With every $1 spent generating an ROI of $38, email has reigned as the ultimate growth hack for marketers for over a decade. However, the past few years have seen browser push notifications gain a lot of popularity. And, not without reason!
Boosting app engagement by 88%, as reported by Localytics, notifications have become a highly valuable channel for driving sales and engagement. Moreover, web or browser push notifications capture a user’s attention at their first interaction point with the web – the browser. Half the job is done right here. What remains is to run your browser push notification campaigns with a full understanding of the lifestyle stage your user is in, and convert them quicker.
Let’s see how with browser push notifications you can bring in more conversions from users at each lifecycle stage – Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action, and Retention.
Bringing In Conversions at the Awareness Stage
A new user visits your website and you have no previous data to promote relevant offers or content that might catch the user’s attention. What do you do to ensure that the user ends up making the first purchase from you? Or in case you are a SaaS business, at least drops in an email address before leaving?
Advice for SaaS
At this stage in their purchase journey, your users are looking for the answers to a problem that they are already aware of. For example, they might already know that their landing pages are not optimized. What they want is help on why is it so and how it can be solved. Here’s where you should be stepping in to help.
- Offer Content that Informs and Helps: The chances that users in their awareness stage might sign-up for your product/service is quite low. However, if they find your content useful they might just slowly journey towards signing-up.
Use browser push notifications to impress them with valuable content – eBooks, how-to articles, and actionable tips. For example – Users often find industry jargon to be confusing. Start by educating them about what all this jargon means. Show them a notification saying, “Can’t make any sense out of the jargon?’ Read the simplified version here.
Advice for eCommerce
A person with sensitive skin visits your website looking for herbal cosmetics. How can you support the search experience and make sure that this first time visitor ends up making a purchase? The following use cases might just help engage them better, and convert quicker:
- Welcome Coupons for Opting-in – You need to get your first time user to opt-in for notifications on your website. Only then it will be possible for you to win future engagement and sales from those users. Incentivizing is an effective way of getting someone to opt-in for your browser push notifications. Once a user has opted-in, send out a notification with a discount coupon code that can be used on checkout.
- Involve Your Users in Finding the Right Products for Them – Let’s consider the same example where a person with sensitive skin visits to your website. This user will either land on the home page or directly on the category of herbal products for sensitive skin.
Based on the categories and products the user has browsed, push personalized web notifications about products that are trending or most purchased in that particular category.
Advice for Travel
A first time visitor might need something more than a discount to make a booking from you. The user might need to be confident enough about the services that you provide as a travel business. Here’s how you can leverage your users’ trust:
- Win Some Trust First – 50 other people checked out the same room that you showed interest in booking. Book it before it’s gone!
Numbers do the talking when it comes to instilling trust in users. While discounts and offers do the trick for most users, there are people who won’t make a purchase unless they are sure that they are buying or booking the best deal. Give them some social proof and assure them that they are choosing the best.
Ensuring Conversions at the Interest Stage
After awareness, the next phase that users enter is the research or interest stage. Given that consumers are spoilt for choice and competition can easily lure them into better deals, your challenge at this stage is to keep their interest in your offering alive.
Your advantage is that you have important information and data about these users and their behavior, which you can leverage to capture interest and create intent. With the following interest-stage browser notification campaigns, know how exactly you can do this.
Advice for SaaS
Consider that a user who has some interest in using your product signs up for a free trial. How do you get the visitor to actually becoming a client?
- Links to Webinars and Case Studies: At this stage, when the user has shown some intent in using your product, you need to convince him to become a paid client. You need to tell the user what makes your product better than the rest. Keep your users hooked with what you have to offer over and above the competition by sending them links to case studies and webinars.
- Guide Users with Product Specific Content: Your users are still trying to figure out how to use your product and understand what all it can help them achieve. Send them content such as “Here’s how you can build you first landing page using XYZ”. Or, send them links to your product video and walkthrough guides.
Advice for eCommerce
Thousands of users visiting your website but all they do is browse and leave? You know that a visitor who has visited you more than a certain number of times, might just be close to making a purchase. How do you get him from ‘interested’ to ‘definitely buying’?
- Inform about Fresh Items in Stock – One of the reason why a user might be browsing your website every then and now and leaving without buying could be that there isn’t anything new. With web notifications you can inform your users about new arrivals and interest them into buying.
- Promote Time Sensitive Offers – A sense of urgency can get your users from browsing to actually purchasing. This mostly works with items that can be purchased on impulse. Personalize your time sensitive offers based on purchase behavior that the user has exhibited. For example, if someone views certain earrings on your website thrice but does not buy, send out a browser push notification offering time sensitive discount on the purchase.
Advice for Travel
Want to get your users really interested in the travel packages that you are offering? Make their purchase experience special. Break-away from offering off season discounts. Offer them cheaper deals on the right destination.
- Promote Seasonal Offers: There is a place for every season. As an online travel business you should suggest your users the best destinations for each season and help them make the most of their vacation. Offer a summer discount on a booking for Miami. Your users will simply love the discount that you are offering. You could ask them to pre-book for the package and not worry about competition stealing the deal away. The faster you are able to get them to book, the better it is.
Kayak would be the right example to quote here. This travel site allows users to set their own notification options. Users can pick a destination, their prefered date and more. Based on these options, they are notified by Kayak whenever prices drop on the user’s specified criteria.
Driving Conversions at the Desire Stage
A user at this stage is more than interested in buying something from you. This is where they have done their research on what they want and landed on your site to look for exactly that product or service. At this stage, you need to ensure that you don’t lose your users to competition.
Advice for SaaS
Often in SaaS, the interest and desire stage are clubbed together as ‘consideration’. However, there is still a thin line that can differentiate between these two types of users. For example, a user in the ‘desire stage’ might often drop-in pricing enquiries. Someone who takes your free-trial, and thereafter, reaches out to you with product user queries might be genuinely interesting in buying. He might be delaying signing-up probably because he is also considering a few other similar products and will settle for nothing but the best. Here’s how you can win conversions at this stage using push notifications:
- Price and Feature Comparisons: Have a user who has rated your app 7 or higher on a scale of 10? These users are most likely to buy given that you can convince them with your pricing and feature comparisons. Trigger your notification when such users are browsing through your pricing or product pages.
Advice for eCommerce
There are a number of eCommerce specific use cases that can be talked about here. Following are a few:
- Leverage Search to Send Reminders: Consider what will happen if a user is unable to find what he was looking for on your site’s search? The user will ditch you for competition. With browser push notifications you can bring him back to your website in no time.Your notification: “ Hey there, We believe you were looking for ASOS plus size skirts. We have them. Check here”.
- Offer Deals and Discounts on Specifically Searched Items: Jack visits the ‘headphone’ category on your website. He returns another day to browse the same category, and leaves again. Two days down the line, he visits again to check out the headphone category.
You clearly know what your user has a very high-intent to buy. Converting him should be easy with web browser notifications that offer a 20% discount on headphones. - Price Drop Alerts on Items Added to Wishlist: Items that a user adds to their wishlist are the ones that the user really wants to own. It might just be that the user considers the wishlisted items to be splurges. That is why those items are in the wishlist and not in the cart – for a future purchase.
How do you make sure that those items in your user’s wish list end up getting purchased? Notify users about special discounts on items worth a certain price in their wishlist and get them to buy now what they have planned to buy for the future.
Advice for Travel
Having looked at SaaS and eCommerce use cases, let us also talk about how the online travel industry can use browser push notifications to convert users at this stage.
- Offer Discounts on Customized Packages – Give your users a little more than ‘generic’ deals. Show them discounts on a package that they customize for their vacation and make their day! Your notification could say, ‘Plan your vacay with us and get a 20% off on your hotel bookings’.
Cracking Conversions at the Action Stage
This is the closest stage to ‘checkout’ for eCommerce, ‘subscriptions’ for newsletter, and ‘bookings’ for a travel business. Web browser notifications play an important role in ensuring that a visitor who is so close to performing the purchase action, does not leave at this conversion point.
Advice for SaaS
At this stage, your users have already signed-up for the free trial. However, you need to get them to using a paid plan. Here’s what you can do:
- Clear Doubts on Pricing: Send them the link to all your pricing plans. Help your users pick the right paid plan for them by educating them on the pricing. A link to pricing FAQ page would prove very helpful for your users who are seriously considering signing-up for a paid plan.
- Extended Trial and Discounts: Target those users who are close to completing their free-trial. Get them to sign-up for a paid plan by offering an extending trial period. Your notification could say – Sign-up now and get an extended trial 15 day trial period. Use coupon code XNY009. If you want to increase paid sign-ups on a certain plan, say bundle plan, you can run a discount on it for a specific segment of users.
Advice for eCommerce
When your users are at the action or purchase stage, they can be further motivated to either convert quicker or to purchase more. Note that you can always win more sales and relevant ones with personalisation. Here’s how you can use browser push notifications for achieving your conversion goals at this stage:
- Use Price Drop Alerts on Items in Cart : Users on the move often add items to their cart from mobile but will only buy later from desktops. A visitor also often adds items to cart on seeing an item of interest quickly going out of stock. Post adding these items to cart, the user goes dormant. How do you get this user to re-engage with the cart and view items that he just added and forgot about later on? Price drop alerts and time-sensitive offers work well in increasing conversions on abandoned carts.
- Leverage Free Shipping to Increase AOV: Have an enthusiastic buyer with a cart loaded with purchases? You could make that user buy just a bit more. Offer a free shipping on a certain value of purchase and you have a fair chance at increasing the AOV from a visitor who is currently adding items to cart.
Advice for Travel
A little more at a little less price is a tactic that you must never take for granted. Here’s how as an onsite travel business you can use this trick to your advantage, and to keep your visitors happy too!
- Cross Sell: Have a visitor on your travel website booking flight tickets? Push a notification on discounts you are offering on hotel bookings for that destination. Help your user plan the trip better and conveniently. Send a list with all discounted options to pick from.
Keeping Conversions Going Even After Purchase
Purchase should not be the point where you unplug your relationship with your user. Retention is what every business is trying to win at. Given that the cost of acquiring a user is rapidly increasing as compared to the cost of retaining one, your long-term success depends on how well you are able to keep your existing users engaged and loyal to your offerings.
Advice for SaaS
There are a lot of ways in which SaaS businesses can use browser push notifications to keep engaged with their customers in a meaningful manner. Here are a few examples:
- Send Out Billing Reminders: Send out payment alerts and keep users informed. Save them the hassle of scouting through emails for these reminders. An alert will help them recall instantly and pay immediately.
- Notify About New Product Features: Have loyal users who have been using your product for more than a year now? Keep them well-informed about ‘what’s new’ and maybe they’d want to try it or sign-up.
- Show Actual Results on Campaigns Run: Make your product a bit user-friendly and keep users engaged. Save your users some time and effort by showing them their campaign results on push notifications, instead of them having them to log into the dashboard.
Advice for eCommerce
Once a user has made a purchase from you, the scope for bagging more sales from him increases. The following are some examples that you can go through on how exactly can you win more conversions and engagement post the purchase stage:
- Keep Users Notified About their Order Status: As an eCommerce business with the end goal of keeping your users happy, make sure that their post-purchase experience too is smooth and hassle free. Keep them informed about the status of their order at every stage with real-time push notifications.
- Push Recommendations: Once a user has completed a purchase, you have enough information about that user to help you suggest recommended products. Personalizing should be easy at this point. Use personalized web push notifications to push recommendations based on your user’s past purchase behavior. For example, if a user adds succulents from the home decor category to the cart, you could recommend other indoor plant varieties at a discount.
- Honour Loyalty: Repeat and loyal visitors should be the ones you should focus on retaining. Reward their loyalty with special discounts. Offer a discount on their favorite brand, just for them! To those who have spread a positive word for you with their reviews, send out a coupon code. Don’t forget to show the gratitude. Thank them in your message.
Advice for Travel
Journey with your users even after you have helped them plan their stay and guided them through their booking. Aim at making their next experience even better. Here’s how:
- Ask for Feedback: From inspiration to planning to booking – online travel industry needs to handhold users and provide them the best possible experience. And, to improve their users’ experience they need feedback. To all those who have made their bookings from your website, drop in notifications asking for their feedback. Your notification could say, “Hope you had a smooth flying experience. Leave us your feedback”
- Send Weather Reminders: Simple reminders like – Hey, You Might Need to Pack Some More Warm Clothes. Weather dipping in Amsterdam – are a thoughtful way to keep users informed. They add to the user’s satisfaction and happiness quotient.
To Wrap Up
Browser push notifications are far more effective than any other channel of communication because of one fact – they grab attention immediately. Planned and executed intelligently, browser push notifications can help you increase engagement and conversions at each stage of the customer’s purchase cycle.
We hope our examples helped you understand how using notifications can make your customer lifecycle even more efficient, and high converting. Have anything to add to the list? Just drop a comment and we’ll get back soon.
