According to a July 2014 study by the marketing and analytics company Localytics, however, some app categories fared far better than others here. Ecommerce exceeded all the others with a 278% increase in launches among users with push notifications enabled vs. disabled. Localytics noted that personalized and targeted messages from ecommerce apps, such as reduced prices on items of interest, could drive engagement and interaction.

The analysis, which looked at activity on the Localytics platform, found that music also fared well, with 177% higher engagement among push message users, and travel as well as food and drink both joined the over 100% club, too.

Push notifications also improved app retention. Users who had enabled push messages were between two and three times more likely to launch the app over the four months post-download. And compared with Localytics’ figure of one in five apps being used just once, this study found much lower abandonment rates after one-time use among push users: 11%. Meanwhile, more than half of push-enabled users (53%) accessed an app 11 times or more after download, vs. 38% of non-users.