40%-70% of push notifications on Android phones go undelivered in India: Report

In India’s Android market 40%-70% of push notifications go undelivered, which affects brand loyalty, according to a new report.

As a result of this, consumer brands in India are losing opportunities to engage with more than 50% of mobile customers, said the ‘Push Notification Delivery Benchmarks India, 2022,’ by customer engagement platform MoEngage. 

Push notifications are clickable pop-up messages that appear on users’ browsers irrespective of the device they’re using or the browser they’re on. They serve as a quick communication channel enabling companies to convey messages, offers, or other information to their customers. A 2019 study by MoEngage showed that push notifications deliver a clickthrough rate seven times greater than email. That means, when used correctly, it can result in greater engagement and ultimately more sales. 

According to the study, push notification delivery rate in Xiaomi and Huawei phones are nearly 54% and OnePlus has a delivery rate of 73%. 

In terms of push notification delivery rates for different verticals, for example, EdTech has 55%, e-commerce 37%, Media and Entertainment 30%, Travel & Hospitality 39%, Financial Services 37%, Healthcare 47%, and Gaming 20%. 

“With the large dominance of Android mobile devices in India, Push Notification has been the top communication channel for consumer brands to engage their customers. However, our report shows that most brands face a loss of up to 40-70% in delivery rates, directly impacting conversion numbers and eventually, north star business metrics,” said Raviteja Dodda, CEO & Co-Founder of MoEngage.

The report also cites reasons why brands fail to reach their customers through mobile push notification. For instance, older Android OS typically have a much lower delivery rate when compared to the newer versions. Android 10 has recorded the highest delivery rates to date. These improvements are highly correlated to the optimisations made to battery usage and improvements to the way notifications are introduced to the notification channel.

The app category plays a role in determining customer reachability via push notifications. This is largely because consumers use different apps with a varying frequency. For example, you may listen to music from your audio streaming app daily but only use your airplane ticket booking app just once a month.

In other words, as users’ activity on the app reduces and the app is visited less frequently, push notification reachability reduces. Brands fail to reach 56% of customers when the customers’ last activity on the app was over a week ago. And the reachability keeps dropping as the time gap between customers’ previous app activity increases.

“Using a marketing automation platform with a strong push amplification product can address a lot of issues around OEM restrictions and network issues,” said brand expert Aparupa Patowary. Brands such as Oyo Rooms and BigBasket, among others, are seeing up to 15-20% improvement in push notification delivery by using AI-based tool. 

Another great way of improving delivery rates is by using an AI-enabled marketing automation tool. She said AI can improve all parts of the push notification process — from creating the push notification to customising message content to improving delivery rates.