Sales marketing is ever-evolving as businesses look for new ways to get their products more in front of their customers. With the rising competition, mobile marketing seems like an uphill battle for businesses. More businesses are experiencing a downtrend and fluctuating brand loyalty on their investments. Then push notifications entered the stage.
Push notification is a form of digital marketing introduced in 2009, making it newer than most existing ones. Since its introduction, push alerts have gained substantial publicity and steam over the years. There is still a wide gap between its uses and conventional digital marketing methods.
"It is about execution, doing things faster and better." – Sheryl Sandberg
Despite this channel resulting in exceptional conversions and results, there are situations where unknown limitations can let you down. Marketers are still looking for new ways to revamp push messages to increase conversion rate, user retention, and repeat visits. This article will tell you how to improve customer retention with push notifications.
What are Push Notifications?
Push notifications are messages that pop-ups on the screen of users outside the application or browser. Businesses use them as a quick communication channel, enabling companies to convey their customers' messages, offers, or other information. Phone users can be anywhere on the browser and still receive these messages online or have their browsers running on their devices.
Push messages are simple and appealing messages that are easy for receivers to respond to. This makes them a great medium for businesses to keep their customer base engaged, even if they are not on the website or application. Push notifications are made of several elements. They usually consist of a title, a message, an image, or an URL.
Improving Customer Retention With Push Notification
1. Craft Compelling Contents
A push alert should be precise and catchy. Several customers have opt-out of push alerts because they find them boring. No one wants to see boring pieces of stuff pop up on their screen now and then. Also, the brain only reacts to stuff that stimulates it or piques its interest. So it is not far-fetched to understand why businesses are not getting the best out of push messages.
Choose an image that adds context and use emojis that pass your message across in a few words. Use a crisp title and stay within the recommended character limit. It is best to use more catchy and relevant images to use fewer words. Above all, use the correct URL.
It would help if you considered that your customers are busy people and could be engrossed in several activities at any time of the day. So when they take a look at your push messages, they should be captivated enough to be interested. For easy connection, you should use concise contents
2. Not Pumping Too Many Notifications
This is a thoroughly contested issue as businesses believe push messages are a great way to remind users about their brand. Unfortunately, several users deem them as nuisances that keep popping up on their phones, thereby reducing the productivity of the push alerts, needlessly hindering user experience.
Customers are pretty difficult to handle, and there is no generic way to deliver the best user experience. What a customer loves might be a nuisance to another. This subjectivity of choices makes push messages tricky water to navigate. Your push messages might be becoming a nuisance to receivers if you send too many notifications. They yearn to push your products in customer's faces to overwhelm marketers, and they tend to send a little too many notifications. If this happens, they end up bugging the clients. I recommend that you send one push notification per day and not more than five times in a week and analyse user reactions and responses after each push alert has been sent.
3. Ignoring Time Zones
Timing is very important in how a message is received. It would help if you did not dwell on creating the most compelling messages alone; you must send your messages at the right time. Good push alerts at a bad time will be discarded. Conversely, poor messages at a good time will most likely get a read.
For example, a customer receives a push notification at 5 AM about the latest arrivals of his favourite sneakers. Irrespective of how addicted or in love with sneakers or your brand the customer is, it is likely they won't give the notification the dignity of a read. If it were an SMS, they might have revisited the push; however, since push notifications don't stay saved on the device, you can't revisit them. Hence, the resources invested in sending those push notifications are wasted.
It is important to send push alerts to customers only when the time is right. Consider the time zones of each customer and try and send push alerts when the time is right.
4. Right Targeting
Suppose you are not generating enough leads or getting your desired level of conversion. You might be targeting the wrong audience. The task of keeping track of every visitor's information, placing them into segments, and targeting them with the right content can be daunting. Hence why you should use the right software.
The software will compile the information of multiple users, place them in segments, and targets them with the right information. Many platforms sends successful push messages by monitoring the previous activities of users, their tastes, location, purchases, etc. hence, it sends each push message to the right audience, which will surely increase the conversion rate of your alerts.
5. Feedback Analysis
Do you analyse your feedback? Do you leverage the statistics to know how next to target your push notifications? If you don't know how customers relate to your notifications, you wouldn't know how to target them.
It would be best if you analysed all feedback you get from your push notification software. Study the A/B testing, the visits, and the click statistics critically to know what you are not doing right. Efficient software evaluates and optimises the statistics and gives you suggestions to get more conversions. The analysis offers you new approaches, contents, and appearances that will make your push messages stay effective and enticing to readers.
6. Personalising Notifications
Do you personalise your push notifications? If customers cannot immediately connect a push message to your brand, they are most likely to swipe it away, or worse still, opt-out of receiving subsequent messages. This might be the step you need to improve push notification conversions. Customers are sentimental people, and they mostly respond to what they have a connection with. If they cannot immediately recognize the push alert's connection, they would most likely jettison the message.
"Building and maintaining connections with top customers is not only table stakes but imperative to success." – Ashley Johnston
Personalise your push messages and make them easily recognisable by clients at a glance. You have a few seconds to keep them engaged. You should try and leverage your relationship with them to make them engage your push notifications. Personalisation of messages will get you more clicks and views. Consequently, you will get more leads and conversions from your push messages.
7. Make Opt-in and Opt-out Easy
Customers are getting wiser daily with digital marketing. Push notifications should be a strictly permission-based medium. If you think you can trick your customers into seeing your push alerts without their permission. There is a chance they will react by blocking all future push notifications from your business. This means they are blocking off your chances of generating leads and making conversions.
Make it easy for your customers to opt-in and opt-out of your push notifications. In fact, it is best if you send them an opt-in message from the start. Please give them a choice about seeing your push notifications. By doing this, you make your customers feel empowered by having a choice of receiving or avoiding messages from your brand.
This tactic is quite effective in streamlining your range of receivers as it helps you target only interested participants. It is only logical to assume that users who choose to opt-in are people who choose to see your alerts and want to do business with you.
8. Track the Right KPIs
Your push notification needs to align with your marketing goals. You have to always stay in touch with how your schemes have worked out and what value a particular campaign adds to the brand's goal in the long run. Examine the right metrics and figure out how your notifications campaigns are doing.
You need to be quantifying the right numbers to evaluate the performance of the campaign. The click rate gives you deeper insights into audience engagement to know what is working for your brand and what isn't.
Also, you need to monitor your subscriber count, which will further give insights into what made each customer subscribe to your website. By staying in touch with the Delivery Rate, you will know how many subscribers have received your notifications.
9. Use Geofencing
You will experience both an increase in open rate and app conversion rate when you use geo-targeting. Without geofencing, you are like the proverbial sower who scatters his seeds abroad without regard for where they land. Geofencing allows you to specify a defined boundary to get notified when a user enters or leaves it. You know if you include such customers or remove them from a targeted section when the trigger is activated.
Some platforms allows you to define Geofences to target within a specific radius of a fixed point on a map. Furthermore, you can create a proximity marketing campaign that allows you to interact with users in real-time with geofencing. The software enables you to send push notifications to users when they enter or leave a specific location.
10. Create a Sense of Urgency
No one wants to miss out on a free offer. So maybe you should institute the use of FOMO (Fear OF Missing Out) in your push messages. Creating a sense of urgency in your push notification strategy will surely increase conversion. Customers would rather not postpone engaging with your push alerts as they fear missing out on vital offers and promotions.
You should consider some choices of words if you want to create a sense of urgency with your notifications. Such words include; soon, limited, don't miss, etc. also, you can use soothing words like; explore, enjoy, benefit from, etc.
Conclusion
A tweet from RSSFeedsCloud emphasised the importance of Push Notifications. I quote, "Why push notifications are a very important component in the modern-day advertising and business world."
Engaging with customers using push notifications can be tricky. With each message, you are tethering on the brink of getting an opt-out or your app being uninstalled. It is important not to remain redundant and stale with content to get conversions from push alerts. Hence, using the above strategies will surely improve the way your customers interact with your push messages along with customer retention.