• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, November 25, 2016

Used intelligently, push notifications are believed to increase retention rates among app users.

And, as new research from Localytics suggests, more developers are wising up to that fact.

Among all push messages, this year, 75% were segmented to specific users, while 25% were “broadcast,” i.e., blindly blasted to everyone.  

That’s an improvement on last year’s spit, the analytics firm finds, when 65% of push notifications were blasted, and 35% were broadcast.

Showing the value of segmentation, the firm found an average of 6.4 sessions for segmented messages, compared to 2.8 sessions for broadcast messages, while click-through conversion rates averaged 3% for segmented messages, and just 0.6% for broadcast messages.

Yet, segmented or not, more than half of consumers surveyed at the beginning of the year found push messages to be “an annoying distraction.”

A big problem is that too few publishers are doing any sort of intelligent targeting, by Localytics’ reckoning.

As such, the firm previously found a 300% improvement in conversion rates when push notifications were personalized to individual user preferences.

What’s more, when Localytics asked survey respondents what they actually wanted from push messages, the top three responses all had one common theme: personalization.