There are many frustrations thrown up by daily life – the bad hair day, trailing toilet paper around on the sole of your shoe … but few are as irritating as these messages …
You know the ones. Your phone buzzes, someone wants your attention – your mother, the dogwalker perhaps, but it turns out to be just another irritating push message from a company you’ve likely not heard from for months, offering you something that you’re just not that into. It’s an all too common mistake – by someone who has obviously not heard of ‘intelligent targeting’. Intelligent targeting has the potential to boost retention rates by almost 40%, and rid recipients of the compulsion to delete your app.
What to do? With the average US smartphone user privy to 46 push messages every day, it makes sense to ensure that those you’re sending out are one of the 46 we actually pay attention to, particularly when over 60% of 18 to 34 years often or always opt-in to receive push messages (54% across the board). The opportunity to build long-term customer relationships and high lifetime value is there for your taking!
3 Key Benefits Of An Effective Push Strategy
Knowing why you should be sending the perfect push isn’t going to help on it’s own when it comes to formulating that effective, results-driving push strategy you want to implement. You need to know exactly what you want to achieve with your push campaigns.
1. Reach the right people in the right place and at the right time.
Location-based and geo-triggered campaigns are one of the most effective ways to reach your audience with the perfect personalized message – one that adds real value and not irritation.
2. Encourage user engagement
With the right strategy, push notifications can engage your audience in meaningful non-intrusive ways that provide real value, elevate loyalty, and boost retention.
3. And boost conversions
From triggering an instant purchase via a single click to completing abandoned purchases, boosting conversions nearly always depends upon the ability to successfully engage your customers through push to take the desired action.
Push Notifications Best Practices
The following Push Notifications best practices might seem obvious and simple, but they will help you reach the results you’re looking for:
1. Always Add Value
if you send a notification, there simply must be something in it for your audience. A limited-time discount for leaving feedback? Check. The opportunity to try out your new product before anyone else does? I’ll take it! Saying thank you for their recent participation in your survey – with a link to results and a free download of the report? Now you’re talkin’ (always use Deferred Deep Links to take the user to the right content in your app).
2. Time It Right
There are usually three key push delivery options – those that need to go immediately (for example, a discount code when customers are near your store); timezones, and intelligent delivery.
intelligent send times can increase engagement by 40%. But get it wrong – a middle-of-the-night time-sensitive discount offer, or Saturday evening survey-requests with no incentive – and you’ll irritate your audience and trash their trust in the process.
The likelihood is that your userbase will be spread across different timezones. You’ll need to take this into account to ensure you’re reaching your audience at the optimum time – wherever they happen to be.
Intelligent Delivery is really all about personalizing push campaigns using customer data. Using predictive technology and algorithms that work with a user’s historical and real-time app activity, platforms that offer intelligent delivery are a marketing team’s dream, enabling the automated scheduling of messages to push at the time that a particular user is most likely to engage with it. The reason intelligent delivery is such a big hit with mobile marketers is it works – taking the guesswork out of campaigns.
3. … And Make It Relevant!
Personalizing the content of your push notifications can lead to a 9% increase in open rates. Pretty good, right! Behavior-based push notifications can deliver a 400% increase in open rates (that’s four hundred percent)! Now we’re on to something!
A single intelligently targeted push notification based on real-time customer intel is always going to provide your audience with way more value than the spray and pray approach – one that almost always does more harm to your brand than good. Bottom line? If you’re finding your engagement or retention rates are dropping, there’s a good chance that the messages you’re sending to your audience simply aren’t relevant.
4. Use Rich Media
Rich formats have the potential to skyrocket engagement rates by a whopping 25% – so, if you’re not already using rich media across your push campaigns, it’s time to get started!
Rich push notifications are messages that can include images, emojis, video, URLs, deep-links, audio, and gifs, and which often include interactive elements that can take users to content that sits either inside – or outside – your app.
5. And Don’t Forget To Test, Test, Test!
A/B testing allows you to test users’ responses to the messages you’re sending out – with the purpose of providing you with the intel to make any necessary adjustments as you go. Accurate, intelligence-driven A/B testing can reveal a lot about your audience, allowing you to fine-tune your push notification strategy for optimum results. That buy-one-get-one-free offer might be going down a storm with one segment of your users – but could the use of a different image garner even better results.
Push notifications are a great way to reach and connect with your audience – but they’re also a super-fast way to lose your fans if you’re not working with the best practices that will give you the best chance of success.
Timely, relevant, and valuable, finding the right balance between engaging and spamming is an art – one that can be mastered! The Push Notifications best practices we’ve included here will help you get started – if you’d like more inspiration, dive into our downloadable guide, and start planning!
