Push notifications are a way of communicating and strengthening the bond with your users by reminding them of your presence. Push notifications appear anytime with the information about some offer, or discount, or a random reminder to use their service. One of the prerequisites to send push notifications to the users is that the users should have opted-in for the same.
Push notifications serve as a prompt mode of automated communication between a business and its users. Now broadly, there are two main types of push notifications, namely, web push notifications and app push notifications. But, it’s important to note that it’s not essential for a business to have an app in order to send push notifications. All that is needed is the web push code installed on a website to send push notifications.
Structure Of Push Notifications
Push Title: This summarizes the motive of the push notification briefly. Some brands choose to use their brand name here.
Notification Content/Body: This contains the message of the notification. Although the shorter, the better; character count keeps varying here.
Notification Icon/Image: This can be the logo of the website, brand, or the app. It could be anything specific to the business.
Browser Icon: This is applicable to the web push notifications. It includes the icon of the browser via which the notification is sent.
Types Of Push Notifications
1. Informative Push Notifications
Informative notifications are in the form of updates, alerts, reminders, and so on. Update notifications inform users of any update that may have been introduced in an app they use. It could be an update about an improved functionality, etc. It could also be a reminder so the user doesn’t miss on an important action. Informatice notifications may also be in the form of alerts. For eg. social media alerts.
2. Geolocation Push Notifications
Geolocation push notifications are ideal to send in case of promoting an offer, especially to boost in store traffic. Users may receive such notifications while entering or exiting some location. Geolocation notifications are a great way to spread awareness about an on-going offer that a business may be running. It creates a virtual perimeter around a specific area so the users visiting there may get such notifications.
3. Catch-up Push Notifications
Catch-up notifications are aimed at re-engaging the users and to encourage them to complete an action that they may have left. Such notifications are ideal in fitness apps where users are constantly motivated to perform better and also congratulated for their performance. Another ideal vertical could be ecommerce, music apps and other similar areas. Such notifications encourage users to stay engaged with the app.
4. Promotional Push Notifications
Promotional push notifications inform users about the premium or exclusive offers, sales. Thus, such notifications entice users to make purchases and boost conversions. Promotional notifications can be applied to a multitude of categories like shopping, games, fitness, travel, etc. Such notifications are ideal to urge users to boost conversions and make purchases.
5. Rating/Survey Push Notifications
Such push notifications are a great way to gather customer feedback than those lengthy feedback forms. Such notifications help businesses improve the customer feedback based on the ratings or comments that they leave. These push notifications can ask users to rate the app, rate the service, leave comments, etc which in turn boosts app installs, boost conversions, etc based on the user ratings.
Top Benefits Of Push Notifications
1. Re-engage Your Customers
Push notifications serve as an ideal way of communicating or motivating your prospects to utilize your service, or incase of an app, use your app. Thus, it has the potential to turn inactive users into active ones. Push notifications provide businesses an opportunity to send their users personalized messages, thoughtful reminders, updates, and more and hence express their valuable presence to their business. This keeps them engaged with your business.
2. Reach The Right Users
With the help of push notifications, you can get access to the location of the users. This is when users give permission to the app or website to track their location. If they do so, you get great opportunities to personalize the user experience by reaching the right users specific to their location. For example, based on their interest, you can send personalized recommendations to a specific set of users and different offers or suggestions to another set of users.
3. Boost Conversion Rates
Push notifications can help you better your conversions rates. Many users tend to forget the final action and leave the app or web before reaching the final stage. Push notifications can thus trigger a sense of urgency by notifying or reminding users of the action that they need to take. For instance, let’s consider ecommerce, people often leave items in their carts and exit before buying, so push notifications remind them to complete this action by enticing them, thus boosting conversion rates.
4. Trigger User Engagement
With the help of push notifications, you can send reminders and real-time updates to your users which triggers engagement with them. You can keep in touch with your users in a non-intrusive and unobtrusive way via push notifications. You can send informative messages like special offers or updated features which stimulates the conversation with the users. All this shows that marketers are presented with another great channel to keep the conversation going with their users.
5. Increased Traffic With Personalized Offers
For users to receive push notifications, they’ve to opt in for the same and the best part is they’re not required to submit any sort of personal information. A simple opt-in button does the job. Once the subscriber base boosts post the launch of the campaign, there’s a rise in return traffic. And businesses can boost CTRs and conversions by creating personalized offers for each of their audience segments. Push notifications allow audience segmentation through which this can be done.
6. Insights Into Metrics
Push notifications allows businesses to gain actionable insights in the metrics as to how their campaign is performing. You can explore the user behavior with the complex analytics that push notifications offer backed by data. Insights like user interaction, click-through rates, etc help marketers to understand which kind of messages are most likely to be opened the most. Post analysing the metrics and data, marketers can strategically plan for the next campaign and gain better results.
7. Help Users Stay In Touch With Businesses
Businesses can substantially enhance their customer experience with the help of push notifications. They are relatively less intrusive in nature and can boost traffic if the right message is sent at the right time. Users can stay updated with the current offers and promotions. What is important to note is to personalize the messages rather than keeping them generic to all. Customized messages are more likely to be opened than the generic ones since they make users believe that they’re valuable to their business.
Conclusion
Push notifications can be proved to be one of the ideal means of keeping in touch with your audiences, if used strategically. As compared to text messages, it’s most certainly better to use push notifications. With so many benefits like personalized user experience, audience segmentation, better conversion rates, access to creative approach, ease of use, etc push notifications turn out to be a versatile and should-have tool to communicate with the users.
If you’re looking to adopt push notifications to step up your marketing efforts and build a strong business presence, write to us at mktg@staging.ingeniousplex.com.
