9 Ways to Master Your Push Notifications Marketing Strategy

When we think of digital marketing, often channels like email, social media, search, and SMS marketing come to mind. Unfortunately, focusing on these channels, digital marketers often miss other effective digital marketing strategies. Push notifications happen to be one of them.

Being around since 2009, push notifications have been gaining momentum during the last couple of years, becoming a fresh way for digital marketers to tap into new audiences, increase retention rates, and improve engagement. However, building a push notification marketing strategy or even incorporating them into an existing one can be challenging.

With this in mind, in this article, we’ve taken a deep dive into the world of push notifications. We take a look at what push notification marketing is, why it is important, and how you can build your push notification marketing strategy. Let’s take a closer look at what we’ve found.

What is Push Notification Marketing Exactly?

To understand what push notification marketing is, let’s first take a look at what a push notification is.

If explained simply, a push notification is a clickable pop-up message your website visitors will receive, no matter the device. It is a quick and witty way to deliver news, offers, and reminders to customers even if they are not on your website at the moment. One thing to know, however, is that push notifications are permission-based: your visitors need to allow receiving push notifications before you can start communicating with them.

With this out of the way, let’s now move on to push notification marketing itself. As the name suggests, it’s a marketing strategy that focuses on using push notifications for the benefit of your brand. In its essence, it’s a retargeting strategy allowing you to reach people already interested in your brand with relevant messaging and offer them a personalized experience. From sharing promos to reminding about abandoned cards, push notifications allow you to instantly reach thousands of people without much hassle.

Depending on your audience, service and product type, and your end goal, you can implement different types of push notifications. If done correctly, each of these notifications can become an incredibly powerful tool to connect with your audience.

Why are Push Notifications Important for Your Marketing Strategy?

The purpose of push notifications is to help you create a loyal community of customers around your brand and, of course, encourage them to use your products or services. Now, let’s see why exactly push notification marketing is important and how it can benefit your brand.

Better Outreach

Using push notifications can help you reach your readers anywhere and share updates about your products in real-time. Unlike other marketing channels, when people need to be active on a specific website to see your message, push notifications ensure that you can reach them irrespective of the website or channel that they are active in at the moment. This immediate distribution also helps to avoid crowded social media feeds and emails. Additionally, with push notifications, you connect only with the people who previously expressed interest in your brand (with 42% of users keeping push notifications active), so you won’t be shooting in the dark.

Higher Engagement Rates

Ultimately, your main goal with push notifications is to drive people back to your website, where they can continue engaging with your content and even make a purchase. Because these notifications are call-to-actions, they do a great job at driving traffic to the website and boosting engagement rates. In fact, it’s reported that push notifications increase CTR by 700%!

Increased Retention Rates and ROI

Push notifications go beyond driving traffic and improving engagement and can be a powerful tool to increase sales as well. This is in part because push notifications provide guaranteed impressions, triggered only when the user is active. When done correctly, through personalization and catchy messaging, push notifications can increase retention rates by up to 93% and boost ROI by 3500%!

How to Design and Implement an Effective Push Notification Strategy

Now that you know what push notifications are and how you can benefit from them, let’s take a look at how you can make it part of your marketing strategy.
As the benefits of push notifications become apparent, more and more brands and professionals use them. Unfortunately, this increase in usage also comes with many mistakes that do more harm than good. That’s why having a solid understanding of how push notifications work is essential.
Below are some of the key steps you need to take to ensure you are using push notifications in an effective way:

• Continuously experiment with the content and design of your push notifications, edit your messages based on performance data.
• One size fits all approach won’t work here. Make sure to target users with personalized content and custom messages.
• Understand the best time of sending push notifications to different user groups by tracking and analyzing their behavior and identifying when the user is likely to act on the notifications.
• Don’t overdo it. Use push notifications at the right frequency to avoid being “spammy.”

These best practices are the cornerstone of your push notification marketing strategy. If implemented wisely, they can help you boost your subscriber count and drive more revenue.

9 Push Marketing Strategy Examples to Boost Audience Engagement

Here you can find a list of effective push notification marketing strategies with ample examples to help you get more subscribers through push messages and increase your overall website traffic.

Onboard your users with welcome push notifications to retain customers

The very first thing that you need to do is to create a good onboarding experience. Successful activation can increase the number of users and make them loyal customers as, besides encouraging users to subscribe, welcome push notifications are a great source of income when a discount is added, as they push customers to their first purchase.

Effective welcome leads to higher retention rates, which means higher profits. Welcome push notifications are a must and a great tool for building customer loyalty. As a notable example, Shein online shop encourages users to sign up faster through welcome push notifications, in this way pushing a user to register quickly and make their first purchase.

Engage users when they add the product and abandon the carts.

These are automated reminders that are sent to users who have added items to their shopping cart but left without completing the purchase. As reported by Baymard Institute, 69.82% of online shopping carts are abandoned. Abandoned cart push notifications can recover about 30% of all abandoned carts and are highly effective in bringing back customers to check out and fulfill the purchase.
Recovering abandoned carts is one of 17 essential e-commerce tactics that will drive sales, and web push notifications are a highly effective tool for achieving this.
Benefits of abandoned cart recovery push notifications are:

• Boosts sales immediately
• Improves marketing ROI
• Captures sales and sale notification is not missed

Abandoned cart push notifications should be one of the first types of push notifications added to the store and it’s definitely worth the effort.

Informative push notifications to deliver important messages

A great time to retarget and engage your audience is when you have a new blog post or useful information. Push notifications receive 50% more opens and so more opportunities to attract customers with updates from product launches, exclusives, events and other important message, thus boosting conversion and engagement rate.
A blog or a news website can set a push notification after a visitor reads an article or a post and offer the user to get updated on new posts and updates. It can be in the form of reminders, alerts, updates, FYI messages, and so on to keep customers updated on key news and updates.
Remember, a viewer is most likely to opt in to receive push notifications for more news or posts once they’ve navigated through your content for a while.

Guardian uses yet another version of updates, it offers to subscribe to the newsletter and get in the inbox every Saturday morning the weeks’ must-reads, pop culture, trends, tips for the weekend, bringing the best, biggest and weirdest bits of the internet into the viewer’s podcast feed.

Generate more traffic with catchy offers with promotional push notifications

Probably the most common type of push notification in e-commerce are promotional notifications. With promotional notifications, brands aim to advertise their goods, raise brand awareness, and increase sales. They aim to drive sales and engage a large number of subscribers. These push notifications are used to inform your users about flash sales, limited real-time offers, blanket discounts on all items, and more.
They are a must for seasonal sales periods. The limited time offers create even more urgency getting users to complete the purchase.
Promotional push notifications are not just about increasing sales, they’re also a great tool for engaging users and building customer loyalty. Discounts and coupons came in as the top-ranking tactic for driving loyalty, with 61% of consumers saying they use them (Expedia Affiliate Network).

Back in stock offers to attain maximum conversions

Now, when you’ve got users checking out your service, you’ll need to make sure they engage with your products. To do that, you’ll want to use this push notification type, letting your customers know that their favorite products are now back in stock. Sending them a notification as soon as the products are back in stock gives the opportunity to re-engage your users further and show them your care. Simply create a good reason for people to come back, and you’re set.
As statistics go, a strategy that utilizes push notifications that are relevant and valuable to users will increase your engagement by over 80%. It keeps the audience engaged and updated without so much effort.

Launch of a new product to encourage customer loyalty

Notify subscribers whenever you launch a new product or service or upcoming events/competitions. These messages are good for ongoing engagement and work very well to keep customers loyal. They are a great way to increase sales, customer loyalty and satisfaction. In this case rewards and/or referral programs are powerful retargeting tool, and in fact, 70% of customers say that they are more likely to recommend a brand that has a good loyalty program.
Tip: Always remember to carefully consider the number and frequency of push notifications you send to new users and so as not to be referred to as spam.
Sephora pushes messages about events and special offers at stores near the customer’s location. Events vary from new product launches intended to discover new beauty brand or product to learning about the most up-to-date makeup trends.

Geolocation push notifications

Push notifications based on geolocation are another great way for showing content depending on geolocation, sending date match notifications, informing local events and promotions, and displaying deals for different cities. For example, Expedia highlights travel deals based on location, YouTube displays wide-ranging video content depending on your geolocation. This specific push type can be applied to all industries and create a unique user experience.
But as with all things marketing, you have to test to understand how your subscribers respond to the volume of messages you are sending them to get the frequency right. In this way your users won’t get frustrated by the volume and either unsubscribe or disable their push notifications.
Keeping cadence right, in fact, 87% of mobile marketers see success with location targeting. Benefits include better response, higher engagement and customer insights.

Segmented push notifications to achieve campaign goals

Besides using geolocation you can also use several types of segmentation in one marketing activity. You can combine geo segmentation with social segmentation and demographic with behavioral, so subscribers receive information that corresponds to their interest and needs. Offer them information specifically related to what they’re interested in.
To increase the campaign conversion rate segment your subscribers based on various factors such as their product purchase history, their behavior, and demographic factors and send them customized notifications.
In E-commerce, you can target, for example, only the users who have already reached a certain purchase amount and provide them with a VIP coupon code or, alternatively, keep track of subscriber’s activity and send them special offers about the products in the Favorites section; it will turn into an immediate transaction.

Customized push notification

You can create and customize campaigns as per your business requirements. Try to create a catchy and appealing message, showing the benefit why they should opt-in to your push notifications marketing, and if their answer is positive, you can show the official opt-in where they can click allow. So, you can firstly show custom text like “Want to receive our real-time updates and exclusive discounts first?” in this way you show your best argument of subscribing and only after show the opt-in. Thus, there is more chance that the user will click allow to subscribe and you can get more subscribers and traffic.
So we can say, that segmentation in web push strategy allows you to:

• provide corresponding information with relevant subscribers
• increase brand loyalty
• re-engage customers
• increase your conversion rate

Push marketing strategy examples also include exit-intent technology, which identifies the right moment when a visitor is about to leave your website and shows a push notification. It can contain a discount, voucher, or an exclusive offer to new subscribers. This can be combined with discounts on similar products the visitor viewed. When applying this kind of engaging push notification, you’ll see more subscriptions and less bounce rate.

There is no best working strategy, depending on your business test various combinations of elements like color, copy, a combination of offers and identify which combo is giving you better output.
Using the right push notifications can get your customers’ attention and keep them coming back, and as statistics say, push notifications have a 50% higher open rate than email marketing, it’s a tool worth using for your business’ exposure.

Conclusion

Push notification is a powerful marketing tool, it is like a bridge between the brand and the consumer to keep the users engaged and committed to the brand. So, it should be used carefully without crossing into spam territory and in an effective way to reach the maximum potential and take advantage of push notifications.