How to Use the Drip Notification Plugin

The Drip Notification plugin allows you to send push notifications. 

But these notifications are triggered based on a user’s activity—specifically, the last time they’ve opened your app. 

If a user hasn’t opened the app after a certain number of days, you can set a cadence for a drip campaign. This series of notifications will remind them to come back and use the app. 

The feature set for this plugin is very straightforward. You’ll be able to set up and manage your drip cadence with ease. 

With the Drip Notification plugin, you’re essentially sending regular push notifications without the in-app message. These notifications will only appear on the user’s lock screen.

The Drip Notification plugin is an excellent tool for any app. Here are a handful of ways that we’ve seen this plugin used successfully:

Generally speaking, it’s a great way for app admins and business owners to remind inactive users about the app. Whether it’s been three days or three weeks, you have complete control over what the notification says. 

Below you’ll learn how to use the essential features of the Drip Notification plugin.

Follow the step-by-step tutorials and follow along using your app dashboard.

Once the plugin has been installed to your app, simply locate it within the “My Features” section of your dashboard. You’ll be brought to a screen that looks like this:

Click the green “Add Drip Notification” button to continue.

The title will appear as the notification header on the user’s lock screen. Just fill out the form field as prompted.

There is a 20-character limit to your title. This ensures that users can see the title in full when it appears on their lock screens. 

The message will appear below the title in the notification. This is your chance to add a little more detail and entice users to open the app.

There is a 70-character max for all messages.

Next, decide when the notification should be triggered. 

The countdown timer starts when a user first opens the app. For example, let’s say a user opens the app at 10:00 AM and uses it for 12 hours straight, stopping at 10:00 PM that night. If you set your drip notification for one day, the message will be delivered the following day at 10:00 AM—one day from the last time it was opened, not the last time it was used. 

The final step is adding an action to the notification. What do you want the user to see when they open the app from a drip message?

Available actions include:

This step is optional. It’s only necessary if you want to highlight something specific for your app users to see. Otherwise, they’ll be directed to the app homepage.

Once you’ve completed this final step, click on the green “Add” button in the bottom right corner of the screen. Repeat these steps for as many drip notifications as you’d like. 

Once you’ve created one or more drip notifications, you might want to go back and make changes. Maybe you want to change the number of days, edit the message, or add an action item. Here’s how you do it.

Navigate to the “Current Drip Notifications” section of the plugin. In the screenshot above, you can see the sequence that we created in the last step-by-step guide of this tutorial. 

Click on the pencil icon to edit the notification. This will bring you back to a familiar screen, with all of the form fields you used to create a new notification initially. 

Deleting a notification in your sequence is easy. Simply click on the “X” icon, as highlighted above. 

A pop-up will appear to confirm your decision. Click “Delete” in the pop-up, and the notification will be removed. 

Click on the small graph icon to bring up your analytics reports. This information will help you determine the success of each drip campaign. 

After using the Drip Notification plugin ourselves and seeing other apps have success with it, we’ve identified the top tips and best practices for its use. 

Push notifications need to be used with caution. If you send them out too frequently, it could cause users to mute notifications altogether. Once that happens, you won’t be able to bring them back with any targeted messages.

The trick here is to send them out just often enough to trigger engagement, without annoying your users.

We recommend setting up a drip for 3 days, 7 days, and then anywhere from 10-14 days. 

Don’t just blindly set notifications with “we miss you” messages. You need to make sure that your messages follow a logical progression.

For example, let’s say you release a new piece of content on your app once per week. If your first notification goes out after three days of inactivity, it won’t make sense to promote that new piece of content. Users might have already seen it.

But if it’s been 7+ days since they’ve opened the app, you can send a message with an action item linking directly to your new content section of the app. This keeps users updated while following a logical progression. 

Take advantage of the analytics feature. By measuring the performance of your messages, you can double down on what’s working, and make changes to what’s not. 

For example, let’s say the first message in your sequence has virtually no opens. But the second message is performing really well and driving users back to the app. This information could be telling you a few different things. Maybe you’ll decide to eliminate the first message completely. You might even move the second message up in the cadence to bring users back sooner. 

Follow the data. This is the best way to maximize the efficiency of your messages.

Still have questions? No problem! Reach out to us and we’d be happy to help :)