On September 20, 2021, Apple released the new iOS version with all these changes in email, browsing and push notifications.

With the email privacy protection, I’ve felt that it brings a lot of uncertainty in marketing, but the push notification update is something that I wanted to highlight because the change will have a notable impact on the deliverability and not as in reaching the device, but getting the attention of an active screen. Secondly, it obviously impacts user engagement with push notifications. It’s getting more restricted.

I’ll go in-depth about the features like ‘Focus’, ‘Notification Summary’, Apple’s interruption levels and relevance score for your push messages. I’ll share some tips on how to align your push notification strategy for Apple users.

iOS users were already familiar with the ‘Do Not Disturb’ feature that disabled calls from your non-favourited phone numbers and any notifications that wanted to disturb you. One size does not fit all and with the new os version, Apple introduced a suggested set of ‘Focus’ groups and gave users the power to set their own ‘Focus’ by allowing people and apps to notify while focusing.

Think about it like this – your app has X amount of users and Y amount of users are signing up every month. Those users have their own lifecycle - brand awareness reaches the users, users get excited about the product, they downloaded the app, they start to use the app, the user becomes a power user and some eventually churn.

Prior to iOS 15 updates, marketers were directly affecting these 3 major pillars:

1. Activate

2. Delight

3. Retain

The Focus will have its own effect on all of those 3 pillars because the dedicated messages might not get the attention you once expected.

1. The user now has the power to decide which apps can be part of a Focus

2. When Focus ends, the older notification is either:

   1. Displayed in a ‘Notification summary’ (which we’ll cover later)

   2. Displayed in the ‘Notification Centre’ after the Focus has ended

From time to time I research how pushes and in-app communications are set up and with signing up on all of those delivery, ridehailing and micromobility apps you often start receiving a bunch of those notifications.

And I remember when I downloaded the Delivery Club (RU) app and started receiving ca 10 messages within the first 2-3 days. They wanted to activate me and that is disturbing when you know you have literally just signed up and you’re not in the region. From this point of view, I’m actually glad that I have the power to manage those notifications with some extra layer as a user and block apps that are annoying.

Though for growth and marketing, there’s still the ability to break through that Focus and deliver time-sensitive messages. I’d imagine the adoption of Focus will be substantial, which raises a couple of key questions before diving into notification classes:

• When a user is in a Focus mode, how can a push notification reach the user with time-sensitive information like delivery or driver notices or any other critical update?

• When the push notification is featured in the notification summary, but my user has multiple queued messages, how do I know which one bubbles to the top?

There are 4 classes, but only 3 of them can be used by your app, where the last one can be accessed through Apple approval. Here’s a short description of each class:

1. Passive: These notifications do not wake the home screen, make sounds, vibrate, or break through a Focus mode. Examples of Passive notifications are non-urgent updates like content recommendations and new feature updates.

2. Active: This is the standard notification type that marketers and users are accustomed to on iOS devices. Active notifications do wake the home screen, make sounds, and vibrate, but they will not break through a Focus mode. Examples of Active notifications are breaking sports updates and social media alerts.

3. Time-Sensitive: This new notification type wakes the home screen, makes sounds, and vibrates. Users can enable Time-Sensitive notifications to break through a Focus mode in the Focus mode’s settings. Examples of Time-Sensitive notifications are delivery updates and account verification alerts; this classification should be reserved for urgent messages that require action.

4. Critical: These notifications wake the home screen, make sounds, vibrate, and can even break through system controls. Critical notifications are reserved for crucial health and safety alerts, like flash flood warnings in a user’s area.

Something that is worth noting about Time-Sensitive class is that, once you send your first message to the user that has this class attached, the user has two options:

1. To keep receiving such notifications as Time-Sensitive

2. To turn off Time-Sensitive notifications, which user can later turn on again, but what are the chances

1. When we talk about marketing push notifications, then most of them should be considered as a Passive class of push messages.

2. Sports, gaming or stock activity tracker messages could be considered as Active class of push notifications.

3. From the description above, Time-Sensitive examples are delivery updates or account verification alerts, which should be considered as product or transactional messages.

4. For transactional and Time-Sensitive messages, the opt-in needs to clearly communicate your value prop so the users understand why they’ll benefit from hearing from you, e.g. not to miss out on delivery or any other valuable reasons to have them on.

5. In marketing, you could consider using Time-Sensitive class, but note that if the first time a user receives such notification from an app, the user will be prompted to either keep or turn off future Time-Sensitive notifications. This can directly affect the deliverability of your transactional push notifications. So when in doubt, opt for Active or Passive.

Apple also introduced a feature for developers and essentially marketers to add a relevance score to the push notifications. This is how Apple interprets relevance score:

The relevance score, a number between 0 and 1, that the system uses to sort the notifications from your app. The highest score gets featured in the notification summary.

If we’d zoom out and take a holistic look at all the push notifications you send, they could be grouped into some lifecycle stages, funnels, content pillars, etc.

You can then evaluate how these groups engage and what type of monetary value they bring to your company. Let’s assume that 20% of messages generate 80% of revenue, so for those that are in that 20%, we want to assign a higher relevance value than to other ones.

Adding such parameters to push notifications is actually very relevant (no pun intended) as you don’t know the moment when a user adds your app to the Notification summary, which we’ll discuss below, so whenever that happens your notifications will be interpreted correctly and have the higher chance of coming out at the top of the summary.

When I mentioned above that some apps do have a nasty habit of going a bit nuts with the number of push notifications they send, Notification summary introduces a slow and painful death to such strategies.

Let’s go into a bit of detail of what the Notification Summary is:

1. Users can personalise which apps notifications get to appear in the summary

2. Apple’s ML algorithm helps to order notifications based on how the users use their apps, with the most relevant at the top

3. The summary is displayed at a specified time of the day to eliminate user distractions

4. Relevance score affects which of the push notifications can appear higher compared to other notifications of the same app

We know that Notification Summary is something that has multiple touchpoints:

1. User – can add or remove apps from the summary

2. Apple – orders the notifications based on the app’s usage

3. Relevance score – how much more relevance one message has over the other

When we look at the screenshot of the Notification summary, we see that at the top the push notifications are displayed with an extra element – image.

Images inside push messages have been here for a while, but finally, they have some proper use case besides hiding behind the push notification click. When I listened to Apple’s own best practices, it was quite clear that adding images to your push messages will increase the likelihood of appearing at the top.

I discussed three big updates on iOS 15 that will affect your push engagement, they are all interconnected.

1. You’ll need to dive into what messages you send today, how should they be grouped together and evaluated, so that your team could assign the relevance score to each notification

2. If you send both transactional and marketing push notifications, sit down with your dev team for transactional and with the 3rd party provider for marketing notifications and make sure your iOS pushes have classification and relevance score defined.

3. Evaluate how and what type of image content could you be using with your messaging as helps to increase the position of the notification in the summary.

I hope this brings at least some clarity to what the iOS 15 update means to push engagement and what can you do to be aligned with the latest changes.