Mobile usage has witnessed an unforeseen growth in the last decade, pushing marketers to look for mobile-first channels to reach their audience. Push notification has become a primary channel for reaching app users with real-time updates. If used right, it can be an effective tool to grow your audience with minimal effort.
But the key aspect of using push notifications to accelerate the growth of your audience is sending the right messages at the right time. Mobile users are likely to receive 46 push notifications a day on average, which makes it crucial to send the right number of notifications without annoying them.
In this article, we’re discussing how to craft a push notification strategy that boosts engagement and grows your audience base.
Push Notifications are clickable pop-up messages that are sent as a medium of alerting users or sending information that they have opted-in for. Push notifications can be sent for apps and services. These work as a quick communication tool that enables companies to convey information, messages, or offers to the customers.
This relatively new digital marketing channel was introduced in 2009. Even after gaining significant momentum in the last few years, marketers are still figuring out the way to utilize the full potential of push notifications.
Nonetheless, the impact of push notifications is undeniable, which includes increase in engagement, user retention, and repeat visits.
A lot of the time, users install an app, use it for some days, and then forget about it. Push notifications act as a savior in this case.
All it needs to turn an inactive customer onto a regular one is the right use of personalized push notifications. Provide the latest offers, thoughtful reminders, or customized offers, and your users will surely appreciate it.
Monsy makes it even easier for you to boost your revenue through push notifications. You can expect increased traffic and an 85% revenue growth with its top-performing formats.
Push notifications trigger users to open the mobile app from which the notifications were sent. But make sure the notification content is relevant and has a clear call-to-action to drive the desired actions from the users.
For example, if you know about the preferences of your users, use that to set up offers or limited-time deals.
When a customer opts into your service, you get access to their information. This enables you to understand which product is suitable for whom, allowing you to customize the notifications to individual users.
For example, segmenting subscribers by grouping people based on similar tastes and other relevant parameters.
Conversion rates can be driven up by launching push campaigns that focus on a clear picture of what your goals are.
Understanding user behavior is another way of skyrocketing conversion rates. Sending concrete, concise, highly targeted, and personalized messages can help you effectively boost the conversion rates of your service. According to a study, push notifications generate 3-10 times more attention than usual.
Keep tabs on user behavior and use the insights to optimize your push notifications strategy.
Launch campaigns that leverage positive user behavior and find ways to stay connected with your users. Push notifications provide you a more efficient channel, with much higher click-through rates when compared to email campaigns.
To understand if you're performing well or not, check on your subscriber growth and click rate. Keeping tabs on your irregular and inactive users helps you to retarget them the next time you send push notifications.
Another way of boosting customer engagement is by planning out responses to emotional triggers of the users to send push notifications.
Share useful and relevant information through push messages to elicit a response from inactive customers. This will help you increase app visits and website traffic which will ultimately grow your audience.
Make sure to schedule push messages using the right time zone to keep your users’ phones from beeping at the wrong hour.
You can send notifications based on your subscribers' geographical location, which allows you to personalize your messages even better.
Understanding which notification should be sent at which time is crucial for user engagement. Not all notifications are equally important. The less urgent ones should be the least intrusive.
Another crucial factor for user engagement is push notification cadence. Don’t send them too often, nor wait too long. Waiting too long will result in your users forgetting who you are and feeling interrupted the next time you reach out to them.
For example, the New York Times mobile app sends the news notification when the news is actually breaking. If it were sent a few hours too late, their audience would likely have heard it from some other source.
Sending the same notification to every customer can bring about uncalled consequences. Segmentation and targeting allow you to send push messages catered to each user based on their needs. You can also send push notifications tailored to the users' devices as segmentation may differ from Android to iOS.
Experiment with different types of CTA messages to elicit a specific action from your users. Send your users push messages like “Buy Now”, or “Get a 20% discount only for today!”.
Experiment with multiple CTAs to see which one is the most effective for your customer base and the groups you want to reach. It can also be an amazing strategy for in-app messaging.
It is crucial for you to make the onboarding process flawless, as this is the first push notification your subscriber is going to receive.
Keep your new subscriber engaged to bring them back to your site. Identify the needs of your subscribers and craft a list of push messages for the onboarding campaign that has to be sent in regular intervals.
Cart abandonment is a common cause of headaches for every online business. Cart abandonment can occur due to various reasons, regardless of which you can craft a push notification campaign to reengage these users.
You can also automate the process by using cart abandonment as a trigger to launch and conduct the push notification campaign.
Among multiple touchpoints in your website, you need to prioritize the ones that drive the most actions. For instance, “Download E-book” is a strong touchpoint for a SaaS website that aims to trigger interest among its users about a specific field.
Another way of increasing engagement is to create trigger push notifications based on customer actions. For instance, product reviews are very important for e-commerce websites. You can easily create a product review trigger campaign to automatically trigger users whenever they buy a product, which reminds them to leave a review of the product after using it.
Price acts as a very strong motivating factor in purchase decisions. Shoppers often compare prices and wait to buy the product after the price falls, or during a sale. They even compare prices across different websites.
To attract the attention of price-sensitive customers, you can enable price drop alerts on your service using push notifications to alert them about any price change. Select the price drop level at which you want to send notifications and it will send it to the subscribers whenever the price drops to that level.
You should keep in mind that push notifications should grab your user's attention and should be non-intrusive at the same time.
These can be a blessing or a curse depending on however way you send them. If sent aggressively they can start unsubscribing the push alerts which will cause your audience base to shrink.
This is why it’s very important to strike the right balance between timing and frequency when it comes to push notifications.
While we talked bout push notifications as a way to drive back inactive users, they can also be used as a tool to improve user experience.
Push notifications can be used to give your users exactly what and when they want it even when they are not in the app. Consider the role push messages play in service-oriented apps like Lyft and Uber, and payment apps like PayPal and Venmo.
These brands provide users with real-time notifications like low account balances, estimated driver arrival, new payments, and unconfirmed transactions. As users won't check the apps every time for this information, notifications like these capture the users’ attention when it's important.
Identifying the purpose is the first step in creating a push notification campaign. You can only create a successful push notification campaign when you're clearly aware of your problems and goals.
Avoid users from leaving your app by keeping track of when they are doing so and create a strategy to keep them engaged. You can also compare your reach and engagement with other competing services or even create your own past records as benchmarks.
Add more personalization to make your post notifications more relevant to users. If it's done right, personalization can help you connect with your users on a deeper level while still not coming off as “salesy”.
Another useful tactic is to put your users in control. This will add more value for your users by making them feel better about it to providing them full control over the push notifications they receive.
According to a study by Localytics, users prefer to receive push notifications based on the interests they shared with the app as opposed to getting push messages based on their in-app behavior. You can also combine both to get the best results.
Pinterest executes this perfectly. It sends you notifications based on the interests you set within the app combined with your in-app behavior (saved pins).
Send prompts for push notification permissions the right way. If users don't allow your push notifications in the first place, none of your strategies will work.
This is especially important for IOS apps. Accengage found that 91.1% of Android users allow push notifications. Where the is number is 43.9% in the case of IOS users. The reason for this is, Android users have to manually opt-out of receiving push messages while IOS users have to manually opt-in.
Push notifications aren't always about advertising. You also need to build relationships and credibility with your audience. You can do so by providing updates about simple things such as transaction confirmation or updates on a wish list.
Send notifications instead of text messages or emails for instant alerts for time-sensitive messages, such as a flight change. As mobile platforms are more personal, users expect them to be more relevant and personalized.
Push notification can be the ideal channel for creating value for your customers, boost brand loyalty, grow your audience and drive more sales. The key is to send the right message, to the right audience, at the right time.
Personalizing your push notification strategy based on user data helps you do just that.
Even though we’ve provided you a guide on how to use push notifications to grow your audience, keep in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. You need to understand your users and keep experimenting to find the strategies that work best for you.
If you want to grow your revenue by capturing your audience easily and reaching them in multiple platforms effectively, Monsy is the perfect tool for you. Sign up today and start getting the results in no time!
