For mobile app developers, the stakes have never been higher. Mobile applications are failing and losing more users. Sometimes, a great app lacks engagement, or you drive many downloads, but retention is low. In these cases, either optimize specific user flows or seize essential opportunities to retain app users. All these scenarios can be frustrating after the hard work you put into app marketing tactics like App Store Optimization (ASO), PR, or social media. Using mobile push notifications can help increase app engagement and retention.
Taking the merit of a push notification, marketing strategy is an effective method to remind your users about your app. Recently, Google listed push notifications as a significant marketing trend that marketers cannot neglect anymore. Amid GDPR, where customers do not accept unwanted messages or emails, push notifications serve as a perfect alternative, operating on the principle of permission-based marketing. Marketers use push notifications to drive consumers into their app to make a purchase or take action. Let us deep dive into the topic.
What are the push notifications?
Push notifications are used by the apps to alert smartphone owners to content updates, messages and other events within the installed application. When there is a need to send push notification to the user by using any of the three options such as sound, on-screen alerts or badge. Most of the apps that support push notifications allow the users to select any one from the three notifications they prefer to use to make the user aware of the updates. The push notifications are incorporated to activate inactive users with exciting offers, retargeting users, holding loyal users with personalised content and more. According to the research, 52% of the individuals have enabled push notifications on their devices.
Types of push notifications
Depending on the app you developed for your business, the push notification will depend on:
- Retention Push Notification: Making your users sign up for the app is just half the battle of the war. Once you have grabbed the notice of the user, you need to maintain them and keep them engaged or coming back to the app. Using push notifications give them the reasons to return and remind them why they downloaded the app. In turn, this retention push notifications are different types such as:
- Abandon cart push notifications
- Incomplete action push notifications
- Inactivity push notifications
- Risk of churn push Notifications
- Transaction Push Notifications: This push notification is used to provide information that supports the users throughout the journey, which is an excellent way of providing seamless customer experience that keeps you close to customers at all times. This has different types, such as:
- Purchase update push notification
- Payment made push notification
- Bill payment due push notification
- Required info update push notification
- Change push notification
- Goal hit push notification
- Recurring push Notification: This type of push notifications will be there on the users’ phones regularly. Working out a plan that provides to user behaviour is the key to mastering recurring push notifications. Some of the types of these push notifications are:
- Daily/weekly/monthly reminder push notifications
- Newsletter push notifications
- Event reminder push notifications
- Promotional Push notification: When a high sales or event is happening, then these promotional push notifications are the best way to grab the user attention and increase overall brand engagement. Some of the different types of promotional push notifications are:
- Flash sale push notifications
- Live event push notifications
- Limited time push notifications
- Holiday based push notifications
- Location-based push notifications: In this, the push notifications are sent based on the user’s location using the geo-fencing technology, which is a great way to make the customer experience more personal and contextual. Some of the types of location-based push notifications are:
- Nearby event push notification
- Proximity-based push notification
How to use push notification for marketing?
Even though there are several ways you can market using the push notification, here are a few marketing strategies – how your brand can engage app users:
- Send images of your business to app users to promote your business sales through the app
- Notify your customers of new products before the general release to garner the excitement and pre-orders.
- Alert the customers to the abandoned cart that links to directly to checkout to make the purchase easy.
- Share a gif with an offer to earn bonus loyalty points when purchasing something.
How to analyse push notification engagement
Try to understand how your push notification marketing strategy is performing as it is crucial to determine the success as well as planning future campaigns. Here are some of the metrics to track how push notifications are performing:
- Direct Open: The number of taps on the notification to open the app to understand which messages received the highest engagement.
- Organic Open: This is used to understand the number of times the app is opened and also the to know the app usage and benchmarking.
- Direct open rate: This is used to understand and analyse against the other marketing channels, i.e. the number of taps divided by the number of notifications sent.
- Failure: This tells the number of messages that were not delivered to the app user. Also, to understand how your message impact notification disablement.
All these metrics are used to dig in at the user-level to analyse app engagement and how it impacts your users’ bottom line.
How to Drive App Engagement With push notification?
Here are the few tips that are useful for driving the app engagement with push notification
- Give the best value using push notification: The push notification that you send should give some benefit. By seeing the notification, the user will be engaged with your app. Some value push notifications like send a discount coupon, virtual stickers, and many more. The notification that you send from your app to the user should be valuable.
- Choose the right time to send a notification: Always think for a while before posting a push notification to the users. Time should be the primary concern for sending your push notification about your app. Do you like to wake up in the midnight by vibrating your phone, flashy lights and a push message saying you have five bucks discount on your next purchase if you invite your friends? Time plays a crucial role in everyone life.
- Push something important: Never send the push notification just like that. Your push notification should be something that must carry something essential or extraordinary for the users. Don’t send any push notification if you don’t have anything to say important about your app or don’t have anything to sell.
- Everything about landing pages: Once the push notification has been sent doesn’t think that everything was done. You should ensure that users experience a new feel when opening the notification. He should direct to the respective landing pages making your customers feel welcome.
- Through test before pushing: Testing, testing, testing, have you ever heard about A/B testing? If so, please make sure to conduct such testing to validate the push notification. Push notification is the best trigger to test the web page that determines the speed.
Conclusion
Push notifications can really benefit you grow your app business and reduce your churn. Using push notifications cleverly and thoughtfully can really change the way your users see and use your app. Some of the take-away points are:
- Always think about which app engagement metrics are most important to you.
- Smartly define which aspects of your app engage your users
- Think in user point of view and provide the value to your users rather than communicating with them.
- Personalised the push notifications that you send to engage your users.
- Re-engagement is the most effective and efficient way to enhance your app revenue or bottom line
- Take the data-centric approach to engagement
By following these rules, and you will be a success on your way to creating a mobile app engagement tactics that work for your app.
Krifyis the leading mobile app development company based in India and the UK. We have already developed over 1000+ mobile applications with unique features and functionalities like GPS real-time tracking, social media integration, image gallery, multi-lingual support, and push notification. For more details contact us.
Similar Blogs
5 Ways to Improve App User Engagement with Push Notifications
