In his research he's found that there are three parts to forming a habit:

1. Cue
2. Routine
3. Reward

Push notifications are an invaluable way to remind users about your app, and are a necessary first step when trying to develop habitual use of your app.

But Rachitsky cautions against using push notifications with impunity, and recommends that you find the opportunities where your push notifications provide value to your users.

How do you tell which pushes deliver value and which don't?

Integrating Otherlevels will tell you which notifications are performing better, automatically optimising-out the poort performing notifications, thereby increasing your chances of developing a habit-forming interation. ;)

OtherLevels will also help you create, manage and optimise your user communications across SMS and EDM campaigns, which, to our knowledge, is a first.

We also recommend watching the whole interview when you have a moment.

Is this a familiar feeling?

You’ve deployed your first smartphone apps, and invested in acquiring an audience for them, are you now worried that people are using your app less frequently than you had hoped?

You’re not alone!

These days, users are bombarded by marketing for apps. Building consistent repetitive engagement requires an on-going strategy that extends beyond publishing the app in an app store.

App push can make a difference. App pushes (those little alerts that you see on your smartphone) let you communicate with your audience in a timely fashion. When used optimally, app push becomes your primary channel for user re-engagement, because like SMS, app push is immediate and timely — it lets you build conversations with your audience.

However, like email, SMS and other tools for building engagement, respecting your audience is critical — users have even less tolerance for spam on a mobile device because it is their most personal device and is with them 24x7, not just while they work but in the car, watching TV and even by their bedside. If you’re going to implement push notification in your app, you need to learn how to do it well.

Don’t take our word for it — Here’s a selection of recent coverage on the topic of app push and its importance to app publishers:

• "Welcome to the Future of Push" http://bit.ly/welcometothefutureofpush
• "Every Push Is Marketing" http://bit.ly/everypushismarketing
• Forrester: "Goodbye siloed digital messaging, hello customer-focussed integrated messaging"http://bit.ly/integratedmessaging

We’re OtherLevels — an Australian mobile marketing and analytics platform. Our team has deep experience in implementing app push solutions for some of the world’s largest on-line communities. Now we can use that expertise to help you implement app push, and using the OtherLevels platform, measure and split test message content, to help you maximise audience engagement.

It might take your development team weeks or even months to find the time to learn and deploy an app push solution for your apps. But now there’s a better way…

The OtherLevels Push Accelerate program is designed to get publishers up and going using app push in a matter of days. Using our deep expertise, OtherLevels will:

• Spend a hands-on day on-site alongside your team, and implement your preferred open-source app push solution or an app push vendor.
• Detail how best to integrate app push for either broadcast or individual audience engagement
• Explain the issues and differences between Apple’s push platform, and Android C2DM
• Make sure you understand the issues of volume and scale with open-source solutions.
• Provide a further 30 days’ telephone support so your developers can continue to learn from OtherLevels expertise.
• Provide 3 MONTHS FREE use of the OtherLevels platform to measure the success of your app push engagement, and enable optimisation via split testing.

We're piloting the Push Accelerate program in Australia initially. You can register your interest in bringing Push Accelerate to your market by emailing pushaccelerate@otherlevels.com.

Push Accelerate is a fixed price program of $4,250 plus GST. Qualifying educational, community and start-up publishers receive a generous discount. If travel is required to an Australian capital city there is a flat additional $500 fee.

To book Push Accelerate for your organisation please contact OtherLevels at  pushaccelerate@otherlevels.com, or call +61 7 3040 0317. If you have already implemented app push, then feel free to contact us and discuss how the OtherLevels platform can measure and improve your push messaging.

We look forward to helping you build increased app audience engagement.

The OtherLevels team.

For all the reports about this being the 'Year of Mobile' and mobile advertising spend to eclipse all other years, app publishers and marketers know that mobile application analytics and testing are still in their infancy.

In 'Measuring Mobile Apps: The Problem with Mobile Analytics', Rob Kenedi lays out the issues with mobile analytics and testing. Unlike web applications, which enjoy a myriad of free and paid applications for tracking and reporting performance, it doesn't look like the processes limiting mobile app testing will change significantly any time soon. 

One way to work around 'gatekeeper' limitations are described by Suhail Doshi, CEO of online analytics company Mixpanel:

What matters in mobile, Doshi told BetaKit, are user actions. “Everything is shifting to user behaviour from page views,” Doshi said. What developers have done, he said, is release a control version, update the app with a point release with the intention of varying the user interface, and determine retention. By tracking this way, developers can see what changes positively or negatively affected their customers.

We think app publishers should be shifting their focus from page views to user engagement, particularly their interactions with the app, not just time in app. This is illustrated by the following example from the same article:

There is a compromise approach that Eric Hansen, CEO of SiteSpect, has seen work. SiteSpect advised Perx, a mobile loyalty solution, to vary the number of offers presented to the user as well as the duration of that offer’s life to create a sense of urgency. As these varied, Perx could determine the optimal presentation of its core offering, and thus, as Hansen noted, “monetize based on activities of end users.”

In our work with clients we've found A/B testing of creative messaging can make a dramatic difference to user engagement — in the order of 10% improvement in acting on a push message, for instance. Varying the offers presented to users, as well as the time, day and frequency of messaging is essential — your customers are all different, and their relationship with your app needs to reflect that.

App publishers need to leverage all the testing opportunities they can get, and push notification offers an accessible way to track and test user engagement. Which is where OtherLevels can tip the odds in your favour.

Footnote: Congratulations to Mixpanel on the news of their $10M capital raising from Andreesen Horowitz,  PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff and Yammer Chairman and CEO David O. Sacks.

We've previously covered why you should use push notifications as part of your app and what the future of push notifications might hold. But how do you use push notifications effectively?

The purpose of a push notification is to get a user back into your app. Push notifications should provide users with timely and relevant information, just enough to hook the user back into your app and get them using it again. But be wary of overwhelming your users with too many notifications, or with notifications that are too sparse on information. 

As AppMakr say in their post titled 'The Power of Push and How to Use It' - "Every time you send a message, you should do so with the end goal of having users reopen your app".

How do you learn how much information is just enough? How do you establish the right frequency of delivery, and whether there are days/times you shouldn't send any at all? By integrating the OtherLevels analytics platform and measuring what happens when you send pushes (as well as SMSs and emails). 

Read on for more tips from AppMakr for leveraging the "direct line between you and your entire user base".

Jana has published a fascinating infographic about the mobile marketing opportunity in emerging markets. Some of the numbers are just breathtaking.

For example, there are 5.3 billion mobile subscriptions in the world, with 73% of those coming from emerging markets. And it's not just SMS — the mobile advertising market in China alone is projected to hit one billion dollars in the next four years. 

Click through to the infographic to see it in full size. It covers the emerging markets in detail and has some eye-opening revelations. Take particular note of how small a percentage EU and North America consumers will represent in the future of mobile (read: online) marketing.

These are tremendous growth markets not just for SMS and email marketing but increasingly for smartphone push messaging as the cost of Android handsets continues to drop.

What's needed to help empower mobile marketing in these sectors? A multi-channel marketing platform that helps you create, manage and report on your marketing communications across SMS, email and smartphone push messages, like OtherLevels. 

Saar Gur is a general partner at Charles River Ventures. He's got a great opinion piece in Techcrunch right now about the need for a new generation of smart mobile services which are context-aware: they know the right information to pass you, the right times to pass it, and when not to bother you. He's also got a lot of great ideas about how mobile services need to be smarter than just cluttered apps, borrowing too much from a desktop environment.

Says Saar:

Current mobile apps use the notification channel and SMS to bring me back to their apps. But very few have “smart notifications” that take advantage of my current context. These next generation services will only interrupt me when they have something valuable to add that is in-context. And they will do a much better job building different user interfaces based on my state.

I added the bold formatting in that quotation because for mobile notifications to get smarter, they require a backchannel of analytics informing the app and the app publisher whether notifications get acted on.

There's nothing smart about expecting users to configure their own notification preferences, especially not at that level of granularity and over multiple services and devices. No, a smart notification should get progressively smarter by learning from my interactions with them, and that requires an analytics backchannel like that provided by OtherLevels.

Smart notifications also need to be managed by a notification content management system that allows the app marketer to create and test new smart notifications without bogging down the app dev team. Like the notification content management system in OtherLevels.

Smart notifications also need to be managed in a framework that supports multi-channel mobile messaging — there's no good having smart push messages while still only sending dumb emails and dumb SMS/MMS messages. We live in a multi-channel world and app publishers need to be able to manage the customer relationship across all mobile messaging systems in a consistent manner. Like, oh, you guessed it... the multi-channel management framework provided by OtherLevels ;-).

Steve Gilmor has written a brilliantly lyrical piece called "Push notification and the Beginner's Mind" over on TechCrunch. 

Push notification isn't just about grabbing someone's attention, yelling out an announcement or jumping around squealing 'Me me me, over here, tap on this!'. Not at all. In Steve's words -

Push notification and the fabric it creates are about what comes next. Not what we know, but what we’re about to know. The next step, the one we’re about to take, the moment when the foot is in the air and hasn’t yet figured out exactly where to land.

He calls it "the central interface of the social intersection" elsewhere in the article. Now pause and have a think about that. 

If the push notification is indeed the layer between a social interaction how does it change the way we design it, use it, monitor it, and analyse it?

Do we as app developers build in a myriad of ways to personalise the push, or do we stick with an ON/OFF switch? Do we as phone owners turn all notifications off because we don't want to feel harrassed, or are we willing to trade a silent phone for one that keeps the information we most care about at the front of our minds all the time?

Steve's vision of the true potential of the push notification is an interesting one.

Social filtering, presence mixed with social authority, the ability to configure rule sets for what reaches you immediately and how others are staged for you in buffers on different surfaces. And as these filters are built out historically and across our social groups and cloud, the views into that data will be increasingly valuable to us both personally and in our business. This is the real Big Data, big in its social implications and concise in its personal context. How corporations can use this will be up to us, or put another way, licensed to those who we trust to use this data in our best interests.

The push notification — perhaps not all that humble after all?

2012 will definitely be big for mobile advertising, an opinion seconded by Justin Barr from Tapit! Mobile Advertising. Citing numbers from eMarketer, the mobile advertising spend in the US for this year is estimated to be $2.61 billion - 80% more than the actual spend last year. That's significant growth!

Barr points to the following key factors behind an 80% year-on-year growth in mobile advertising:

• Increasing demand for mobile advertising — brands now recognise that it is an effective and efficient avenue;
• App development and monetisation has reached a point of maturity;
• Location-based advertising allows brands to target local customers in a timely and relevant fashion;
• Real-time bidding benefits both ad buyers and sellers
• Rich media advertisements come into their own now phone and data technology support the use of this format, engaging customers at a higher level than static ads.

What's missing from Barr's analysis? The impact of multi-channel marketing (the ability to manage your email, SMS and smartphone ap push marketing messages from one platform) such as that provided by OtherLevels and... oh... uh... nobody else. 

Head on over to Barr's article 'This is the year of mobile advertising' for the detailed explanation of each point.

We were profiled in ZDNet.com.au last week after an informal introduction to Mahesh Sharma a few weeks ago. We weren't really expecting the introduction to produce a story, or perhaps we would have been better prepared, with some specific data and case studies for him to base his story on.

During the conversation we used push delivery platform Urban Airship's rapid growth (they've just reported sending more than 14 billion push messages since the company was founded three years ago) as an illustration of just how rapidly push messaging is growing as an industry.

The rest of the article talks about how, at OtherLevels, we're using push analytics to help address the growing problem of 'push spam', where untargeted, untracked and hence unwanted push messages are being sent to app users.

So is Urban Airship part of the push spam problem? No. Just to be clear: Urban Airship is actually the industry's least likely source of push notification spam. Urban Airship has been at the forefront of helping the industry do a better job of targeting and delivering push messages from day one. UA's delivery platform includes comprehensive analytics. In fact, they just announced a new 'opt-in reporting' feature for app publishers using their platform (showing whether users are opting-in or opting-out from receiving push messages from your app).

So if Urban Airship provides push analytics, and OtherLevels provides push analytics, do you really need both? Well, that depends: Urban Airship offers analytics for app publishers using their delivery platform; whereas OtherLevels provides push analytics for app publishers across any delivery platform. Both are great.

For the moment, most unwanted push messages are sent by app publishers who don't use a third-party like Urban Airship; instead developing their own push message delivery for their apps. Generally tracking and reporting are forgotten in the rush to get push message capability added.

Since they often have other priorities as publishers, tracking what happens to the pushes their apps send is often forgotten. So they have no idea they're sending push messages that go unread, deleted and unacted-upon. It's these messages we're referring to when we talk about "push spam".

Finally, the story credits Alan Jones as a co-founder of OtherLevels. Though he's a member of the team, he's not a co-founder — that title belongs to Tim Marks, OtherLevels' CTO, who co-founded OtherLevels with CEO Brendan O'Kane.

But what's really important here is remembering to track the pushes you send — whether it's with OtherLevels push analytics or another solution. Track them, measure the response rates, and A/B test different messages to see what gets the best response. Unwanted and untracked push messages are 'push spam' and users will turn away from you and your app if you send them.

Adotas' Brian LaRue has a great blog case study just out about app publisher Onavo, which turned to push messaging platform Urban Airship to build awareness, social presence and app engagement.

Onavo’s Results Using Push Notifications

• 75% Awareness Increase
• 50% Overall Satisfaction Increase
• 30% Increase in Shares and Mentions

Onavo, a utility app for iOS and Android, compresses phone data, tracks usage, and helps users save money on their data plan. Because it's a 'set-and-forget' kind of app, Onavo were concerned they were being forgotten by their users and not getting the kind of social mentions that would drive new user signups.

To bring users back to the app and show how useful Onavo is, the company added push notification using the Urban Airship platform to keep users up-to-speed on their account usage data and savings. This resulted in a booming increase in this information being shared on Facebook and Twitter, as well as increases in opens, retention, user satisfaction and broader awareness.

Said Dvir Reznik, Onavo's director of marketing, “Being a utility app that runs seamlessly in the background can be a double-edged sword: users can easily forget about your service. Push notifications, with their ability to increase interactions and awareness levels, were important in providing a solution to that problem.”

Onavo decided to message users when they had saved certain amounts of data – such as their first megabyte, 100 megabytes, or first gigabyte. This way users would continually be reminded of the great benefit they get from Onavo and be able to tell their friends.

Could you do even more?

The results from this case study are significant but more could be learned from using push notifications on an app like Onavo.

1. Every push message you send to a user can be considered useful, or annoying; how many times can you message an average user in a month before you cross over from useful to annoying?
2. What days of the week and times of day are users more likely to open and respond to the push notification?
3. If you A/B test with, say, three different lines of copy for the message, can you improve your results still further?

Read more about the Onavo case study over on Adotas.com.