What is the best time to send push notifications?

Timing your push notifications wisely can drive more traffic and boost engagement.

The key to communicating effectively with your users is to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time.

When is the right time? Here are some hints:

1. Beat the Rush: Send Notifications Before or After Peak Hours

Our clients have been sending push thanks to Batch for years now. We analyzed their habits and discovered that they mainly send push notifications at three specific moments of the day:

• Early morning, from 7 AM to 9 AM

• Mid-day, during the lunch break from 12 PM to 2 PM

• Early evening, from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

Knowing that, do not hesitate to send your push notifications a little earlier than most other apps. For instance, you can schedule your push notification at 11:55 AM to make sure your users receive it before they receive alerts from other apps at noon sharp. Or you can also decide to send your notification at 12:02 AM instead of noon sharp ti stay on top of the notification pile.

2. Make sure you pick the right scheduling mode

There are two main ways to schedule orchestrations in Batch:

A. Campaign or Recurring Automation

You can pick between two options when scheduling a simple or recurring push campaign:

• Profile's local time: This option lets you send a push notification that will be received based on the user's timezone, at the same hour in every country. This ensures that marketing efforts target your users at a uniform time.

• Universal time (UTC): This option allows you to send a push notification to your users at a specific UTC regardless of their location. Every user will receive the message at the same time.

Profile's local time vs Universal time (UTC)

B. Trigger Automation

You can try out different sending times in our Automation Builder thanks to the Random split feature:

• Click the "+" sign to add a random split and up to 4 variants (you can choose the ratio between them).

Adding up to 4 branches via the random split.

• Select your preferred delay for each option by clicking the "+" sign and adding a Delay. You can set it for a specific duration or wait for a certain time.

Adding different delays to your branches.

You can check the result of each variant in the Analytics tab of your automation:

Checking the branches KPIs.

3. Send your notifications when users are most likely to engage with your app/website

Go to Analytics > Push > More > iOS / Android / Web and set the dates for 3 days maximum. This way, you will be able to see the analytics, hour by hour. The "Starts" chart (blue) shows when your app is most opened by your users (in UTC):

Audience analytics per hour.

Check your app's peak hours—these are the times when users naturally engage the most. This indicates they are available and more likely to open your notifications during that period.

You can find the same information in your dedicated analytics tool (e.g. Firebase Analytics, AT Internet, etc).

4. Check the influenced opens

This feature is specific to Batch's Mobile Engagement Platform (More on the difference between Batch's CEP and MEP).

If you notice more influenced opens than direct opens, it may indicate that your push campaign was sent too early. Instead of opening the notification immediately, users opened your app within three hours after receiving it.

To check the ratio of direct to influenced opens, visit the campaign's analytics section:

If you are not seeing any direct opens in your campaigns, we recommend checking out our guide on why your direct opens may be stuck at 0 — it could be due to an integration issue.

5. Match the send time with the audience and the content

General timing strategies are useful, but always adapt them to your audience and the type of content you're sending.

• Media apps: Perform best with early weekday morning pushes.

• Fashion, lifestyle, and entertainment apps: See higher engagement in the late afternoon or on weekends.

Final Tip: Test, measure, and optimize. Use your data to refine your approach continuously — the "perfect time" to send a push notification will depend on your unique audience and goals.