What affects your push open rate: Mobile user segmentation research

At Pushwoosh, we firmly believe that user segmentation directly impacts both revenue and engagement. To validate this, we analyzed 50 billion mobile push notifications sent via Pushwoosh in Q4 2024 across the following verticals: eCommerce, retail, news, gaming, transportation, and finance.

Our initial hypothesis was: “User segmentation consistently leads to higher push open rates.” To test this, we first examined the verticals that sent the highest volume of broadcasts most frequently — news, media, and eCommerce apps.

Broader segmentation outperforms no segmentation

We started by narrowing our focus:

• News apps, which frequently send broadcasts to their entire user base.
• eCommerce and retail apps, which often use broad segmentation based on factors like gender or country.

Our analysis revealed that a broad segment — “all women” — comprised 70% of one app’s user base. Despite its wide reach, messages sent to this segment achieved a 3x higher open rate compared to those broadcast to the entire audience.

Still, the difference wasn’t as significant as we had anticipated. So, we decided to dig deeper.

Narrow segmentation leads to a higher open rate compared to broader segmentation

We often hear from our customers that send-outs based on user interests yield higher open rates. With this in mind, we refined our hypothesis: “More precise user segmentation leads to higher open rates compared to broader segments (e.g., men/women, country/language).”

To test this, we first analyzed eCommerce apps. Messages sent to more narrowly defined, interest-based segments achieved a 10x higher open rate compared to broader segmentation.

We observed the same results when we repeated the experiment with apps from different categories.

Transportation apps:

News and media apps:

Here, we noticed varying levels of engagement between local and global media. The more localized and personalized the news, the higher its potential open rate.

When analyzing financial apps, we observed a drastically different approach to segmentation. In our previous research, we found that financial apps had the highest opt-in and open rates across all categories. Now, we could see why—every financial app we examined exclusively sent segmented messages.

We had gathered enough evidence to confirm our second hypothesis—this time with significant insights:

• Not all segmentation criteria yield the same results.
• The smaller the segment, the higher the potential open rate.
• Location- and interest-based segmentation drive higher open rates compared to other criteria.

However, we uncovered something unexpected. The same news, when framed differently—as a statement vs. a question—resulted in noticeably different open rates.

• News framed as a statement: 1.51% open rate
• News framed as a question: 2.07% open rate

Could it be that content, not just segmentation, plays a key role in driving push open rates?

Content without a clear call to action ruins open rates

We decided to analyze the relationship between content and segmentation criteria to identify any dependencies.

For our first experiment, we focused solely on retail apps.

The results were clear: generic announcements had lower open rates, while content tailored to user interests — such as updates from a user’s favorite store — achieved the highest open rates.

Could it be that content without a clear call to action lacked the motivation needed to drive clicks?

Across retail apps, we observed that messages with vague or ambiguous content had lower open rates compared to those with a clear call to action.

To validate our findings, we decided to reverse-test, comparing the performance of the same content when delivered to different segments.

We assumed that users who invested time in setting up their accounts — completing KYC, selecting their city, language, favorite team, etc. — would be more engaged over time.

For our third experiment, we focused on a category where users typically spend no time on account setup: Match-3 and puzzle games. The games we analyzed often sent similar or, at times, vague messages.

We found no clear correlation between segmentation, content, and open rates.

However, the experiment confirmed that users who invested time in setting up their accounts were more engaged. But this raised a new question: why did similar content perform so differently?

Our experiments didn’t yield meaningful results—until we shifted our focus from segmentation alone to analyzing the impact of days of the week.

Sending a push on the wrong day can drop the open rate by at least 2x

As B2B marketers, we typically prefer sending communications on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. For B2C, however, our initial hypothesis was:

“Users are more likely to open push notifications on weekends.”

We were wrong. Monday turned out to be the highest-performing day for mobile push opens. Our theory? In the first half of Monday, users tend to scroll more before fully diving into work.

The only exception was transportation apps, which saw the highest engagement on Sundays, likely due to increased travel.

On the other hand, Thursday was the worst-performing day for push notification opens across all categories we studied. Our guess? Wednesdays and Thursdays are typically the busiest workdays, leaving users with less time to engage with apps.

This experiment showed that the same message — such as one for a Match-3 game — could generate varying levels of engagement depending on the day it was sent.

Combining the right day with the right content can be just as effective as broad segmentation.

Personalization can drive better results than broader segmentation

We noticed that one retail app consistently achieved significantly higher open rates compared to other retail broadcasts.

What set this app apart?

Personalization. Some of its messages directly addressed users by their [first_name] — a small yet impactful detail.

Sometimes, personalization outperforms broad segmentation in driving better results.

Conclusion

Our hypothesis — “user segmentation alone leads to higher push open and click rates” — did not hold true.

Broader segmentation (e.g., by country or gender) can yield similar results to broadcasting the right content, with personalization, on the right day.

However, user interests and location (such as town or region) are the segmentation criteria that drive the most engagement. For even better results, segmentation should be reflected in the content itself—for example, Barcelona FC fans receiving updates about their favorite team. Many Pushwoosh customers have adopted this approach, starting with onboarding and notification opt-in.

As a side insight, our research suggests that email is a more effective channel than mobile push for apps and games, with an average open rate of 33% for email compared to just 0.3% for mobile push. We also observed this trend in a case from one of our fintech customers — but that’s a topic for our next study.