Pushwoosh Study: Boosting Push Open Rates: Is Segmentation Always The Key? 6 Fresh Insights

What if we take the widely accepted belief that segmented push campaigns have higher open rates and test it through large-scale push notification research?

The Pushwoosh study shows that segmentation indeed plays a big role—but it’s not the only factor at play. Personalization and timing can rival segmentation in driving open rates. Let’s dive deeper.

Key Findings and Insights

Even Basic Segmentation Improves Engagement

The first thing we discovered is that segmentation doesn’t need to be complex to drive open rates. Even basic segmentation, such as by gender or location, can have a noticeable impact.

Gender-Based Segmentation

For example, e-commerce apps targeting female users with tailored offers saw a higher open rate compared to retail and news apps reaching their entire user base:

As you can see, the women segment’s open rate increased even despite its large size.

Location-Based Segmentation

For transportation apps, simply segmenting users by city was enough to drive push open rates compared to mass messaging:

The impact was even more noticeable for news and media apps.

Country-tailored content generated higher open rates than unsegmented messaging (even compared to the apps that are already local).

Town-specific content, meanwhile, achieved record-high open rates:

Takeaway: Simple segmentation can outperform mass broadcasts, making it an easy first step for apps looking to increase their open rates.

Preference-Based Segmentation Can Double Open Rates

Progressing from basic to more advanced segmentation, such as based on user preferences, may require extra effort in data collection. This involves tracking events like completing purchases, adding to favorites, or viewing pages—but the payoff is worth it.

Our study revealed that for transportation apps, push open rates doubled when users were segmented by service and increased fourfold when segmented by their favorite supermarket:

The Best Way To Segment Is By Combining Criteria

We saw that layering multiple segmentation criteria can significantly enhance engagement:

For e-commerce brands, adding a country+gender filter improved open rates compared to using just the country filter. 

In turn, combining country with interest-based targeting (PlayStation 5 buyers) led to a dramatic increase in open rates:

For financial apps, the impact was similarly strong. These apps used segments with both 2 and 3 criteria, and the combination of ‘active users’ paired with ‘the app version’ showed the best results:

Takeaway: Refining segmentation leads to better results than targeting based on a single condition. The more specific the audience, the higher the chances of driving engagement.

Segmentation + CTA = Greater Impact

We found that segmentation efforts are more effective when paired with a clear call-to-action (CTA), such as discount codes or sale invitations.

For example, for retail apps:

A standard announcement sent to all users resulted in the lowest open rate;

A discount code targeted at all users performed better but still didn’t hit the mark;

A discount code aimed at a language-specific audience showed an improvement;

A sale notification tailored to the user’s favorite store achieved the highest open rates:

Apparently, broadcast messages with vague CTAs perform poorly. In contrast, when push notifications are targeted and include clear offers, open rates increase.

Here’s another example, this time from gaming apps:

See how top brands craft high-performing push notifications:

Explore Pushwoosh’s 50 Best Examples

Timing and Open Rate Correlation Varies By Industries

Marketers often assume that weekends are the best time to reach mobile users, but our study reveals that’s not always the case. We also saw a few industry-specific trends.

News apps are the only ones with consistent push open rates, while other industries behave differently:

E-commerce & retail: lower-performing days are Tuesday to Thursday;

Finance apps: Thursday is the lowest-performing day;

Transportation apps: Sunday is the best-performing day;

Gaming apps: Monday and Sunday are top-performing days:

Takeaway: Timing is just as important as segmentation. Even the best push notifications may underperform if sent on a low-engagement day. Apps can take advantage of the best-performing days we’ve identified for each industry by scheduling their campaigns accordingly.

Personalization Can Match Segmentation In Driving Results

Beyond segmentation, we found that personalizing messages significantly boosted open rates.

Based on the user’s name

For example, retail push notifications that addressed users generically had a 2.68% open rate, while adding the user’s first name nearly doubled it:

Based on language

For financial apps, tailoring messages to users’ preferred language led to better results than ​​sending them in English to all users:

Takeaway: Personalization can be as effective as segmentation. In both cases, collecting user data is essential. Apps should consider setting up a customer data platform (CDP), either an in-house solution or a third-party platform.

Collect and unify data—you’ll always find ways to put it to work. Today, it powers segmentation; tomorrow, personalization. Beyond that, it fuels experimentation, in-depth campaign analysis, and seamless integrations to enhance your toolkit. Pushwoosh centralizes all your user data in one platform, enabling truly intelligent communication strategies and impactful results.

Max Konev
CEO & Founder @ Pushwoosh

Conclusions

While segmentation does improve engagement, several other factors play an equally crucial role:

Location-targeted content delivers stronger results, particularly for news apps.

A clear CTA matters: messages focused on a targeted action combined with smart segmentation create a winning formula.

Timing is critical: different industries see better performance on different days.

Personalization can be as effective as segmentation.

One additional takeaway? Our research suggests that email remains a more effective channel for mobile apps, with an average open rate of 33% compared to 0.3% for push notifications. We also observed this trend in a case from our fintech customer—but that’s a topic for our next study.

Thinking about using smarter segmentation and choosing the right channels for your communication campaigns to boost user engagement?

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Originally Published on Martech Zone: Pushwoosh Study: Boosting Push Open Rates: Is Segmentation Always The Key? 6 Fresh Insights