Mobile marketing seems like an uphill battle against continuously rising competition in an already cluttered app market, fluctuating brand loyalty, and diminishing returns on investment for most marketers.
Set in the backdrop, push notifications constitute a major weapon in your user engagement arsenal. While this channel may have constituted to serve you well, there can be situations where unknown limitations let you down.
So, where are you going wrong? What is it that you still haven’t paid attention to?
This is the year for you to rectify it all—when talking about push notifications. Let’s make it right.
Push notifications—Nifty or Nuisance?
Though a contested issue, push notifications certainly are a great way for marketers to remind users about their brand. However, there are users who have been comparing them to ‘nightmares’ that don’t leave you alone, killing productivity and needlessly hindering user experience.
The world of user experience is pretty complicated and highly subjective. One person’s delight can turn out to be another person’s nightmare. This leads us to go on and finally decide what push notifications mean for your business.
Let’s analyze…
Studies claim that push notifications boost an app engagement by 88%.
Also, the same study goes on to prove that 65% of the users tend to return to an app within 30 days of the push being enabled. Further 48% of the mobile users involved made an in-store purchase after receiving a push notification triggered by profile data.
Impressive enough? There’s more.
By sending just one on-boarding-related push message to newly converted users during the first week post app installation you can increase retention by 71% over two months.
Therefore, we can easily conclude that push notifications are not completely a waste for marketers and not necessarily a nuisance to customers. So, why the discrepancy? Then what is it that is bringing your marketing strategy down?
Let’s check exactly that in this post.
Are you aware of the different types of Push Notifications?
Push Notifications are not all the same. Different kind offers different purpose, depending on what is it that you want to notify users about. Are you using them all, accordingly? Check it out before moving further.
- Alerts: These are the notifications that appear on the screen and require action from the user. This action can be to open or to dismiss them.
- Banners: These are the ones that appear momentarily on the screen and disappear in some seconds, soon after.
- Badges: These are the small red circles that you see floating in the corner of the app’s icon.
- Sounds: This one accompanies the different notification types.
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Some Common Mistakes you might be committing
In this section, we need you to understand and go through the most popular and widespread mistakes marketers tend to make when creating and managing push notifications in the last couple of years. It is imperative to stay in touch with the crucial and updated literature in order to maintain a high level and staying informed. Check out these mistakes worth your attention and see if you are committing any.
- Too many notifications: Quantity and quality are never to be confused. Are you sending too many notifications that are only bugging your clients to no end? SmartInsights recommends sending not more than one push notification per day and not more than five times a week, post analyzing users’ actions and responses.
- Ignoring time zones: Are you by any chance sending your customers notifications at 5 in the morning? Why do you think the user would not want to opt-out from your notifications altogether? It is vital to take into account what time zones your different subscribers are at.
- No Personalization at all: Personalized messages have in the past and will in the future remain effective. Have you personalized your push notifications today? Personalization always gets more attention, thus resulting in more view and clicks, consequently bringing you with chances to convert leads.
- Bad Targeting: Want to hit the target? You need to define them first. By keeping up with the multiple user information reach different groups of customers by segmenting them effectively. Make successful notifications based on previous actions, purchases, location etc. in mind.
- No Optimization or Testing: Feedback analysis, A/B testing, visits and clicks statistics are highly powerful tools to be constantly used. Without being able to properly evaluate and optimize, without using new approaches, content, and appearance will become out to be boring and ineffective eventually.
How Can you Improve Your Push Notification Performance This Year
Now, since you’ve gone through what could be wrong with the notifications you are already sending, let’s take a look at some hacks that will surely help improve your push notifications performance. A strategic marketing strategy for your push notifications can yield amazing results when implemented in the right manner.
1. MAKE OPT-IN AND OPT-OUT EASY
As you must be aware that push notifications are strictly permission-based medium. And an opt-in act as the first touch-point with a new visitor. Therefore, these notifications also require to ensure that it opting-out of it is as easier. By doing this you make the subscriber feel empowered by having a choice of receiving or avoiding messages from your brand. This further enables you to be able to target only the interested prospects.
You should experiment with the timing of your opt-in message. A/B test to see what works best for you.
2. CRAFT COMPELLING MESSAGES
How you craft your message and how they are communicated to your customers is very important. This is precisely why your push notification title and message need to be eye-catching, effective and unique. You need to come up with catchy titles and keep the content fresh, understandable and crisp. Keep in mind that users may be involved and busy with different kinds of activities when they take a look at your notification as it momentarily flashes on the screen. Therefore, use short and concise content to make it easy to connect.
Power words and effective CTA will lure users to take actions you desire them to.
3. THE RIGHT TYPE OF NOTIFICATION
As discussed above, there are several different types of notifications. You can send a notif that is informative, time-bound or simply a quick reminder. With the help of A/B testing find out which type works best for your business and also engages your audience the most. Choosing the right type that best suits your business and customer needs is important because the impact of a message that is specific to what a particular user prefers comes with very many perks. Bring into consideration your products and services you have to offer and make sure your notifications depict the right emotions needed for each. Your notifications should adhere to the nature of your content.
Keep the time-zones and how seldom you are sending the notification in mind.
4. PERSONALIZE AND SEGMENT
The same message broadcasted to all subscribers alike certainly results in low engagement; marketers in the past have witnessed its failure. Sending push notifications to your customers selectively has worked wonders. Did you know that by personalizing a notification one get achieve three times higher conversion rate than by not doing so? By creating personalized push notification messages using segmentation will help the user connect with your brand more easily further resulting in them taking actions. To be truly valuable you need to personalize each aspect of your notification. You should first segment the users based on different parameters. The three factors you can absolutely not ignore are behavior, geography, and preferences. Take them all into consideration in order to send deeply personalized messages that your customers look forward to receiving. Make users feel special.
Identify more parameters that would help you segment customers better and send specific push notifications to the right segment.
5. TRACK THE RIGHT KPIs
Your push notification KPIs need to be in sync with your marketing goals. You must always stay in touch with how your strategies have worked out and the value a particular campaign adds to your brand goal in the longer run. Analyze the right metrics and figure out how your notifications campaigns are performing. You need to be measuring the right numbers in order to quantify the performance of the campaigns. The click-rate provides you with deeper insights on audience engagement and what’s working for your brand and what isn’t. You also need to keep a closer watch at your subscriber count which will further enable you to have valuable insights on what made someone subscribe to your website. By staying in constant touch with the Delivery Rate you’ll know how many subscribers received your notifications.
You also can include engagement, turnover, and customer retention as your KPIs and test them out.
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Push Notifications as the Essential Marketing Tool
To sum it all up we can come to this conclusion that push notifications have indeed become one of the most effective and thus widely used marketing tools because of the quick and effective impact, personalized approaches, and valuable offers.
So, the best kind of push notification is the one that takes into account a user’s preference and adapts accordingly.
Any notification that deviates from what a user needs and wants to see will result in creating a disinterest among them leading to frustration and complete brand abandonment.
Strike a balance between the right kind of content sent at the right time to the right person for your brand.
Have more ideas on how to improve the performance of push notifications? Get in touch with Us!
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