How Push Notification Technology is an Effective Tool for Your Mobile Marketing Campaign
According to Statista, by 2019, the number of smartphone users will be more than 5 billion. With mobile internet usage exceeding that of desktop, app owners and businesses should focus on mobile push notifications.
What are Mobile Push Notifications?
Push notifications are one of the most effective tools to deliver actionable, personalized, timely and relevant content. For all intents and purposes, they are profoundly disruptive.
Should digital marketers use mobile push notification services in 2018? Yes!
Push notifications can boost app engagement by 88%. Let me run some more numbers for you.
|
Industry |
Average Opt-in rate (%ge) |
|
Gambling |
46% |
|
Media |
50% |
|
Entertainment |
45% |
|
Retail |
46% |
|
Games |
35% |
|
Sports |
48% |
Source: Wigzo
Mobile Engagement Crisis
Unfortunately, and shamefully, marketers ruin everything. They overdo everything. Now, over 50% of app users find push notifications annoying. This is a big turn-off. Marketers should master the art of engaging audiences and respect the following boundaries to obviate mobile engagement crisis.
- Do not send irrelevant pieces of information.
- Don’t nag your audience with too many push notifications
- Respect their privacy. Do not send or share your customers’ data without their consent to third parties.
Strategy for Sending Push Messages
It’s important to formulate a robust strategy to use mobile push notification services to your advantage. But before that, let’s understand the different types of push messages. Note that the following types of push notifications can be used for smartphones and desktops.
#1: Location Triggered
Do you know the address of your prospects? Do they stay roughly about 500m away from your store? You should be using location-triggered mobile push notifications to bring them to your store.
In scenarios where the location is very much relevant to the app usage, location-triggered mobile push notifications have very high engagement rates.
#2: Transactional Based
Are you keen on promoting any subscriptions? Do you want to keep your audiences informed on premium readership privileges and entitlements? Are you looking to promote an offer which is associated with money and transactions? You should use transactional based push messages
#3: Pull-back
Is your user inactive? Isn’t he / she showing any interest in your app? Bet your chances on pull-back push messages.
#4: Feel Good
Want to send feel-good messages such as positive life tips, inspiring adages, and witty maxims? You should try feel good push messages
#5: Gifting
Are you keen on congratulating and subsequently rewarding your audiences with discounts and cash back? Use Gifting push messages
#6: Pure Marketing
Do you want to cut to the chase and talk business? Do you want your latest arrivals and product launches to be reviewed, tried and tested? You should definitely proceed with pure marketing push messages.
A/B Testing
The next step in the pipeline is A/B testing. It’s important to A/B test the messages. Why?
Because small mistakes can negatively impact your conversions. And do NOT bombard the user with too many messages. Establish an upper boundary. If a user has opted for disabling / de-activating push notifications, respect his / her decision. If you are using a mobile push notifications service/software, analyze the information on the dashboard. Understand the user’s rationale behind his / her decision.
Digital marketers should acquaint themselves with the best practices. Without any further ado, let’s now look at the same.
#1: Segment Smartly
It’s important to incorporate a solid segmentation strategy. In other words, you should put intelligence behind every message that you deliver/intend to deliver. Segmentation is closely associated with personalization. According to a study by Localytics, the conversion rate of users is at-least three times more from mobile push notifications if they are personalized.
You can segment users based on the following parameters:
- In-app behavior
- Profile data
#2: Take Care of Timing
Timing is everything. Let’s say there’s a holiday sale scheduled for this Thursday. If you send a mobile push notification on Friday, it’s surely a conversion killer! If there is anything which can surely draw a line between a welcome message and a spam message, it’s timing. Expired offers and discounts are of little use to prospects.
If your target audiences are busy bees on weekdays, it’s better to send a push message or two on weekends. Time of the day also matters significantly. Users keep checking their mobiles frequently from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM. In all likelihood, click rates as high as 15% can be registered.
But note – these numbers may not work well for you. It’s solely your job to keep trying and testing different things to establish the ideal threshold for your audiences!
It’s important to keep learning more and more about your audiences. For all intents and purposes, you should adapt over time. A couple of years ago, Fridays registered the highest click rates. Now, weekends are registering significant click rates. The key is to be diligent!
#3: Use Multimedia
Many digital marketers are unaware of the fact that they can use images and animations in push messages. By all means, the attention value of multimedia-rich mobile push notifications is high. However, a few mobile operating systems may not support multimedia in push messages. Moreover, they make collapse.
#4: Define Your Mobile KPI
Have you defined your mobile KPI? Digital mobile marketing strategy is incomplete without KPIs. To begin with, focus on the following KPIs:
- LTV – Life Time Value
- Revenue
- Engagement
- Long-term conversion
- Customer retention
Feel free to add your own KPIs to the above list.
#5: Be Precise and Think Big
It’s important to be precise and out-of-the-box at the same time. As a marketer, you are required to have answers to the following questions:
- How is the customer interacting with me?
- What exactly are his / her needs?
- Do I know about the context of his / her requirements?
- Which type of mobile push notification will serve the user’s purpose?
Note – Push notifications are not just another version of emails. Mobile push notifications are all about delivering value.
Final Thoughts
Every mobile push notification should have a clear context. The moment your prospect clicks on the notification, he/she should be directed to the most relevant part of the app. Do not let your prospects take the trouble of searching for contexts within the app. Otherwise, mobile push notifications may backfire. Give more control to your prospects and get their permission to subtly push messages.
Found this blog useful and informative? Keep watching this space for more insights on mobile push notification services.
