A short take on 'Push Notifications'
Welcome back! Firstly apologies for being absent for most of October. Now coming to today's Understanding Nuances, we bring forward to you a short article on push notifications, and how they vary for different applications, and different user segments, and how Ola can send push notifications.
Why do you use a cab rental app? A fundamental answer comes up - to move from one place to another. Is there anything else for which you can use rental apps like Uber and OLA?
In general, people use OLA only when they need to travel. Ola cannot nudge people to travel by sending out push notifications. Instagram can, WhatsApp can, and many other apps like Swiggy and Zomato target their user cohort through personalized notifications. In other words, I don't get the same notification as someone else might be getting; notifications get triggered based on my in-app activity.
Let's try to understand how notifications vary depending upon the User Persona and let's do a good product segmentation exercise around the same.
Say you want to segment Dream 11 user base. The segmentation will help Dream 11 send out push notifications in a more customized and personalized way to each segment. Can you think of some ways in which Dream 11 does this?
Let's see what some possible ways of making cohorts are:
Based on how often users open the Dream 11 app - Depending on the frequency of apps open by users, Dream 11 can make a user cohort of people who have gone dormant for some reason and send them some engageable push notifications. For users who already have a very high app open rate, bombarding them with notifications would not be a very good idea.
Based on what time users are opening the app - For users who miss making teams by a few minutes or users who create teams in advance but forget to participate, it's imperative to have clusters of users based on the time they are opening the app.
Based on what money they have in their wallet - A person with 200 rupees in Dream 11 wallet might not need the motivation to participate/ bet money in another round v/s a person whose wallet balance is zero.
And there can be many other ways of making cohorts; we are not listing all of them here. Notifications live on these cohorts, notifications can only work if they are sent to the right user at the right time otherwise they are just a stack of unwanted advertisements waiting to be cleaned up by the user.
Let's come back to our topic of cab rentals again. So most of us will agree if I say that notifications are not much of a use for cab rental apps when it comes to making people transact on the platform. I do not open OLA unless I need to go somewhere; that's how limited my interaction with OLA is. Can you remember one time you opened OLA for no good reason, just randomly? I don't think there will be many such moments for anyone.
But I do remember opening OLA for no particular reason when I am actually inside the OLA cab. Think about it, if you are traveling by OLA and you get notifications from OLA during your cab ride, the chances are that you will open that notification. This is a bit of a subjective experience, but I hope some of you reading this article will follow the same. For OLA, the best chance of selling anything to a customer is when the user has already bought their product; weird it is. How to sell a thing to a customer who has just purchased from your platform? -- UPSELL --
Imagine sitting in OLA and getting a notification stating - Add 500 Rs on your OLA money and get 20% off on the current ride, or buy a travel pass for the following three rides and get 100% cashback on the current ride.
We will end today's article on Understanding Nuances with this note and leave all our readers thinking for more.
We’ll be seeing you next week with another teardown. Until then, if you enjoyed today’s article and found it insightful, do share ‘Understanding Nuances’ among your friends and peers!