While designing great products that actually solve user problems is the best path to user engagement, even the best developers need a helping hand from time to time. In-app notifications can drive better user onboarding experiences, feature adoption, customer retention, and, ultimately, greater user engagement.
Let’s look at how you can unlock the power of in-app notifications.
What are in-app notifications?
In-app notifications are things like messages, banners, or pop-ups that appear as notifications within your app.
Unlike push notifications, in-app notifications:
Only appear when the user has the app open
Don’t require opt-in or consent
Don’t disturb users when they are in different mindsets
One of the most compelling things about in-app notifications is their versatility. You can use them for customer service, promotions, product information, gathering feedback, and more.
In effect, in-app notifications are the perfect choice for sending timely, relevant information that helps your users engage more deeply with your app.
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How in-app notifications can boost user engagement
In-app notifications are a powerful tool for driving user engagement. Here’s how they can help.
#1. Create an effective user onboarding experience
An effective user onboarding experience has lots of different moving parts. In-app notifications can help make the process as frictionless as possible by providing contextual information.
Here are a few ways that you can use in-app notifications to help with onboarding.
Welcome message
You can use an in-app notification to send a simple, personalized welcome message to your users.
Onboarding checklists
You can also use in-app notifications to direct your users towards onboarding checklists. These powerful onboarding frameworks lay out the various steps your users need to understand and adopt your product.
#2. Product adoption
Product adoption describes the necessary set of steps where your target audience discovers, understands, and actively uses your product. In other words, it’s a multi-stage journey from awareness to user engagement.
In the last point, we talked about using an in-app notification to gather information to help onboard new users. These communications also provide an opportunity to orient your users in a variety of different ways.
Highlight key features
Every app has a few flagship features. You can highlight them during your welcome message or quickly after via a separate in-app notification.
Feature adoption
You can split feature adoption into three distinct phases: Awareness, guidance, and motivation. In-app notifications are adept at each of the three, as you can see below.
Awareness: Ensuring users know about all the features that are relevant to their goals with your solution
Guidance: Linking your users to onboarding content, help articles, FAQs, and tips and tricks that can help them get value from the features within your application
Motivation: Nudge your users toward engaging with unused features, becoming paid users, or showing them what they can achieve with your product.
Launch product tours or walkthroughs
Product tours or walkthroughs are an excellent way to show users around your solution. Providing a step-by-step guide on how to get value from your product helps engage users and ensure they understand the core features and functionality of your product.
This kind of onboarding content is important for shepherding users toward their “aha moment” — the time when they grasp how your product can solve their problems and they can imagine themselves becoming active users.
Contextual in-app notifications for feature discovery
Complex apps have a lot of features. Leading with them all up front risks overloading users with information or messaging about features they don’t need. Contextual in-app notifications solve this issue.
For example, you can use tooltips to give hints or tips for new features. However, you could also use in-app notifications to give your users a gentle nudge toward features they don’t currently use. What’s more, if you have user preference or segmentation data, you can suggest relevant features.
All of this helps your users forge a closer and more engaged relationship with your solution.
#3. User retention
You can boost user retention for your app by sending personalized messages that are triggered by specific behaviors or preferences. Again, this is about finding ways to deepen or enhance engagement through sharing information that helps users get full value from your product.
A big part of successful customer retention is being proactive. So, figure out who is at risk of churn and ensure your messaging addresses any common issues and promotes behavior that keeps users around.
That process could involve revenue-generating activities to promote loyalty, like promotions, offers, and so on. Or, these messages could be geared towards helping users solve their pain points or get more from the app.
#4. Feedback and surveys
No product is ever perfect. There is always some improvement that can be made or a need that can be met. Getting feedback from your users is critical if you want to know what you’re doing well and where you need to do more work.
In-app notifications are a great way to get feedback. You can get granular and request a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey right after your user has engaged with a feature.
The best thing about triggering surveys from within your app is that the response rate is far greater and that users can provide the information you need to improve your products and user satisfaction rate while the issues are at the front of their minds.
#5. Product announcements
In-app notifications are an excellent way to send brief, punchy messages to your users. They’re universally usable for Product, Support and Marketing-related messages, great for promotions, offers, news, and especially for announcing new features.
If you have a new feature, you can announce it via email or in your newsletter. However, a banner or popup that highlights a new feature is very effective. You can also use the in-app notification to direct users to a product tour or walkthrough that shows them how to utilize the new feature.
A lot of users won’t figure out a new feature on their own. So, give them a nudge so they can extract more value from your product.
#6. Upselling and cross-selling
In-app notifications can provide a direct revenue benefit when used for upselling and cross-selling. You can use them to convert trial or freemium users into paying customers or sell little extras or expanded packages.
Just don’t bombard your users with these notifications. When possible, connect the notification to user behavior. For example, if your user is exhibiting behaviors that suggest they would benefit from a higher pricing tier or they are using a lot of resources, a well-timed in-app notification can be hugely beneficial.
Final thoughts
In-app notifications offer a flexible way to communicate with your users. They are a good choice for onboarding users, sharing information about your product, driving customer success, and even marketing and promotion from within your app.
Additionally, users often dwell for a long on a single page - this is especially true for internal tools or data dashboards that remain open for extended periods.
in-app notifications such as Banners can be displayed dynamically, without the need for user page action or refresh. This way, you can display a maintenance window or convey any important announcement to your users and be sure the message will be seen.
Try Usetiful free now to create in-app notifications that transform your user engagement and amplify your messages without relying on your developers.