Custom Notifications: The Mother of all Triggers
Social media marketing, advertisements, AI-based recommendations, manual content curation, notifications, email campaigns and cross-promotion. Each of the above tasks, aim to improve the KPIs of a product.
Teams make use of technology, media and human intelligence to improve the KPIs.
As a marketing or an editorial guy, you spend hours, thinking about some quirky notification campaigns. You skip your meal to ensure timely delivery of those notifications. You bat around the creatives which the designers provided. You do all this to make the tiny 256dp real estate in the user’s notification bar appealing. What happens next? The users mercilessly swipe the notification away.
Users receive a barrage of notifications every day. The average attention span per notification is a few precious milliseconds. This, in turn, means that you have a few milliseconds to convince the user to click the notification.
The Ultimate Trigger — Notification
A standard android notification layout consists of 5 configurable components — a title, subtitle, image and the two action buttons.
The marketing folks experiment with these components to design ingenious notification campaigns. To help these persevering individuals, android goes a step further. It lets developers design a custom notification layout.
Custom Notifications
Android lets your app have a custom notification layout/UI.
You can add images, texts, buttons and place them the way you want. You cannot exceed the height of expanded (256dp) and collapsed(64dp) notifications.
This customization lets you design the notification layout that suits your exact need.
Using ‘Notification Tags’
Tags are adjectives that add context to the content being promoted. Words like trending, popular, breaking, viral, unbelievable, funny superhit etc add value.
The title, subtitle, time of notification & image occupy their standard places. The top right corner has a significant area left to accommodate at least a 25–30 character long tag. You can add a highlighting rectangle to make it enticing. An added advantage of having at the top right corner is the fact that it will be visible in the collapsed state as well.
The trick is to avoid using these tags for every notification you send. It would take away the ‘This is Important or This is Interesting’ factor from it. That might make the tag unavailing.
Using it for the right content and at the right time makes these tags super-alluring. This, in turn, would increase the CTR and so the KPIs.
Horses for Courses
A different notification layout for each content type in the app can work wonders. Configuring a flag from the push notification dashboard is pretty simple. You can either have a different channel name or a key-value pair to differentiate.
An ‘awards won’ section that lists the top awards attributed to the movie or its actors. A share button visible for video content types to make it easier for the user to share it. A live score layout for apps dealing in live sports coverage. A custom notification layout can prove to be a boon for Stock Brokerage apps. They can use this feature to render price fluctuations of a stock with a buy/sell button.
E-commerce apps can use the 256dp (height) to display a list of popular items with price and details.
There are endless possibilities. You may run A/B tests and find out what works.
To name a few
The ‘Inshorts app uses it for better news delivery. A large font, share button and a full-size image. Hotstar uses sticky notifications for pushing live scores and commentary. WhatsApp uses it for displaying messages and provides an option to reply as well. Online recharge apps use it to render offers and plans. Tinder has its own unique way.
Potential Pitfalls
As a development platform, android is notorious when it comes to UI-related uncertainties. The custom notifications work as expected for almost all the devices.
Having said that, custom notifications misbehave for Chinese phones like Xiaomi and Huawei. For these phones, the layout needs to be separately defined. Xiaomi phones restrict the notification height to 250dp for expanded notifications.
Custom notifications work fine for Samsung, Oneplus, Oppo, Vivo, Moto etc.
Note: Dark/Night mode handling will have to be handled as well.
The first step in Nir Eyal’s ‘Hooked Canvas’ for building habit-forming products is ‘Trigger’. As far as external triggers are concerned, notification is the mother of all triggers. An increase of 0.5–0.7% in CTR could have a large impact on the KPIs. This is the direct increase in numbers. There are instances wherein users gain value by reading the notifications. They don’t click them. News notifications & live scores are the best examples. Although CTR doesn’t change much, there is an indirect impact on KPIs. It also helps to thwart uninstalls.
Start Reading about it:
https://developer.android.com/training/notify-user/custom-notification
https://itnext.io/android-custom-notification-in-6-mins-c2e7e2ddadab
