Push Notification: An untapped hack to keep customers “HOOKED”
Why you need to include push alerts in your channel arsenal.
Why do you need to include push alerts in your channel arsenal?
Marketing teams are always in a rush to acquire new customers. Because it makes for a good pitch to investors and is seen to be a more quantifiable measure of success. The quicker you gain early traction equates the perceived value-added of your product.
However, it is customer retention that offers a better long-term ROI.
Would it not be a waste of time, effort, and resources to acquire new customers (after spending massively) and then not be able to repeat and monetize the relationship once they have bought into the service?
It can be perfectly surmised in the words of Janet Robinson:
“Repeat business or behavior can be bribed. But Loyalty has to be earned.”
The key to getting loyal customers is in having perfect resonance with your customers at every stage of the product. From the product ideation down to the commercialization and after-sales phase.
So, if you look at it, the whole essence of a business will boil down to understanding what customers’ expectations are and living up to them!
There are numerous ways to keep the customers “hooked”. I wrote an article about getting users hooked on your brand a while ago.
This will fall under the external trigger I wrote about.
One of the ways to build a habit-forming product is through PUSH NOTIFICATIONS.
When done well, the possibility of customer retention is spiked.
Push notifications are the little messages that appear when you visit a site asking if you’d like to “enable notifications”. on an app, it appears before the installation stage.
If you select yes, you’ll get notifications from the platform when they publish a new article or have an offer of interest.
They’re somewhat similar to pop-ups, which are not exactly at the top of the hype curve these days when it comes to cutting-edge marketing, but they still work.
Just spend some time browsing the web and you’ll find a ton of big websites still using them.
You can give your visitors time-sensitive alerts like flash sales, case studies, new product releases, updates, product notifications, and a much more personalized experience.
Push notifications can bring back customers with custom discounts, coupons, and other deals to convince them to come back and buy from you.
The only limit is your creativity.
The reality is that most people who visit your website will never return. You need to convert these visitors into subscribers or customers as quickly as possible (assuming the product-market fit phase is fully settled).
Things like getting them to follow you on social media, join your email list, or sign up for SMS marketing are all approaches to stay in touch, but I chose to dwell on push alerts because it needs to be exploited further.
The desire to write about Push notifications emanated from the need for more SAAS businesses to integrate it as a marketing channel.
If you really want to have a clear chance at winning the retention game, then this should be considered.
If you want to have a clear chance at winning the retention game, then this should be considered.
Please Remember!
No one wants to see boring pieces of stuff pop up on their screens now and then. You need to be super creative because the brain only reacts to stuff that stimulates it.
Synchronization of messages should also be paramount in push alerts to avoid duplicate messages.
There are rules you should take note of if you must nail it well.
RULES FOR NAILING PUSH NOTIFICATIONS IN PLATFORMS
- Personalization and Segmentation
- Timing
- Geofencing
- Being Subtle
Personalization and Segmentation
Personalization and segmentation are the two components that make the bedrock of effective messaging.
Away from the generic merge tags many brands use, you can creatively play with personalized messages to suit a person’s current journey with your brand.
Wondershop used the FOMO effect and personalized customer journey to send its push alert.
Users are sentimental people, and will mostly respond to what they have a connection with.
If they cannot immediately recognize the connection, they would most likely jettison the message entirely.
Grouping users into distinct segments for effective messaging will save you tons of time and energy and in turn, give the required returns on the platform(pun intended).
Asos can easily use personalization because it has a healthy database to glean from.
Timing
A message loses its intended meaning when sent at the wrong time.
It has become trite with over use to still say the popular marketing phrase:
“get the right message to the right audience at the right time.”
But maybe there’s a reason the phrase is overused and ineffective.
The right time means knowing when your audience is most receptive. It involves identifying “moments when you can really capture someone’s attention or change their mind and then meeting them there with the right message.
Through search terms, browsing behavior, general marketing signals, and engagement, we can know when the time is right.
As marketing strategist Robert Rose puts it,
Instead of focusing on the ‘right message, to the right person, at the right time,’ successful content marketers are creating ‘the right value, to the right audience, in their time.
Geofencing
Geofencing allows you to specify a defined boundary to get notified when a user enters or leaves it.
You will know if you should include such customers or remove them from a targeted section when the trigger is activated.
These pushes are triggered when a user physically moves near a specified area in real-time (if they’ve opted into sharing their location through their mobile device).
This is often done through either geofencing or beacons. Geofences are created by mapping out a “fence” around an area using GPS coordinates or RFID signals.
Once users step within the geographical fence, a push notification sent is triggered.
Beacons are small devices that send Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signals to mobile devices when they’re nearby. They’re often used in venues, stores, or other physical locations owned by the app maker.
Sephora geo-triggered push notification works well because it includes fun emojis, is short, action-driven, beneficial, and includes location targeting.
Sephora app users receive a push notification when they come within a certain radius of a nearby store.
This push offers them a free service, which incentivizes them to enter a store and increases the likelihood that they’ll make a purchase.
Sephora geo-triggered push notification works well because it includes fun emojis, is short, action-driven, beneficial, and includes location targeting.
Sephora app users receive a push notification when they come within a certain radius of a nearby store.
This push offers them a free service, which incentivizes them to enter a store and increases the likelihood that they’ll make a purchase.
Being Subtle
Although the top-of-mind appeal will stress the need to always be in front of your audience to enact a recall.
But we all can agree that messages should not be forced down the user’s throat.
Research by Responsys even shows that 70% of consumers find push notifications valuable.
Unfortunately, several users deem them as nuisances that keep popping up on their phones, thereby reducing the productivity of the push alerts, and needlessly hindering user experience.
Your push messages might be becoming a nuisance to your audience if you send too many notifications.
The hack is in being easy with your messaging. You must not sound obviously “salesy” all the time.
This image shows how Piggyvest (a fintech), did a good job by being creative with the global black Friday buzz last month.
Different messages were sent to different users and they were all based on their journey.
Conclusion
There are different software available for running push notifications nowadays. Companies that take more control of their marketing and advertising data and technology will be able to respond quickly to a customer’s zigs and zags and send a tailored message at precisely the right moment.
The battle is no longer to stay top of the mind of the customer, it is to own the mind of the customer entirely.
That raises the odds of seizing attention for the immediate purchase and building brand equity in the longer run.
In the end, it will all fall to data, which will birth;
how much do you know your audience,
and how to best serve them.
For the success of any push notification channel, it needs to be hinged on data.