The push notifications provide the customers with proper and relevant information while encouraging them to engage with the website or App. However, the notifications can deter and annoy the users when it is poorly implemented. It can be disastrous if used without proper strategy.
Just imagine, it’s 6 o’clock on Saturday morning and you’re in deep sleep. Suddenly, your mobile got one notification. If you find the notification as essential stuff of yours, then it’s fine. But instead of an important message, if you find a promotional message from one of the application on your phone, you will definitely waive off the message.
The push notifications are used as a powerful marketing channel by many brands to reengage users and retain their customer base. It needs to be ensured that it will become more beneficial when used in the right way. Here in this article, I am going to analyze how to avoid mistakes while sending push notifications. Check them out!
Avoid sending too many notifications:
Push notifications are alert based messages that need only immediate attention. So, it is better to send the notifications within a schedule, timing, and frequency to the users. It is a tendency to use push notifications by many of the product owners because it is easy to send and cheaper than emails. But that doesn’t mean you should send too many messages to your audience.
For example, if your website is running a sales promotion, and you are sending a price drop alert to your customers. But if you keep on sending the notifications for each and every product, it might annoy your customers which can lead to a chance of opt-out or the user may unsubscribe from your website. Receiving too many notifications in a shorter period can irritate the users by creating a negative impression of your website.
Instead of sending a lot of notifications, you can send the messages in a meaningful way. Don’t send any messages to customers without a proper push notification marketing strategy. It is necessary to follow proper planning similar to other marketing campaigns before inducting the push notification channel as your marketing activity. You can’t able to get the benefits of push notifications lagging with marketing efforts.
Don’t do bad targeting of customers:
The fact that a user opted into your website or downloaded an app in mobile is because they are interested in engaging with your brand. If you don’t figure out what the users really want by gathering their behavioral analysis, you will lose the customers.
Eventually, instead of targeting with blasting generic push messages, it is better to trigger some action with your users to ensure your marketing communications.
For example, when a user comes to an app or website, let the customer browse different products categories. Then according to the browsing history, you start sending the recommendations.
Don’t disrespect the customer’s time and routine:
Don’t ever disregard the user’s time and routine while sending a push notification. If you send the messages with bad timing, the chances of getting a click will decrease.
Consider the local time zones and timing for sending the notifications. It is better to know the time of day where the users are active so that you can send them contextual messages.
Imagine, on a summer afternoon, if you get the notification from a brand saying- “winter is here: buy the woolen sweater with 15% off”. Will you think of buying the product?
Never send a single push notification message to all the users:
Receiving personalized messages on own mobile device is interesting for almost all users. The personalization will lift up the open rate of messages and increase the conversion rate.
If you don’t divide the audience by segment, group, behavior, demographic data, and purchasing history, you will not achieve your customer retention. You can encourage the audience to buy your product with upselling and cross-selling by giving discounts.
This is inaccurate that most people ignore the personalization factor while sending push notifications. The websites should put more effort in sending the right messages to their subscribers.
For example, if you send a price drop message to a customer who has recently bought the same product a few days ago without filtering their preferences. Now you think what kind of serious impact would it have on your customer’s mindset?
So, stop sending the same message to all your subscriber base in a single time. Use proper segmentation before sending the messages. Sending notifications without doing segmentation is like drawing lines in the sand.
Avoid sharing irrelevant content to customers:
Notifications are meant to grab the user attention. When an irrelevant message comes to the user’s inbox, it will annoy the user. There are certain people who always want to keep their message inbox with no unread messages, and others like clearing the notifications on their mobile’s screen.
Remember the user has few seconds to read your message. The attention span for any notifications is available for a shorter time. If you sent a notification without describing your offer and without clarity, the message is likely to be discarded by the user. So avoid jumbled words, stick to the point, and keep your tone positive while writing push notification content.
If you send some irrelevant and unnecessary things to the users, then it will become bothersome for them. Sending each and every small thing from your app is considered to be a mistake. Many users don’t want the app when a notification pops up in a shorter interval of time on their screen. It will tend the users to turn off the notifications from that app or website. So it is better to provide an appropriate message to engage the users.
Don’t neglect to tell the users what information it contains:
If a company or brand would like to send notifications to its users, the message should focus on what the company is trying to send the users along with what the user will gain if they opt-in to their notification.
Don’t forget to tell the users about the product in a short, interactive, and concise way. Don’t let the users guess something irrelevant about your product with the content. Because the details of the nature of your notifications make the users understand about your brand and build credibility on your website/App.
You can choose to show multiple products in a single notification to make push notifications more engaging. But don’t forget to mention the product image, product specifications, price information, discounts, and CTA for deep linking.
Don’t send a dull notification to users:
People don’t want a dull and unattractive notification. The users are much aligned to rich media notifications that come with an image format, and emoji, etc. The display ads will look attractive in mobiles.
It is better to send lightweight emojis and icons to attract users because the visual content has more popularity than the textual content. If you send the dynamic rich media push notifications instead of the static text-based push notifications, then it will become more attractive.
Final considerations:
Push notifications are used in all domains of businesses like e-commerce, education, traveling, news, customer support, and many more. However, it will disturb and annoy the users when they are inappropriate for the audience. Allow your users to understand your product and its value proposition before asking permission to send push notifications. Avoid the pitfalls of the push notifications and follow the app and web notifications UX best practices for better customer retention and engagement.
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