Push notifications are short messages that pop up on the users’ mobile phone or desktop to alert them about the factors they opted-in for. Marketers around the world are already putting it to its best use, and if you’re not, you’re falling way behind.

Push notification is a really powerful marketing channel as users are constantly reminded about your product or services through push messages. But you need to send the right type of push messages to make full use of its capabilities.

In this article, we’re going over the types of push notifications that will help you reach your audience effectively and engage them with your marketing communications.

Types Of Push Notifications To Effectively Engage Your Users

1. Geolocation Notifications

When the users enter or leave a location, an app can send them messages based on that. You can create virtual perimeters around some particular areas and send push notifications to the customers in those areas via geolocation push notifications.

Moreover, these types of notifications are extremely useful for sending date match notifications. These can range from finding nearby places to hotels and travel apps. This is a great way to engage with potential customers via a targeted campaign.

Some advantages of geolocation notifications include:

Insights

Using geolocation notifications allows you to access a lot of new data that is used to understand which stores are performing better. It also helps to understand which locations are more lucrative for expanding your business and which customer segment is more approachable.

Efficiency

Sending notifications based on users’ location can make for highly personal and relevant content. This improves the efficiency of push notifications immensely. This also increases the impact your communications create on your buyers immensely.

Engagement

The likelihood of customers engaging with your brand increases by many folds if you provide them with personalized and relevant information at the right time at the right place. This won’t fail drives up your engagement rate.

ROI

You can easily analyze the effectiveness of your campaign as well as understand its response. Geofencing technology allows you to send people offers near your store. This is one of the most effective ways to optimize marketing efforts for better ROI.

2. Promotional Notifications

Promotional push notifications can alert users about time-bound offers like giveaways, flash sales, and more. Hence, users are encouraged to make purchases.

For instance, if we consider the travel app Kayak allows users to set up their notifications themselves for exclusive deals on destinations and dates. This way when these dates or destinations align with the price range that they have set, users receive alerts.

The purpose of promotional notifications is that urges users to take the desired action. These notifications come in handy for a range of industries including fitness, shopping, entertainment, and more.

3. Informative Notifications

Informative push notifications can be found in the form of updates, reminders, FYI messages, alerts, and so on.

Reminder

As the name suggests, reminder notifications are the ones that send out reminders to users so that they don't miss out on the things that they have opted in for. These notifications are sent based on data from external sources and user input.

For example, suppose a user has a meeting at 10:30 am. In that case, an app will accumulate local traffic data to alert the user of the exact time he should leave the house to reach the meeting on time.

Update

Updating the users about the changes in the app and suggesting installing the new version of checking out the much-improved feature are the works of update notifications. These push notifications allow the users to understand that their experience in the app is constantly and continually improving.

Alerts

These are notifications that are used to alert users to something that is directly related to them. For example, in the case of social media apps, alerts notify users about:

• When someone has liked the user's photo.
• When someone has sent the user a message.
• When someone has commented on their post, and more.

These types of push notifications are perfect for job portals, travel or taxi apps, education apps, fitness apps., social and messaging apps.

For instance, a fitness app named 12-minute athlete lets users set a schedule for their weekly workout and have12-minute the app remind them when it's time to workout.

4. Catch up notifications

Catch-up notifications aim to re-engage and motivate users. For example, when a user reaches a goal in their workout routine, the app can congratulate them for the progress made. This also helps build trust with the user.

Catch-up notifications are perfect for e-commerce apps (marketplaces and online stores), fitness apps, music apps, and others.

5. Recurring Push Notifications

Only a specific time and date are selected to send recurring push notifications to users. Recurring push notifications can be sent monthly or weekly to highlight editorial picks. These push notifications are used for educational or book apps and e-commerce. For example, Musx and Sephora send weekly push notifications to alert their users.

6. Order Push Notifications

You can add value for your users via order push notifications. This is the type of push notification that allows the customers about learning their order's whereabouts.

They consist of information like order status updates, order confirmations, tracking information, and provide digital receipts. These are the best notifications for food delivery, e-commerce, and mobile apps.

7. Rating/Survey Push Notifications

This is an easy way to gather user feedback and improve customer service by analyzing the ratings or surveys. A survey shows that nearly 60% of respondents always or mostly check reviews or ratings before downloading an app.

These push notifications will also help you to improve your app by gathering reviews about what the future versions should look like. This will also increase the number of installs for your app.

8. Trivia Push Notifications

The purpose of trivia push notifications is to be funny and entertaining. These are interesting and relevant messages (filled with love) sent to the users. A great example of how to make trivia push notifications can be found in BuzzFeed news.

A lot of the time we can see news apps sending notifications that have similar or repeated headlines. But we all know the goal of push notifications is to be relevant and unique.

So, if you want to get your point across in a funny and lighthearted way, this is the one for you. It is pretty clear that there are thousands of push notifications that are only trying to promote products or companies. So, ones with a touch of humor would catch more attention.

9. Highly Personalized Notifications

If your notification is not about the world ending tomorrow, there are not a lot of alternatives that all of your users could relate to. So, the only that you could get the attention of your users is through personalized push notifications.

Collect enough data about your users' past searches and other pieces of information. This would allow you to tailor your notification to cater to your audience.

Your main goal is to send relevant notifications to your users. for example, Netflix shows their audience the perfect notifications to their users about new episodes of their favorite shows, upcoming movies they might like, and so on.

Sending irrelevant notifications might end up in your users unsubscribing from your notifications altogether.

10. Smart Selling Notifications

This is the type of notification that you send your customers when you don’t want to be too salesy. The audience eventually gets bored because of receiving too many sales messages. But you need to sell your products.

Smart selling notifications are framed in a way that makes them look like you are not trying to sell something, but doing a favor to your audience. This requires you to gather data to send hyper-personalized and timely alerts based on triggers.

But how do you craft smart selling notifications?

The first thing to do is making a list of all the trigger events that would lead someone to purchase your products. Here are some of the reasons:

• Extreme weather conditions: Stay the night at ___ city for the lowest price. Hotel options and links.
• Airport closure or delays: Stay an extra night at ___ hotel for the lowest price with the best discounts.
• Uber reminding users to request rides when the rates are the lowest.

11. Limited Time Sale Notification

Push notifications are the best option when reminding your users about a new offer that you have just launched. And when it is a limited-time offer, you want to inform your users about it as early as possible.

So, what better way to do it than sending a notification that is going to be front and center on their screen?

This way both you and your user get value. You receive value in terms of driving up sales and the user gets value from receiving relevant information. This also ensures that you’re not annoying your users rather doing them a favor by notifying them about the sale so they can be the first to grab it.

12. Inbox Push Notifications

Some apps and websites use an inbox to store their notifications. Such as there is an App Inbox for mobile notifications and a Web Push Inbox for web push notifications.

This feature allows the user to access all of their notifications when they click on the inbox icon of the app. The best part about inbox push notifications is that even if the notifications of your app are disabled on the users’ device, they can still check the inbox to find them. All the notifications are saved in the inbox until the app is opened.

Final Thoughts

Marketers are already using push notifications to engage their customers effectively via push notifications. App notifications are sent on mobile phones as long as the notifications are enabled. And in the case of web push notifications, it is stored in both computers and mobile phones.

These types of push notifications can be also received through wearables. This makes sure that users have access to them whenever they want. Choosing the right type of push notification makes it easier to engage your audience and get them to convert.

Get started with Monsy and see how you can engage your audience effectively using push notifications.