If you are already using push notifications or just thinking about doing so then this guide is for you!
Read on to refresh yourself on the value of push for your business goals and objectives, get inspired by engaging and new ways to make use of push and learn about industry best practices.
✨ How Can Push Notifications Support Your Business Goals?
Our mobiles are a non-negotiable essential for leaving the house and never far from our reach, so push notifications allow you to meet your customers where they are, in real-time. By conversing with your customers through their mobile devices you are building a more complete and interactive customer experience.
Increase engagement
Use short, personalised messages to quickly catch a customer’s eye and remind them to engage with your application or website and when combined with deep links, you can lead them directly to a specific page in your app without friction or interruption.
Drive customer retention
Build brand loyalty by providing your customers with timely and thoughtful updates. In a world that is full of distraction and digital chatter, cut through the noise and stay at the forefront of your customers’ mind by sharing bite-size bytes of wisdom, humor and personality.
Empower your customers
Help your customers reach their goals and objectives with your product by being the helpful daily nudge they need to perform that work out, move that money to their savings account or take advantage of your flash sale.
💡 Get aligned: Before you launch any push campaigns, make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and how it fits with your broader marketing objectives. Your push notifications should be consistent with your brand voice, value proposition, and customer segments. Use the same tone, style, and call to action that you use across all channels
🔍 The Anatomy of a Powerful Push Notification
Get to know your customers rituals and routines
Push notifications that are aligned with your customer’s daily routines ensures you can always send timely and relevant messages. By tracking their behavioral patterns in your mobile application you can identify the right triggers for your campaigns to ensure you are by your customer’s send throughout the day.
With great power comes great responsibility
Your chosen frequency of sending will depend on the purpose of your pushes and nature of your business so there are few generalisable rules, but remember that the power and intimacy with your customer that push notifications offers cuts both ways, so be mindful to set clear intentions when deciding when, why and how often you are sending your customers push notifications.
It’s all about timing
A powerful push arrives in your customer’s hands exactly when they’re ready to see it. Industry data shows there is little variation in peak opening times, so the important thing is to get familiar with your customer and get clear on the purpose of your messages and when they are going to need to hear from you. Reports suggest that broadly, customers are more engaged with their mobiles at lunchtime and again late in the evening when we would expect users to be winding down for bedtime.
Keep it short and sweet
“Never send a long push notification when a short one will do” - George Orwell . Well, maybe that’s not quite how Orwell put it, but industry data indicates that in order to have the best chance at engaging your users, your push notifications should contain ten or fewer words.
A picture is really worth 1000 words
The use of emojis is proven to boost open rates and adding rich media elements such as images, gifs, and video into your messages has been shown to increase that even further so, why not start A/B testing messages with richer content and those without to learn how to further optimize your push notifications.
Go personalized or go home
Personalization is the ultimate secret to unlocking the power of push as you can make your customers feel truly seen and appreciated. You can build your push messages to contain personal details such as their name, the last product they ordered, the last workout they completed, a reminder of the personal fitness goals they set or the days left until their subscription renews. The opportunities here are endless and using relevant personalization has the power to directly improve conversions.
Are you finding success in sending push notifications? Share your insights below.
