Push notifications are one of the most effective ways to engage and re-engage consumers on your website, mobile app, and retail channels. They are less intrusive and more contextual when crafted properly. As per Localytics, more people are opting in for app push notifications. The open rate on push notifications is also much higher than the marketing emails, with marketing emails often landed in the spam folder.
What is a push notification?
Push notifications are small messages that are sent by an app or a website server to the users who have explicitly granted them that privilege. Most of the apps ask for user permission during the app installation, while the websites ask for permission to show the notifications when users visit the site.
On mobile devices, the opt-in rate is higher for Android users than iOS’s. Overall, push notifications increase app engagement by up to 88%. Around 65% of users return to an app within 30 days if push notifications are enabled. The average opt-in rate for desktop notifications is somewhere between 7-10%.
Push notifications are powerful mechanisms to raise user retention and re-engagement.
Top 5 Push Notification Strategies
Effective push notifications require a proper strategy. Too many notifications will frustrate the users, while too few means a lost opportunity for user-engagement. Both scenarios would result in app uninstall and loss of business. On top of that, if users receive irrelevant notifications, they will lose interest and opt-out from further push notifications.
Following are the top 5 push notification strategies that are helpful in achieving business goals.
1. Easy opt-in and opt-out
Opt-in and out of push notifications should be simple. The opt-in messages should be clear, telling users exactly what is the value proposition and what to expect. Most of the websites show only the default pop up message asking for the user’s permission. That is not effective! A concise message increases the opt-in rate significantly. The app should show, and if possible, demonstrate the value clearly by an example before asking for the user’s permission.
Timing and context are very important. If the message appears as soon as the user opens your website, it’s simple to implement and is also a huge turnoff. The opt-in message should be displayed after the user has spent enough time on the site to establish a basic understanding of the value delivered.
2. Interesting and Highly Personalized notifications
Push notifications are more effective if they are tailored to the user’s behavior, preferences, and geo-location. More users opt-in when they receive a request that matches their needs rather than a generic one. Avoid messages that are all self-promotional; users do expect valuable information from the messages.
An effective message would:
- trigger curiosity
- be humorous
- deliver value to your users
- create urgency
Emojis generally help to convey the emotions better and achieve a higher response rate. Adding the right images also increases the click rate. The content of the notification should be short and crisp; be innovative in crafting the content of your notifications.
A good strategy is to put yourself in the target user’s shoes and ask: what kind of content, at what time, and how personal it needs to be to trigger your response?
3. Segmentation is important
You should not put all your users in one bucket. Categorizing them based on different parameters is a good strategy. The categories may vary based on the type of business you are into. For example, users could be categorized based on their past purchases, geo-location, last page visited, products in their abandoned cart, etc. Segmenting the users based on geo-location could be very effective, for example: sending notifications about the upcoming events in their locality, or the products that they would need according to the weather in their area. As per Localytics, properly segmenting notifications could double the open rate. Also, segmented push messages have a 3X conversion rate versus a general push message.
It is crucial to identify your segmentation criteria and follow through accordingly. NeuroTags solution helps businesses identifying these criteria by collecting and analyzing customer data, producing intuitive reports that empower business drivers to make the right calls.
4. Timing
Many times, a carefully crafted notification doesn’t bring the expected results due to bad timing. If your users are in different geographies, schedule your message delivery according to their timezone. You should also consider the user’s most active time according to their past activities. If you send a time-bound notification to the office workers at 9 AM, they most likely won’t have time to visit your app or website; thus, effectiveness is hindered.
Track the performance, and the timing of your past notifications then use that to time the next message. We want to push notifications to users at the approximate time slots when they are most responsive.
5. Don’t spam
Too few notifications indeed fail to engage users, but too many notifications are just as bad, driving them to opt-out. In fact, too many notifications are one of the top reasons for app uninstalls. On a desktop, frequent notifications will interrupt the user, and they will turn it off altogether.
Capturing consumer data and using it in the right way plays a vital role in maximizing the effectiveness of push notifications. NeuroTags Consumer Engagement Platform helps brands in collecting consumer data.
