Push notifications are brief and clickable messages that brands send to their users. It acts as a major communication channel to share important marketing updates. Usually, push notifications updates appear on the bottom right side of your desktop devices, and for mobile users, it appears in the notifications drop-down/ right slide window.

Brands from varied industries such as eCommerce platforms, job portals, Edtech brands, news and media platforms, etc. leverage the benefits of push notifications. And, talking about the web push notifications market, there are 189 million active websites to look after. This leaves a lot of Untapped potential in the push market.

Anatomy of push notification alert

The anatomy of push notifications contains the following things-

1. 1. Title
   2. Message body
   3. Brand logo
   4. Call to Action Source

How to improve user engagement using push notifications?

Push notifications are customizable using different features. Below, we will talk about the key features while sending push notifications that directly and indirectly boost customer engagement.

1. Target the segmented audience

Audience segmentation is the process of grouping your users in specific categories based on various parameters such as country, browser, time of subscription, and many more.

Push notifications perform well when sent to a segmented audience. The audience segmentation feature lets you do the following-

• • Create your targeted audience
  • Tailor-made your notification message based on the audience segment that you select. Therefore, increase conversions from targeted messaging.
  • Improve customer relationships and engage them through useful and relevant updates. Therefore, build customer loyalty.
  • Segmented push notifications boost your ROI, as it brings new visitors to your top funnel.

To create a user segment of your choice (other than what your push provider provides), you can use customer tags and create an audience segment of your preference.

For example, you can create segments that require your users from a specific region and should be males. This segment can be used by eCommerce platforms to send male-targeted products like pants, shirts, etc.

2. Send intelligent triggers

Trigger push notifications are time-based crucial updates. Triggers appear on user’s devices when they take certain actions on your website or mobile.

For example, you can send a trigger that gets popped up after x minutes of users subscribing to your push notifications. This will make sure you keep the new leads engaged at the time when your brand is freshly captured in their mind.

Another example of trigger notifications is when eCommerce websites send you notifications about products similar to your search queries.

3. Build customer experience (using welcome notification)

When users onboard a new product or any of your brand channels, welcoming them acts as a cherry on top and takes your customer experience to next level.

You can create welcome notifications for each of your subscribers. Every time new users subscribe to push opt-in, they would receive a welcome notification that confirms their subscription to the website. A welcome push notification will keep your users engaged and gives them a reason to associate positively with your brand.

4. Automate content updates(using RSS-to-push)

Push notifications can be automated using the RSS-to-push feature. Every time new content goes live on your website or new blogs are added, you can automatically update your users for the same.

The RSS-to-push feature is especially useful for media publishers and content aggregator websites where frequent content updates happen. Also, sending individual notifications doesn’t sound practical when you have a large audience base. Therefore, this feature is highly used by content abundant sites.

The notifications from the RSS feed appear the same as normal notifications do. Some of the benefits you can expect from using the RSS-to-push feature are as follows:

• • Push notifications drive traffic to your website and boost user re-engagement.
  • You can send Automated feeds at your preferred timings. For example, you can set the condition of RSS push as ‘live’ after x minutes of content publishing.
  • The RSS-to-push feature saves an average of 50 hours per month.
  • The continuous and automated updates manifold the reach of your brands’ assets to a larger audience at once.

5. Engage users at the right frequency and timing

The most crucial aspect of building user engagement through push notifications is to learn the best practices for the same. Know the right time for user engagement and how many times should you engage users on a daily basis.

What is the right push notification frequency?

Sending too frequent push updates to your users can become intrusive to their online experience. Doing so, you might get higher page views by the campaign completion time, but increased churn in the consecutive campaigns. And, sending too few notifications would not yield any value in terms of engagement.

An ideal push notification count in a day varies based on the industry your brand belongs to.
For example, on average, a blogger site can send 1-2 notifications a day. The media website usually sends 10-15 push notifications a day.

One thing to note is that the push notification frequency depends on how frequently users are consuming the content on your site.

Keep checking which ideal push notification count is yielding the best engagement and conversions. You can monitor the open rates, CTRs, etc. to measure the engagement and keep improvising the content and image to have an optimized push template.

What is the right time to send push notifications?

In order to have better user engagement, send push notification when your users are likely to click on them. This means, send push notifications when your users are in front of their mobile phones, which is likely to happen during the morning time at around 8 am before rushing to the daily chores and work, lunchtimes at around 1 pm, and on weekends.

However, there is no fixed right time to send push notifications, but you can select the right time based on the user persona for your audience segments. This is also subjectable to a/b testing and analyzing the right time that results in maximized conversions.

Some key tips-

• • A report by Marketing Land suggests that the most clicked notifications are achieved during the afternoon time followed by morning time.
  • As per Truepush’s study on billion of notifications, the optimized time to send push notifications is from Tuesday to Friday.
  • The time between 8 am and 5 pm is the ideal time to send push alerts.

Conclusion

Push notifications have evolved in the past few years. Businesses are finding ways to leverage this channel of communication with full potential. To send unlimited push notifications for free to unlimited subscribers, you can use various tools such as Truepush tool.

To engage your user, send push notifications as it has 10-15 times better open rates and Click through rates than other channels like email marketing, SMS marketing, etc. Once you include the aforementioned points while sending push notifications, it will generate ROI and lifetime value.

Image credit- Pixabay