Daily, consumers browse through numerous products in their devices and there is no surety of them to come back and visit a Brand’s page even if they are interested in it. Hence, it has become a necessity for marketers today to employ a medium like push notifications that will be as fast-paced as their audiences.
Push notifications, to their rescue, represents a channel that is omnipresent, helping the marketers to reach back to their potential audience effortlessly. Here are some data-proven statistics on how push notification services are gaining an upper-hand among the audiences as well as the advertisers.
- Web push notifications have an impressive opt-in rate of over 90%.
- Targeted push notifications (with audience segmentation) increases open rates and, boosts app and website visitors by 200-300%.
- On an average, a quality push campaign raises user retention rates by up to 40%.
- More than 25% of the brand audiences want to continuously receive push notifications, to get timely and useful insights.
- More than 80% of Android users and over 50% of iOS users enable push notifications in their Mobile devices.
If you are still using the conventional modes of advertising and haven’t started developing a strategy to strengthen your customer relationships with push, here are some Businesses that almost got bankrupted and how a push strategy got them back into track.
Pixowl’s client retention rate went down from 21% to 1.7%, and mobile push notification services helped them to increase this rate to 47%
Pixowl, one of the world’s leading mobile gaming houses is famous for their pixel-art based RPG game ‘Sandbox’. Sandbox had 16 million downloads and also had a successful sequel, ‘The Sandbox evolution’.
Unfortunately, Pixowl faced an abrupt downfall and started to lose the majority of their users just within a week’s time. Day one’s client retention rate was 21% and after 3 months, the retention rate was just 1.7% falling into the below-average client retention mark.
Pixowl then realized the need for an engaging content strategy to get their players back in the game.
Setting up a push notification strategy: With compelling content, and executing the mobile push notification campaign at the right time (the time which had the highest number of in-game users), Sandbox showed a 47% lift of client retention rate in the course of the campaign.
LA tourism was able to reduce its bounce rate by 43%
LA Tourism is an official tourism marketing organization promoting Los Angeles as their destination for leisure travel. It helps international and domestic travelers discover great deals, catering to over 1100 member businesses in the Los Angeles area.
Being a tourism website, it continuously faced high bounce rates, which is a sign of irrelevant visitor traction to their web pages.
Targeted push strategy: LA tourism understood the need for audience segmentation, and with a careful analysis of their audience groups, a targeted push campaign was set. Segmenting audiences based on their demographics and giving them interest-based push notification feeds witnessed 8X growth in click-through rate and reduced their bounce rate by 43%.
Impegio achieved 400,000 active subscribers using push notifications
Impegio is one of Europe’s largest job portal aggregating job listings from thousands of recruitment firms, websites, organizations’ websites and employment boards. Though they were driving a huge amount of traffic to their homepage, the subscriptions were very less, which is very crucial for a recruitment portal.
Gennaro, the growth manager at Impegio thought of a web push notification campaign, and when executed, they saw a 200% increase in traffic and 120 subscribers onboard within minutes.
“I was amazed at the speed at which I was able to reach my customers and get an instant response through push notifications”, adds Gennaro.
With these business case examples, it is clearly evident that irrespective of any industry, Push notifications are taking the online media by storm, establishing itself as the most effective marketing tool.
What makes push notifications, an ‘ideal’ tool for marketers?
Ability to deliver timely updates to users
Push notifications help the marketers to get instant response from their users as the notifications pop-up in the device they are active and engaged in, even if they are away from the brand’s sight.
Giving users the opportunity to re-engage with the content they are interested in
Opting into relevant push notifications, users will receive timely and useful updates from the brand that they are interested in. A recent study revealed that nearly 50% of the audiences actually prefer personalized and relevant alerts from a Brand.
Increase the app and website engagement
Push notifications as a tool help the marketers to communicate with the users without asking for additional information like Email. Also, real-time messages enabled by push notifications help the users to re-engage with the brand as soon as they show an interest in it.
Multiply the open rates with segmented push campaign
When it comes to a successful campaign, targeting is very essential. User perspectives and demographic data are very important, and it is critical that you broadcast personalized messages to the relevant set of audiences.
Interest-based information, site actions, geography, time zones, mode of interaction and the best time of interaction are some of the audience segments to be studied upon.
Cross-platform delivery
Whether it is an information update, breaking news, live score, event or a sale season, the users can receive the push notification messages instantly in their devices (desktop, mobiles or tablets) they are active in.
Why should marketers prefer push notifications over other modes like Email and SMS?
Push notifications, SMS & Email share many features in common:
- messages are received in real-time.
- messages can be updated through multiple devices.
- messages have a character limit and information should fit within it.
Even though they share some traits in common, here are some important instances those make push notifications exceptional from other modes like Email and SMS.
Instant communication
Push notifications show a 10% higher click-through-rate when compared to Email or SMS. They are delivered right in front of the user’s screen, making it hard to be missed.
Cluster-free and doesn’t go outdated
When we open our SMS messaging app or an Email, there are numerous messages that are clustered in the inbox. Every push message is instantly delivered before the user, and they can opt-in if interested or opt-out if they are not.
Cost
Though bulk SMS and Email campaigns charge a minimal amount, some push notifications campaigns can be executed free of cost, helping small businesses start with a low marketing budget.
Connecting with your mobile audience, without even a mobile app
Businesses now need not even invest in a mobile application to connect with their mobile audience. With browsers like Chrome and Mozilla enabled, they can receive notifications right on their mobile devices.
Advanced audience segmentation
Push notification settings enable you to create multiple target persona boards and help you to precisely segment them according to their behavior, demographics, geography etc.
Adding push notifications to your application
Once you have understood what is push notifications and how it works, here is a short procedure on adding push notifications to your application.
- The app publisher registers with the OS (web, Android, iOS) push notification service.
- The service gives a push notification API (Application Programming Interface) to the publisher, which is a contact path for the application and publisher.
- Once the API is integrated, the publisher adds the SDK in the application. SDK is used to develop applications that target a specific OS.
- Finally, the application is uploaded by the publisher in the store.
Some tips for marketers to gain the best out of their push notification strategy
Providing easy opt-in and opt-out options for the audience:
Your push notification software should have easy opt-in and opt-out options and give your subscribers the choice of receiving and avoiding messages. Hence, you can target only the interested prospects.
A clear outline of your goal and objective:
Map out and predict the actions you want your users to perform, by defining a clear objective for your campaign.
Your messages should be compelling:
The most important thing to remember when it comes to your push strategy is, your users will be in the middle of something while the notification flashes on their screens. Hence, your notification titles and messages should be eye-catchy and crisp, and tell the exact thing you want to convey.
Find out the right audience emotions for your Brand:
Consider the product and services you are promoting and how the audience would prefer to act for the messages you send via push notifications.
Segment your audience and give them a personalized feel:
Sending bulk messages to diverse audience types mostly results in poor engagement. Segment your audience based on their interests and demographics, make them feel special by promoting the most relevant content.
Active time of audience and the frequency:
A/B test with the time that your audiences are most active and when they are not in any work occupied so that you don’t annoy them. Stats say that click rates decline with the next notification sent for the day. Hence, sending one push notification per day is recommended.
Analyze and optimize the KPIs:
The KPIs of your mobile and web push notifications should be in sync with your marketing goals. Continuously analyze the performance and make sure (optimizing) that it will add value to your business in a long run.
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