The stakes are raised with push notifications. Tailored and timely, they can be a powerful driver to get users to reengage. Used haphazardly and they can be more obtrusive than a spam folder. Recently, ABC News has become savvy with their push strategy, however, letting users customize their notifications based on the stories they “star.” Understanding what topics interest users provides ABC with insight into the content and frequency of notifications. Politically-active users, for instance, want very niche messaging while celebrity followers will benefit from a higher volume. Thus far, the alerts have lead to mobile accounting for greater than 80% of the total views for some news stories.
