in three days.
• Personal events: bonus points credited, a new loyalty tier unlocked.
• Abandoned cart — but once, and after a few hours, not three times ten minutes later.

Scenarios that kill the channel

• Mass promotional blasts to everyone with no segmentation.
• Notifications at night and early morning with no regard for the recipient's time zone.
• Several messages a day from an app people use once a week.
• Clickbait headlines that open an unrelated screen.
• Duplicating the same message across SMS, email and push at once.

Frequency and timing

There is no universal answer, but there is a reliable guideline: notification frequency should not exceed the natural frequency with which the service is used. Food delivery — up to a few times a week; banking — driven by account events; a booking service — a day before and an hour before the visit. Tie send time to the recipient's time zone and their personal activity pattern: a message sent when someone usually opens the app performs noticeably better than one sent at a time convenient for the marketer.

The legal side

Transactional notifications about order status are not advertising and require no separate consent. Advertising ones do: under Article 18 of the advertising law, distributing advertising over communication networks without the subscriber's prior consent is prohibited. Fines for legal entities under Article 14.3 of the Code of Administrative Offences run from 100,000 to 500,000 roubles per instance. The practical conclusion: consent for advertising notifications is collected with a separate checkbox, storing the date and the version of the text, and transactional and advertising streams are separated technically. The rules are worth checking against official sources.

What to measure

Open rate on its own says very little. Look at three metrics together: the share who disabled notifications after the campaign, the share who deleted the app, and above all the target action the message was driving. If the open rate rose while opt-outs tripled, you borrowed a short-term result from the future. How to build this analytics alongside your other retention channels is covered in our mobile development section, and you can discuss a specific strategy through the form.