• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, January 20, 2016

We all know that sending the “right” number of push notifications is a tricky business. Too many, and users are ready to hit the uninstall button. Too few, and your relationships go stale.

But how many is too many?

Surprisingly, a full 46% of consumers said that receiving just two to five notifications in a week would cause them to disable an app’s push notifications.

That’s according to a new survey from the mobile engagement specialists at Localytics, conducted in partnership with market research firm Research Now.

Meanwhile, 32% of survey respondents said they would stop using an app altogether if they received six to 10 messages in a week’s time.

As it stands, more than half of consumers surveyed found push messages to be “an annoying distraction,” Localytics and Research Now found.

A big problem is that too few publishers are doing any sort of intelligent targeting, by Localytics’ reckoning. As such, more than 35% of push notifications are generic “broadcast” blasts to all subscribers, by Localytics’ count.

Not surprisingly, Localytics found a 300% improvement in conversion rates when push notifications were personalized to individual user preferences.

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