Whether it’s emails, push notifications or SMS, the goal of the majority of your marketing campaigns is to increase your sales. Other campaigns might focus on customer or player retention but in the long turn, that increases your sales and revenue as well.

Of all the channels you can run your campaigns through push notifications consistently brings results.

It’s near impossible for customers to ignore that buzz in their pocket. The hit of dopamine users get from receiving a message drives them to look at their device straight away. Everyone feels it. Make the most of that quirk of human chemistry and use it to your advantage.

Sending messages through push notifications is something that every business should consider. If you haven’t thought about it yet, then now is the time.

Setting up push notifications

The work you lay down before you create your push notifications is going to help you massively in the long run. Understanding your customers and demonstrating that understanding drives customer retention.

The use of customer data platforms or customer engagement platforms lets you understand your customers at a much deeper level. Your engagement campaigns will change for the better as they will be more personalised and relevant to your customers.

Data 

The quality of your data plays a major role in customer engagement. It’s linked to how well your campaigns will perform. Consolidation of your customer data helps you better understand your customers without leading to confusion. 

A better understanding of your customer and their interests allows you to create messages that are far more relevant to them. Messages that they will want to open, rather than ignore.

There is a variety of different data you can include to build your campaign. The more customer data you include, the more personalised your campaigns can be. And the more successful they will become. 

Using demographical, behavioural, or transactional data to build your customer profiles for your campaigns makes for a richer experience. Your customers will begin to realise that you understand them, building trust and fostering loyalty. 

Segmentation

Running a highly targeted push notification campaign can bring your click rates up to 30%. The use of segmentation in your campaigns can lead to a 760% increase in revenue. This highlights the importance of including segmentation in the lead-up to your campaigns.

You can’t treat every customer as if they were the same. Tailor your push notification campaigns to reflect your customers’ interests and drive engagement.

Segmenting your audience per campaign is more important to driving results than you might think. You need to make sure what you’re sending is relevant to the customer, and segmentation will allow you to do so.

Segmentation is where you can identify a particular group to target with a certain message or offer. Sending a generic campaign will have less relevance and therefore adversely affect engagement for that particular promotion. And, in turn, your sales.

Personalisation and Push Notifications

The expectations of customers to receive personalised messages from businesses are high. Introducing different types of data to inform your messaging and personalisation gives you the power to create some great campaigns. Things like this go a long way for both your customer and your business.

Personalisation isn’t always as blatant as using someone’s name in the message. But showing the customer what they have shown interest in in the past. 

Your customers’ purchase history or recently viewed items will inform the content you can feature in your push notification campaigns. 

You’ll find that when you go beyond a first-name basis your customer relationship will deepen. As well as this, customer retention will rise.

What to include in your Push Notifications

Once you’ve done all the groundwork, it’s time to go ahead and build your engagement campaigns.

Call to action

When you communicate with a customer, you should always ask them to do something. That could be placing an order or signing up for your loyalty programme. 

If you don’t ask your customers to do anything in your push notifications, then they won’t. All your communications should require the customer to complete some sort of action. 

Doing this not only increases the likelihood of an action taking place but also makes it much more memorable for the user. Not every notification will end up with a conversion straight away, but the nudge may drive them to take action later.

Personalised language 

You have analysed and studied your customer data to create relevant experiences. So make sure that your push notification text shows this off.

It needs to be more than just “Hey X, look at this!”. That doesn’t get you results. You need to make sure that they know instantly what you’re saying to them is relevant to their experience.

Providing you have product and purchase data you can make your push notifications far more personal. Featuring products that the customer has expressed interest in or an offer to a product line they like is much more likely to convert.

Dynamic content

Relevancy holds a lot of weight when it comes to increasing interaction rates. Of course, there are plenty of things you can do to improve your campaign performance. The use of images and dynamic content can be deployed to your advantage here.

Visual media is a great way of drawing attention. With the use of images, you can show someone exactly what they left in their basket. Or tease them with new product lines.

 Dynamic content makes your campaigns far more personal. Transaction rates increase by up to six times through this type of personalisation. So you are bound to see some success in increasing sales and player retention.

Images

90% of the information that our brain absorbs comes from visual cues. A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes.

This is why you should include the use of images in your push notifications. A notification that includes an image can increase your open rate by 56%. 

There are different types of images and videos that you can use in your notification campaigns to grab people’s attention. These come in the forms of:

  • Icons -These are small images displayed beside a notification’s main title and message. In general, companies use this to display their logo.
  • Hero Image – This is the image of your product or promotion that you want to take centre stage. More times than not it is where the eye of the potential or already existing customer is drawn towards. These generally make the notification more attractive or interesting.
  • Videos/Gif – In its simplest form, a GIF is a short animated image that gives a bit more life to the notification than just a standard image. A GIF or video would be used instead of a Hero Image.

Analyse and Iterate

Remember that no matter how well your push notification campaigns are performing, there are always areas to improve. Constant testing and updates will serve you well for your future campaigns.

The more you analyse, the more you will understand what is working and what is not.

To learn more about push notifications and how they can increase sales, get in touch with the team to request a demo.

Click to download our guide to increasing eCommerce conversions and retention.

About Xtremepush

Xtremepush is the world’s leading customer data and engagement data platform. We work with various top brands within the eCommerce industry. Schedule a personalised demo of our platform to learn more about how we can help your brand drive repeat customers and increase revenue.