Our digital lives revolve around smartphones. We cannot imagine carrying on our day to day tasks without the help of these little devices. Hence marketing on smartphones is a massive opportunity that prudent marketers do not want to miss.
Having an excellent push notification strategy is an essential part of marketing on smartphones. Push notifications help marketers in communicating relevant and timely notifications regarding their app to the intended users.
Push notifications are those small messages that pop-up when a user is using an app. The significant benefit of push notifications is that users have already given their consent to receive these messages and hence are more receptive to the communication.
Importance of Push Notifications
3 out of 4 app users churn within the first three months of downloading the app. Push notifications can help marketers in ensuring that users use the app. Doing this makes sure that the churn rate is low, as only 1 in 6 users churns after using the app 11 times. Hence having a sufficient push notification’s strategy will help in improving the effectiveness of your mobile app.
Benefits of Push Notifications
Improve User Engagement
Push notifications help the brand in improving user engagement by sending personalized push notifications to the users.
Push notifications also help in re-engaging inactive users. You can send timely messages reminding them about the reason why they installed the app in the first place. Sending a few push notifications will remind the users that your app exists, thus increasing the chances that they will open the app.
Better Conversion Rates
With push notifications, you can improve your conversion rate by continually reminding the users about your app. Companies like La Redoute have solved their abandoned cart problem and improved their conversion rates by using push notifications.
According to research, the users are more welcoming of push notifications in 2017 as compared to two years earlier. This statistic makes it clear that engaging the users with your app is easy with push notifications.
Types of Push notifications
Before proceeding further, let us know in brief about the various types of push notifications.
Informative
Push notifications like reminders, updates, alerts and FYI messages can be classified as informative notifications. Update notifications inform the users about the latest updates and let them know how hard you are working to improve their experience.
Push notifications can also be used to send reminders which will help in reminding the users about useful things. For example, a daily to-do list app can send a reminder notification to the user to ensure that the user ticks off the items from the list at the end of the day.
Transactional
These type of push notifications let the users know about the transaction details, like a successful payment done through the app. Messages related to various sales and discounts can also be counted amongst transactional messages.
Re-engagement
Re-engagement notifications are used to re-engage the users with the app. These notifications have the sole purpose of reminding the user about the app’s existence. For example, an exercise app can remind you of the fact that you have not exercised for a while now by sending you a push notification.
Location-based
Geolocation based push notifications are the ones which an app sends the users, according to their location. For example, a date matching app sends notifications to nearby users based on their location.
Promotional
The promotional push notifications are used to alert the users about the various special offers and discounts that the app wants to convey to its users.
Steps for better push notifications
More than 37%churns people quit using an app that has launched around 2-5 push notifications in a week. Hence in order to gain the benefits of push notifications; you need to have a robust strategy in place.
Now that we have understood the benefits and types of push notifications, let us know the steps that you can take to improve the efficacy of your push notifications.
Personalize and Optimize Alerts
Personalized push notifications work best, everybody likes a company that has taken the pains to understand the needs of the user. Hence you should personalize the push notifications according to the needs of the user. For example, a user who has recently searched for a pair of jeans would be more comfortable viewing push notifications related to jeans instead of any other product!
Use Audience Segmentation using Analytics
You can use the latest big data analytics techniques to segment your audience on the base of various factors like gender, personal interests, location, and other information. This will help you in crafting the optimum strategy for push notifications, as you can now appeal to every niche audience segment according to their needs. Doing this will boost conversion.
Use Rich Media Push Messages
Instead of using bland text messages you will gain more eyeballs by using rich media push messages wherever possible. Rich push notifications contain images, audio, video and other interactive elements. You could also use emojis in push notifications to improve their reach.
Send push messages at the Correct Time
This is important; the timing of your messages can make or break your push notification strategy. Nobody likes to be reminded about that exciting offer in the middle of the night. You must evaluate what is the best time to send push notifications according to your audience. For example, if you are targeting working professionals then it would be a good idea to send your messages to your audience after they have reached home.
Do continuous A/B Testing
Continuous A/B testing is one of the most important aspects of a successful push notification strategy. You need to keep on testing different timings, designs, and content of your push notifications to find out the best combination.
Work on Content
The content of your push notification should be catchy, short and should include a clear call to action. You can also consider personalizing the message by adding the first name of the customer. Crafting such content will help you in expanding your reach.
Prioritize the Messages
A common problem that occurs is that marketers tend to send a lot of irrelevant messages. If the Users get overwhelmed with a lot of unrelated notifications they will uninstall the app. Instead you should prioritize your messages, send more push notifications that have relevant content and fewer push messages that have promotional offers.
Use Power Words
Using power words which evoke emotions add exclusivity, are personalized form of messaging. It adds value to the content can be used to increase the effectiveness of your push notifications.
Use Artificial Intelligence
Using AI you can design proactive systems that will notify the user every time something of the user’s interest comes up. The AI system can send push notifications by deciding the best message according to the user’s interest.
Utilize push notifications action buttons
Action buttons help the users in engaging with your brand by providing them with certain options. For example, when the wall street journal app sends push notifications to its users, it gives two options to the users. The users can either select to share the news or choose to save it to read later.
Push notification action buttons are used to encourage the user to purchase something or to help the users in selecting the messaging preferences.
Enable deep linking
Deep linking helps in bringing the user to the exact location where you want. Suppose you have a retail app and want your customers to know about the latest offer for a particular product, then sending a deep linked push notification would help you in bringing the customer directly to the sales page. Thus deep linking would help in increasing the chances of sales conversion.
Wrap up
Push-notifications can definitely boost user engagement levels with your app. By following the steps mentioned above, you can easily build a strong push notifications strategy. Moreover, you can mould your business strategies according to the trends in order to expand your business horizon.
