How to design notification segments without annoying users

The fastest way to kill a push channel is to over-send. Every irrelevant notification trains users to disable them. Good segmentation is mostly about restraint.

Start with frequency caps

Before any clever targeting, set a hard ceiling: e.g. max 1/day and 3/week per subscriber. A cap protects you from your own future campaigns and from buggy automations.

Respect quiet hours

Never deliver at 3 AM local time. Use the subscriber's timezone to suppress sends during a quiet window. A push that wakes someone up gets the app deleted.

Segment on behavior, not demographics

• Recency: active in the last 7 days vs dormant.
• Intent signals: viewed a product, abandoned a cart, started but didn't finish.
• Declared preferences: topics the user explicitly subscribed to.

Make the segment do the filtering

Tag subscribers at registration with whatever you know (plan, interests, locale) and build reusable segments from those tags. Then every campaign targets a segment, not "everyone".

Measure unsubscribes per campaign

Click-through rate tells you what worked; unsubscribe rate tells you what's burning the list. Watch both. A campaign with great CTR and a spike in opt-outs is still a loss.

OpenPushAPI gives you tag-based segments, per-subscriber frequency caps, and timezone-aware quiet hours out of the box.