• by Jess Nelson , May 30, 2017

Urban Airship announced a new company milestone this week, delivering its 1 trillionth push notification.

The digital growth company powers the push notifications of more than 45,000 mobile applications via its Urban Airship Engage platform, including major brands like Adidas, Alaska Airlines, NBC Universal and Zillow. Urban Airship also works with many athletic organizations, including the Cleveland Cavaliers and Sacramento Kings NBA teams, as well as the U.S. Open tournament.

“Mobile unlocks so much more context than marketers have ever been able to touch into before,” says Corey Gault, director of communications at Urban Airship. “An app used to tell you when the game was, but now apps can also tell you when you should leave your house based on the current traffic situation, can guide you to open parking spots, deliver a hot dog to your seat, and show you instant replay from 5 different angles.”

Furthermore, mobile notification engagement is on the rise, according to Urban Airship’s analysis of iOS customer data from first-quarter 2015–2017. App users opting in to receive push notifications have grown from 40.4% in 2015 to 43.6% in 2017, and engagement rates have also increased from 7.4% in 2015 to 9.6% in 2017.  

In addition to sending push notifications to locked phone screens, Urban Airship also delivers in-app notifications, message center alerts, and notifications to Web site visitors and customers in other digital marketing channels like email or SMS.

“Email has been around forever, but with mobile it’s taken on a completely different experience,” says Mike Herrick, SVP of product and engineering at Urban Airship. “A lot of ESPs talk about marketing emails and transactional emails, but there are also notification emails.” 

Herrick says email marketers can leverage the same CTA-driven design principles as push notifications to encourage readers to take action from an email message.  

“People don’t want to read an email that’s 50 paragraphs long,” says Herrick. “It’s a lot of dense content that doesn’t fit the time we’re living in. Instead, entice them with an image or have a landing page with more information.” 

Herrick says personalization is key no matter what the type of message being delivered. 

“We live in a time where you have people’s attention for just a moment,” says Herrick. “They’ll glance and, if they’re interested, tap it. Otherwise they’ll ignore it and move on.

Customers should also have a choice to specify the types of messages they would like to receive.

“Breaking news is often not that uplifting, but people still want to be informed,” says Herrick. “Instead of getting breaking news for everything, maybe you don’t want to read about politics.”