Event | Trigger Window | Example Copy |
Cart Abandon | ≤ 5 min | “Still thinking it over? Your 🥑 toast kit is one tap away.” |
Streak Risk | 60m before lapse | “Don’t break your 7-day language streak—5 words to go!” |
Paywall View > Exit | 2 min | “Missed the sale? 10% off still applies for the next hour.” |
Price Drop Watchlist | Instant | “Heads-up: The flights you saved just dipped 12% ✈️” |
Vertical | 90th%ile (Pushes / User / Month) | 50th%ile (Pushes / User / Month) | 10th%ile (Pushes / User / Month) |
Media | 293.6 | 85.1 | 7.9 |
Sports & Recreation | 177.4 | 15.9 | 3.2 |
Retail | 34.1 | 7.0 | 1.2 |
Food & Drink | 14.7 | 3.3 | 0.7 |
Finance & Insurance | 7.5 | 1.5 | 0.5 |
Metric | Danger Zone | Explainer |
7-day Opt-out Rate | > 0.5% indicates volume fatigue | If more than half of one percent of your iOS installs hit Disable notifications in a single week, you’re probably sending too many (or irrelevant) pushes. |
Session-after-Push | < 1 extra session per 10 pushes = noise | A push that doesn’t drive at least some incremental app use is just background noise. |
Long-press Rate (iOS) | Spike means users are triaging, not tapping | iOS users long-press to preview then swipe away. A sudden jump means they’re triaging (i.e., your copy/timing feels spammy). |
Vertical | Weekly opt-out Low / Med / High | Danger-zone trigger |
Media | 0.10% / 0.25% / 0.55% | > 0.55% |
Retail | 0.05% / 0.18% / 0.40% | > 0.40% |
Food & Drink | 0.04% / 0.12% / 0.30% | > 0.30% |
Finance | 0.03% / 0.10% / 0.25% | > 0.25% |
Health & Fitness | 0.05% / 0.15% / 0.35% | > 0.35% |
Under-used window | Why it works | Benchmarked boost |
05:00 – 07:00 | Few brands ping pre-coffee; users still thumb through alarms and weather. | Health & Fitness CTR spikes to 5.33% vs. 2.25% all-vertical mean. |
22:00 – 00:00 | “One last check” habit + near-zero push traffic. | Night-owl slots delivered the 2nd-highest CTR across verticals. |
Sunday | Only 10% of pushes land here; inbox fatigue at weekly low. | Brands shifting Friday 17:00 blasts to Sunday brunch saw 2× taps. |
Lunch-hour silos | Utilities, telcos peak 13:00-15:00 while Retail sleeps. | 4.57% CTR for B2C services vs. baseline ~2%. |
Moment | Timing | What to send | Why it works |
1 hour after install | T + 60 min | Welcome/tutorial + permission ask | Motivation is white-hot; Pushwoosh sees the highest activation inside this window. |
24 hours after last key action | T + 24 h | Friendly nudge or channel swap (SMS/email) | “Escalate or abandon” rule from Pushwoosh: a single, timely reminder beats drip spam. |
7 days of inactivity | T + 7 d | Win-back push (reward, new feature, FOMO) | Pushwoosh reactivation flows start at day 7; brands report 5–6% avg / 28% peak CTRs when timing + personalization align. |
Ingredient | Why you need it | Bare-bones tech stack |
Event pipeline | Real-time stream of push-send + push-open stamps | Kafka → Snowflake |
Feature store | Per-user vectors: time-zone, streak gaps, last-open hour | Feast, Redis |
Propensity model | Predict “next 60-min tap probability” | XGBoost / LightGBM (start), graduate to transformer |
Inference service | Returns send-time ∆ and confidence | FastAPI / AWS SageMaker endpoint |
Guardrails | Enforce user-set quiet hours, max X pushes/24 h | Rule engine + silent-hours table |
Observability | Log chosen send-time vs. taps; alert on drift | Grafana + Prometheus |
Vendor STO feature | Reported uplift | Notable perk |
OneSignal · Intelligent Delivery | +69% engagement over fixed schedules | Auto-clusters micro-segments of 10–100 users |
Braze · Intelligent Timing | Used by 37% of top performers (according to Braze) | Countdown timers + send-time in one UI |
MoEngage · Sherpa AI | 40% of marketers rank STO a top AI use-case | Built-in cross-channel coordination |
Pushwoosh STO toggle | Customers post 5.6% avg / 28% peak CTR | One-click “optimal hour” per user |
Question | Lean Buy if… | Lean Build if… |
Volume | < 10 M pushes/month | ≫ 10 M pushes/month |
DS firepower | 0–1 data scientists | Dedicated ML team |
Time-to-value | Need uplift in < 30 days | Can invest 3–6 months |
Custom logic | Standard B2C playbook | Niche triggers, regulated data |
Budget predictability | SaaS fee OK | Want to amortise infra cost |