Taking advantage of a push notification strategy is an effective way to reach users and provide them with immediate, actionable value. These often overlooked messages are both convenient for the recipient and highly valuable for brands. What’s not to love?
Whether you’re trying to drive engagement, drive sales, or push more total app installs – using push notifications in a personalized, respectful manner is a gateway to marketing success. As always, remembering not to overstep the boundaries of customer privacy and preference with this delivery method is important, as is including it as part of your larger multi-channel strategy.
Today, we’ll talk about everything you need to know about push notifications. Showing you how to optimize your push notifications, personalize them, and deliver them with your business goals in mind. The best e-commerce companies are coming along to lead by example, showing the way while we discuss in detail how to reach users – right in their front pocket.
1. What are Push Notifications?
A push notification is a message that pops up on the home screen of a mobile device. Users do not have to be in the app or using their device at the time of arrival. App publishers can send these notifications anytime.
Push notifications look like SMS text messages and mobile alerts, but they only reach users who have installed your app. Each platform – iOS, Android, Fire OS, Windows, and Blackberry – has its own services.
In order to receive the notifications, the user must have agreed to allow the app to send them notifications at the time of install. Otherwise, the user must go into their settings and establish their willingness to receive push notifications from the app.
2. Why are Push Notifications Important?
For app publishers, push notifications are a way to speak directly to a user or a segmented group of users. They do not get caught in spam filters or overlooked in an inbox.
According to research, click-through rates on push notifications can be 50% higher than on emails. A total 68% of customers have enabled push notifications for their apps.
What’s more, these messages promote a 92% higher mobile app retention rate. That’s because they remind users, in myriad ways, to use the app – whether the app is open or not.
Because of their direct and intimate arrival style, notifications can be used to drive real action:
Promoting products or offers to increase sales
Improving and informing customer experience
Increasing brand engagement
Converting unknown app users to known customers
Sending transactional receipts immediately
Driving users to other marketing channels, like social networks
3. How Do You Send Push Notifications?
First, push notifications can be targeted to segments of your user base and personalized for specific app users. This is a distinct advantage over SMS text messaging. That said, this requires the management of user identification data, as well as an interface for writing messages, targeting them, and sending them. We’ll cover these best practices soon.
Publishers can build these structures themselves or hire a vendor to perform these tasks. Such companies include:
Urban Airship
LeanPlum
Kahuna
Appboy
MixPanel
Most publishers focus on building a great app and leave the rest to the vendor. Platform providers perform additional services, such as:
Reporting
Scheduling
Mobile marketing automation
User attribute collection and segmentation
Data management
Security
Cross-platform support
4.Best Practices for Push Notifications
Push notifications are an intimate form of communication. After all, they arrive unscreened on your mobile device. The messages are attention-grabbing by nature, sliding into view no matter the circumstance. That said, notification messaging should be delivered like a light tap on the shoulder from a friend you’ve not seen for a while. It should be immediate, personal, and re-engaging – never intrusive or irrelevant.
Publishers are best served to remember that it’s a privilege, and not a right, to send users push notifications. That means publishers must also provide value. If they don’t, notifications get turned off and the app gets ignored. Worse yet, the app gets uninstalled. If you’re sending “urgent” or “time sensitive” messages that aren’t worth the time, watch out for the boot.
