Web and mobile push notifications are one of the most efficient and handy tools that can help you increase your conversion rates and engage your audience in real time and with actual results.
Moreover, personalised push notifications can reach out to even the most determined leads. A smart marketing strategy with the use of push notifications can increase returning visits and customer interest in the best-working content on your website. You can check a remarkable research-based post regarding the effects of using push notifications published here. It is essential to understand what are push notifications, how they should be used and what pitfalls can wait for you on the road to successful promotion and lead conversion. Let us take a closer look at this useful digital marketing tool.
All alerts with hot offers, deals, sales, promos that you see on your desktop, mobile, or tablet even if you have not opened a browser yet are the push notifications. Both mobile app and web app notifications are aimed to get customer’s attention and interest in the product or service promoted with these messages.
Firstly, push notifications used to look like a spam email but get developed into personalised, interactive notifications that provide information and value with the shortest wording possible. They can be triggered based on a user’s request or the action performed by a user. Push notifications can suggest similar things that a user was looking for previously, send reminders and the most critical information. As you can see, push notifications can work for different purposes and lead to different customers’ action.
After getting such notification, a user can click on it to find out more about the offer, ignore it, or dismiss – but what is for sure, they will pay attention to it for few seconds at least. These few seconds are a significant part of the well-developed push notification because during this time users decide whether they would like to click on the notification or not. Thus, it is essential to pay attention not only to custom application development but also to the push notification design and content.
For those who set push notifications randomly, they will not work for sure. So here we are, considering what pitfalls you can face and, moreover, avoid while setting web and mobile push notifications. Jot them down!
5 Common Mistakes When It Comes to Push Notifications
This section contains the most popular, widespread mistakes related to creating and managing push notifications during the last couple of years. This article also provides exceptional knowledge about common problems with push notification settings and explanation on why they do not meet goals. It is crucial to read relevant and up-to-date literature to remain at a high level and stay informed about all problematic cases and helpful hints. At the moment, these five mistakes are the most commonly performed and worth your attention:
- Too Many Notifications: Would you enjoy reaching for the phone every hour hearing a notification sound? Moreover, would you enjoy seeing that it is just another promo? Surely, you will not like it. Quantity does not mean the quality, and that is the main point. It is better to send fewer notifications to get customers engaged instead of irritated with your messages. For example, experts from SmartInsights recommend sending not more than one push notification per day and not more than five times a week, analysing users’ further actions and responses. Also, a statistic data is proving that Mondays and Tuesdays are the most auspicious days for sending push notifications and get the visit and click rates increased.
- Ignoring Time Zones: Getting push notifications at 5 AM in the morning? Could not wait for it! That is another “great” user experience that may lead to opting out of using your product or service. It is vital to take into account different time zones in which your subscribers live. The best option is to schedule notifications around lunch time when people usually scroll their feeds using mobile phones. Poor timing will more likely lead to unsubscribing than making a purchase.
- No Personalization: Personalized messages have worked and will continue to work forever. They always get more attention, result in more views and clicks and, consequently, help you convert leads to returning clients. Please take a look at what customers were looking for and offer them something really worthy instead of too general, pushy deals.
- Bad Targeting: If you want to hit the target, you need to define it first. In this article, Lisanne Barnaart highlighted four characteristics to help you segment users and visitors and make more successful push notifications based on this information: previous actions on the website/app, prior purchases, location, and preferences. Keeping this information in mind, you can reach different groups of customers and get more clicks, views, and purchases then if you send just one standard message for all users.
- No Testing And Optimization: Proper push notifications are not just made but continuously developed ones. Feedback analysis, A/B testing, visit and click statistics are powerful information to improve your results and reach your goals. Without proper evaluation and optimisation, using new approaches, content, and appearance, your push notification will bore your subscribers, and you will lose numbers instead of increasing rates.
Taking a look at the mentioned above mistakes, it is evident that the opposite actions can turn your push notification into a useful, effective promotional tool. Here you can find advice on how to make push notification resultative, increase customers’ activity, and reach desired goals.
How To Make Your Push Notification Work For Real
If used the right way, push notifications can be the most effective marketing tool in increasing conversion and click rates, and there are some unspoken rules that can lead your marketing strategy and overall performance to success. For example here, KC Karnes highlighted only three main points: timing, value, and personalisation. However, that is not all. To be a great push notification example, the notification should meet much more characteristics:
- Personalization: No wonder that personalisation adds more value to the message. Users are pleased to see that their interests are met, their opinion is heard, and their preferences are taking into account. Make a personalised offer and get a satisfied customer.
- Segmentation: Follows personalisation. Do not spend your time, means, and efforts promoting products and services the user does not care about. Analyse their preferences and make a smart offer.
- Urgency / Limitation: Another significant characteristic of push notifications is that they act in real time. Therefore, the offer should be real-time, hot, finishing as well to provoke customers taking it right away.
- Timing: Lousy timing leads to opting out, while right timing stirs customer engagement up. Lunch and evening time are the best intervals to send push notifications because people respond during their leisure time the most.
- Value: To make a customer clicking on the push notification, you need to create a value of your offer. By using personalisation and segmentation approaches, you can find what is valuable for this user. Also, by providing limited time to get it with a discount or free stuff, besides, you double the value.
- Custom CTA: So-called custom calls to actions, or custom CTAs, are one of the most critical steps in reaching desired results. Your CTA should be clear and concise, showing users the benefits they can get by clicking on the notification. In short, you need to use every single word and media in your push notifications to make customers clicking on it and making purchases. It is not easy to set such message, and you may spend some time changing words, fonts, pictures in your app notification, but it is definitely worth it.
- Creativity: This last one is closely connected with the previous point. Make your push notifications stand out from the others in a good way. Make the best offer, do the best analyses, always try your best to be the best and show the world the unique value of your product or service by presenting it in an original way.
If you are looking for more tips and recommendations regarding improving push notifications’ performance, you are welcome to check this review of approaches, examples, and recommendations from 38 experts in digital marketing, SEO, and customer support areas. Keep in mind these helpful hints, and your app notifications will work meeting your expectations and even exceeding them.
Web and mobile push notifications are one of the essentials for any marketing strategy. And it is obvious that they should be relevant, valuable, and personalized. By knowing possible pitfalls you can meet on your way, you can manage push notifications easily and effectively.
Push Notifications As The Essential Marketing Tool
So, to sum up, it is worth saying that push notifications have indeed become one of the most effective and, thus, widely used marketing tools because of their quick effective impact, personalized approaches, and valuable offers.
It is worth noting that nowadays more and more digital specialists refer to push notifications to get audiences more involved and engaged with products and services. There can be some difficulties in setting and managing push notifications, but all of them can be simply avoided if you keep a few useful tips in your head. Make push notifications work for you and get more customer engagement and sales!
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