Personalised Onsite Push Notifications for eCommerce

Putting together the perfect message for your customer communications can often be a bit challenging. But in reality, it just comes down to a few things done well. The same goes for notifications, regardless of whether it’s a general web push or onsite push notifications.

When we say it’s just a few things done well, it all starts at what you do before anything is sent.

Data is your most important asset in modern day communications. How you gather it and use it will tell how successful your campaigns will be. And when you use your data to its full potential for your notifications, you can experience an increase in engagement of up to 85%.

When it comes to eCommerce, onsite push notifications are an incredibly powerful way to boost engagement and conversion rates. Many businesses report a 23% uplift in conversion rates with their use.

It all begins with the heavy lifting you do before you send out your campaigns. This is where the battle for engaging customers is either won or lost.

Setting Up Your Campaign

Creating your onsite push notification campaign is something to be carefully considered. There are many things to factor in when it comes to putting together your strategy.

Understanding the purpose of your notifications is an important place to start. Your average push notification exists to drive traffic to your website or app. 

However, an onsite push notification tends to drive people towards completing an action. This can include signing up to a newsletter, completing a purchase, creating an account, or even simply just to promote deals. They are also a great way of recovering abandoned carts.

Overall, the primary focus of any type of notification is to encourage people to engage with it and get them onto your website or app. But, making them engaging requires putting in some work under the bonnet before putting them together visually.

There are different types of notifications you can send. These are:

• Informative
• Geolocation
• Promotional
• Recurring
• Transactional

You need to decide which type of notification is suitable for each of your customers. Not everyone will respond to the same thing.

Convincing Users To Opt-In

Before you go ahead and do all the hard work of personalising and segmenting your users, you need to get people to actually agree to receive your notifications.

You have to demonstrate some sort of value to the user in order to get them to opt-in to receiving your messages. Below are some best practices to follow which will help you increase your level of opt-ins.

Timing

It’s important that your new users aren’t presented with the prompt straight away. Asking for them to opt-in to receive notifications as soon as they enter your site is a sure way to turn them off you.

Users simply don’t want messages from an app or website they don’t know yet. They are aware that they will start to receive onsite push notifications from you when browsing the web. This can become very annoying for them and they’ll begin to regard your brand negatively.

Create pre-permission messages to gauge interest

After they browse your website or app for a while, you can send them a message to see if they’re interested in opting in. This can be seen almost as a lead up message before diverting them to a formal opt-in notification.

The options you give to the user here are important. You should allow them to click either “OK”, or “Not Now”. If they click “OK” then send them to the opt-in message. If they click “not now” (or whatever variation you use), then allow them to become more familiar with you.

Once they’re more familiar, then you can save your opportunity for a better time.

Send your request based on activity

This can be a really smart way of demonstrating your value before people opt-in to your communications.

You can set certain event criteria before you send your permission request. The message you send should emphasise how onsite push notifications will contribute to, and enhance user experience.

Basing this message on their unique actions will make it more likely that the user will opt-in.

Following these best practices, our clients have experienced an average of 20% of their active users opt-in to receive notifications. That’s a pretty high percentage, and some have seen even higher.

Your Use of Data

Collecting your data and having a plan to utilise it effectively is the starting point of pretty much every campaign. Going in blind and producing a batch and blast notification will not get you very far.

Customers expect to be communicated with on a personal level from brands these days. Anything less will not get their attention. In fact, it might put them off your brand in the future. 

Use the data at your disposal to set up really engaging campaigns. Even including basic personalisation (like someone’s name) can lead to a 9% increase in open rates.

But using data to understand your customers on a deeper level can bear a lot more fruit. Having knowledge of buying habits, previous purchases, and demographics can help you create a more personalised campaign which will return much better results. Running highly targeted onsite push notification campaigns sees a click rate as high as 30%.

Being consistent in your personalisation will make shopping with you a more positive experience for the customer overall. And a happy customer often leads to a returning customer. Retention rates can increase by 39% when personalisation is carried out consistently. So it is well worth your concentration.

Segmentation

If you treat all of your customers the same then odds are you’ll lose a lot of them. In general, people have different tastes and interests. So, the same thing applies when it comes to communicating with them. They won’t all want to hear the same thing.

This is why batch and blast campaigns are a thing of the past. They simply do not work the same way that personalised communication does.

Using your data to identify different groups of customers is the way to go. Segmenting your customers and communicating with that group personally can increase your notification open rate by an extra 50%. 

Setting up campaigns that target people based on their demographic, geographic location, or behaviour will drive better results.

Assembling Your Notifications

Once you’ve done all the heavy lifting, it’s time to make this notification as engaging as possible.

People will only pay attention to it if it’s eye-catching. So make it that way. A big, annoying mess on the page will be nothing but a brief eyesore for the user. That is until they click the red “x” and get it off their screen, paying little attention to it.

Putting together a notification isn’t a slapdash job. There are some things to remember when building one out.

Rich Media Works

Notifications work best when there’s an added dimension to them. Yes, you can send a bit of text and include a static image in them and maybe get a bit of a response.

But that isn’t going to take you very far when it comes to open rates, engagement, and conversions. You need to add more to it than just the bare minimum.

Including rich media like GIFs, memes, or deep linked images can brighten up your notifications and make them more engaging.

The use of rich media in your onsite push notifications can improve open rates by as much as 50%.

Make It Actionable

This is an incredibly important aspect of your notification. You can make it as pretty as you like, but if there’s nothing for the receiver to do with it then there isn’t really any outcome from it.

Ask them to do something in it. It’s the same as any other message you send to them. Whether it’s an email, SMS, or onsite push notification there should be an action for the user to carry out when they get it. 

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 follow through by the user straight away. But an action included may make them think “not right now, but later”.

Your Use of Language

We’ve mentioned that these notifications should be eye catching and engaging. It can come down to the image you use or the timing of the notification.

But your use of language also carries a lot of weight. The words you use can either excite or bore the receiver. Hopefully, you’ll opt for the former, not the latter.

Creating a sense of excitement or urgency within the message will make your customers more likely to act. For example, an onsite push notification that informs a user about a time sensitive offer you’re operating should create urgency.

The same goes for abandoned cart notifications, sales, and other activities where you want your users to act fast.

This is where the use of emojis also comes into play. Their use has seen an 85% increase in open rates, and a 9% increase in conversions in the past. So they can be very beneficial and eye-catching when used right.

They also add to that sense of urgency when needed. Alarm or fire emojis can suit here. Or even something as simple as using a shoe emoji when sending a message about shoes can be very effective as well.

A generic notification campaign is an ok start, but you need to do more with it in order to fully realise the benefits.

Collecting data and using it properly to provide a personalised experience is the name of the game these days. It will help you retain customers, increase engagement with your brand, and help you get ahead of your competitors.

To learn more about how you can personalise your campaigns through accessing your customer data, get in touch today and a member of our team will help.