How Can Push Notification Marketing Improve Customer Engagement?

Push notifications are a common marketing tool that marketers use to get their messages in front of their audience. However, with the growing number of mobile app users, competition to attract users and engage customers is also increasing. This means your messaging strategy must be well-optimized to reach customers on a deeper level.

You need to apply powerful push notification marketing strategies to optimize your push messaging and improve customer engagement. How do you do so? We’ve prepared this article to explain the top eight push notification strategies to drive customer engagement with your brand.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of implementing push messaging strategies, let’s define what a push notification is and its major types and benefits.

Table of contents

1. What are push notifications?
2. Types of push notifications
3. Four benefits of push notification marketing
4. Top eight push notification strategies to improve customer engagement
5. Wrapping up

What are push notifications?

Push notifications are messages that pop up on a user’s mobile or desktop screen when they have opted-in to receive notifications via the internet or an app. When you apply push notifications in your marketing strategy, they can significantly improve your customer engagement and conversion rates.

An effective push notification marketing strategy provides the opportunity to promote marketing campaigns, news, product updates, and new content that you want customers to engage with.

Types of push notifications

You can send push notifications via desktop, mobile web browser, and apps.

Mobile apps push notifications are sent to users when they have installed the app on their mobile phones. Android and iOS devices usually display push messages on the user’s lock screen in the notification center. Users automatically receive push notifications once they install the app on an android device, in contrast, iOS devices require an opt-in from the user.

Web push notifications are sent to users through desktops. They usually appear at the top or bottom corner of their screens. Popular browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari support push notifications on desktops and mobiles.

This type of push notification allows marketers to notify customers about sales offers, events, and product updates.

Four benefits of push notifications

Push notifications provide many benefits, however, in this section, we’ll throw light on four key benefits.

1. Improved user outreach

The number of mobile users is growing greatly each year. With push notifications, you can promote your product and services to a large audience.

2. Cost-effective communication strategy

Rather than promoting your brand’s marketing campaigns via expensive ads, you can use push notifications to promote your brand at a more favorable price.

3. Higher engagement

Push notifications can enable you to increase customer engagement and conversion rates. What’s more is that you can use push notifications to attract lapsed customers by offering discounts, freebies, or free coupons.

4. Valuable insights

With push notifications, you can gain valuable insights into important metrics like open rate and click-through rate, to track your overall push messaging performance.

Top eight push notification strategies to improve customer engagement

So far, we’ve highlighted what a push notification is, its two main types, and the benefits it provides to businesses. In this section, we’ll highlight the top seven push notification strategies you can apply for better customer engagement.

1. Add push notification requests on high-traffic web pages

High-traffic web pages like the homepage and product pages provide the opportunity to capture customer attention and nudge them to opt-in to receive push messages.

For instance, you can compel your web visitors and customers to subscribe to your push notifications by offering new product updates, discounts, or industry news.

The idea is that you include a compelling call-to-action at the top of your homepage or product page for the best visibility.

2. Apply personalization in your messaging

Value is important in the push messaging you send to your audience because customers are most likely to engage with your message when it provides value in some way. This is where you apply a personalization.

A personalized push notification presents the opportunity to show customers that you understand them and know them beyond their first names.  When you learn more about your customers' preferences, needs, and behaviors, you’ll need to group them into segments.

For example, you can segment your audiences based on their purchase history, demographic data, and previous interaction with your brand. If you own an e-commerce store, you’ll most likely send targeted messages to different customer segments based on their purchase history.

Personalization is a key strategy in push notification marketing because it pays. Marketers see an average increase of 56% in sales when they use personalized experiences. Another study states that consumers are 40% more likely to view items that are recommended based on the information they’ve shared with the brand.

To tap into this benefit, you can start by creating accurate customer segments. With Engage, you can keep track of your customer data, and use that data to create unique customer segments based on categories like:

• Users that abandoned a shopping cart after a certain period
• User demographics
• Customers that have visited the payment page longer than 30 seconds

3. Create compelling content

If your push messaging isn’t compelling, then customer engagement may be negatively impacted. You can compel customers to interact with your brand by including incentives and a sense of urgency in your notifications.

For instance, flash sales and limited offers are great marketing tactics to get customers to participate in your campaigns. In this case, you can create a sense of urgency by highlighting that stocks are available for a certain period or emphasizing that the stocks are almost sold out. Customers will most likely engage with your brand when they think that they will miss out on a limited offer.

4. Frequency

One thing that can negatively impact customer engagement rates is when you send notifications more than is necessary.

While your customers may have opted to receive messages from your brand, you shouldn't abuse their permission by sending push notifications too often. It can be annoying to customers when they keep seeing your push notifications pop up at every moment.

Limit the number of push notifications you send, so that your customers don't develop a negative sentiment about your brand.

5. Use Push notifications to send transactional alerts

For an e-commerce website, customers would want to track the status of their orders via email or even the website. You can send a message to customers, asking them if they’d like to receive updates on their orders via push notifications. You can also ask customers if they’d like to receive push notifications when a specific product is back in stock.

6. Timing

Appropriate timing is important in push notification marketing. If you send a push notification at the wrong time, a customer will be less likely to engage with your message.

Push notifications that promote a weekend sales offer won't generate a high customer engagement on a Monday, they'll be well-received on a Wednesday or Thursday just before the weekend begins.

A well-timed push notification can make a big difference in how customers interact with your brand and the overall customer experience.

7. A/B testing

The best way to know what works and doesn't work for your audience and brand is by A/B testing key elements in your messaging.

For instance, you can create two variations of a call-to-action to know which one will drive higher conversion.

You can also test different content, timing, CTA buttons, and message tones to understand what interests your customers the most. A/B testing is a never-ending process and it is important to develop the most effective push notification marketing strategy.

8. Analyze the right metrics

You need to analyze the results of your push messaging campaigns to gain a bird’s eye view of your push marketing performance.

For example, if you have sent a push notification about a new sales offer, you need to use analytics data to identify the number of users that clicked on the message, viewed the products, used the coupon code, added it to a cart, and completed the purchase,

This kind of in-depth analysis can help you understand customer behavior to improve your push notification marketing campaigns.

Wrapping up

Push notification is a powerful marketing strategy that helps to improve customer engagement as long as you apply the most effective strategies.

Remember to analyze customer data to understand your customers better and use the insights to create accurate customer segments. This way, you can create personalized messages that provide value to customers and improve customer engagement.

Don’t rely on guesswork to figure out the kind of push notification marketing strategies that will engage customers better. Run A/B testing on key messaging elements to identify what works and doesn’t work for your brand.

With Engage, you can create unique segments or groups based on your customer data, and send personalized messages to your customers via our push notifications channel.

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