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Pugpig Reports: How to leverage push notifications to deliver app engagement and growth

Download our latest research report on how to use push notifications and other forms of app messaging to increase engagement and retention.

31st January 2025

Using push plus other app messaging options and personalisation contribute to increases in app engagement and retention.

In our 2024 State of Mobile Publishing Report, we found publishers who were the most successful at getting audiences to open push notifications had more than twice the engagement compared with publishers who struggled with low open rates.

The results piqued our interest. We wanted to know what these publishers were doing and how others could replicate their success. To answer these questions, we dove deeper into our data and reached out to the push and messaging providers Airship, OneSignal, PushPushGo and Pushly to get more data and insights.

The major takeaways from the research we just released in a report:

The rewards of using push far outweigh any perceived risks.
Airship found that the first 48 hours after a user downloads your app are critical, and push notifications and in-app messaging are powerful tools to build habits immediately.
Push notifications are powerful and even more so when used with all forms of app messaging including in-app messages, onboarding screens and live activities.
Relevance is key to driving higher open rates, and the report includes three case studies demonstrating different tactics to increase the relevance of your app messaging.

The report lays out a clear case for using push notifications, benchmarks to measure success and best practice case studies that publishers can apply immediately to achieve superior engagement and retention results with your apps. You can download the report now.

Leah Becerra, a senior digital editor and product manager with the Boston Globe, shared actionable insights for the report into how the newspaper increased open rates up to three times and how that is driving a growing audience for their app. She’s a member of our Mobile Matters community. If you would like to join, you can sign up here. And if you’d like strategic support in applying the lessons in this report, get in touch. We’d love to work with you.

Kevin & James

Why publishers should leverage the power of push notifications

By Kevin Anderson

Our first indication of the power of push notifications came when we worked with publishers to start using push notifications and one saw a 60% increase in active users in three months.

That inspired us to dig deeper for our 2024 State of Mobile Publishing Report, and we found the most successful publishers using push, those with the highest open rates, had more than twice the engagement – sessions per user per month – than those with the lowest open rates.

As Eric Ulken, the Vice President of Product at the Baltimore Banner, told us for the report: “(Apps are) the only platform that we are able to push, bring people in without having to voluntarily follow a link. Newsletters to an extent, yes, but push notifications are more effective at bringing people back.”

We decided to dig even deeper, looking at other factors that delivered success in push notification open rates and the broader goals of app engagement and retention. We dug deeper into our data and partnered with messaging providers used by the publishers we work with to understand how to get the most from app messaging.

Build habits immediately

App users tend to be the most loyal, engaged members of any publisher’s audience. However, that can’t be taken for granted, and publishers need a strategy to make the app a part of users’ daily media habits.

The report outlines key steps app publishers need to take to keep app users engaged in the critical 48 hours after download. App onboarding screens can be used to encourage new users to opt into push notifications and as the report explains, provide important information to new users on how to use the app. Successful publishers using the Pugpig platform including the Boston Globe and the Minnesota Star Tribune ask users to opt into and customise the push notifications they receive in their onboarding sequence.

In addition to higher push opt-in rates, apps with onboarding messages have 56.25% higher stickiness measured by the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users than apps that don’t, according to OneSignal.

When we started the research, we were focused on push notifications, but they are not the only way to use messaging in apps or to support app usage. Publishers can and should take more advantage of in-app messages because they don’t require users to opt-in, and email can support app messaging in engaging new users and keeping them engaged over time. Using multiple communications channels increases engagement by 37%, which leads to higher levels of 1-day, 7-day and 30-day app retention, OneSignal has found.

Relevance is key to better push performance

The report also explores how publishers optimise their push notification and app messaging performance. It is full of benchmarks from the messaging providers on when to send notifications, the optimal length of the messages and also whether to include images or not.

After looking at the data and identifying the most successful publishers, it is clear publishers need to implement tactics to increase the relevance of their messages to supercharge their push performance and by extension their app performance. Airship found that personalisation boosts open rates by 37% on average, and all three case studies in the report have one thing in common: In various ways, publishers found a way to identify the interests of their audiences to better target their messages.

ACCA Student Accountant uses an Airship scene to allow students to identify if they are currently studying for an exam.
City AM uses content strategy and click-through data from its newsletters to inform the stories they push.
The Boston Globe started allowing users to choose which push notifications they received using a preference centre. Open rates increased by up to three times.

The publishers in all three case studies are growing their app audience and making the app a key contributor to their success. The Boston Globe has been so successful in increasing their app audience that they have been able to dedicate a staff member to focus on optimising their app even more.

Apple and Google have developed new ways in addition to traditional messaging to allow publishers’ apps to engage their users. Both have launched versions of live activities, a feature that provides up-to-date information about news events such as sports matches or elections that persist on the lockscreen. Sports apps featuring live activities have 3.7x more sessions than those without them, according to Airship. Across all types of apps, OneSignal found that apps that use them have a 23.7% higher retention rate.

This scratches the surface of all of the actionable information in the report. Download it now to get all of the insights from our research on how to use app messaging to achieve your app engagement, retention and growth goals.

News from Pugpig

ICYMI, Pugig released its updated product roadmap for 2025 at our Customer Summit in December. Product Director Emillie Ruston laid out our vision and new functionality and features expected this year.

As we found with our push report, features that deliver relevant content are important, and we are adding a feature we call Follow, which allows app users to follow the authors and topics they care about the most. Helping users get the most out of their apps is critical to adoption, and this year, we will be adding tooltips and signposting to give new users step-by-step guidance. Those are just two of many major new features on our product roadmap this year. Go here for the full rundown.

Industry News

Here are some of the most important headlines about the business of news and publishing as well as strategies and tactics in product management, analytics and audience engagement.