We all know them from apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, or maybe even your favorite sports team. Push notifications are little banner messages that appear on someone's lock screen or in their notification center. They are a direct way for companies to communicate with their target audience, whether it’s a flash sale, match scores, or DMs, our devices light up with push notifications 24/7.
Most people think push notifications are an app thing and only work on mobile devices. However, the truth is that they can be implemented on your website as well and allow you to push anything relevant straight to your audience's notification center, even the ones that haven’t identified themselves yet. One of the main benefits of push notifications is that they don’t get caught in spam filters or get overlooked in an inbox.
They're highly effective and can have click-through rates twice as high as email.
The basics of push notifications
To receive push notifications, your visitors first have to opt-in and give you their permission to send them these notifications. Immediately target your audience with an opt-in option from the first time they visit your website. These opt-in messages can be customized to your liking to fit your brand, tone of voice, and audience.
Once you have been given permission, the subscribers will be added to your push notifications. After this, you can send them messages and target them to return to your website for offers, push interesting content their way, etc.
There’s a restricted character limit to keep in mind when working with push notifications. If the message is too long, some of it might get lost because it won’t show up on a lock screen properly. The ideal length for optimal CTR is 10 or fewer words. You can easily shorten your messages by using emojis. This also gives it a more lively look.
The push notification family
Once your audience has allowed you to send them push notifications, you can target them properly. Treat this as a privilege because they can as quickly opt-out of the notifications as they opted-in. When your notifications have been switched off, it won’t be easy to have them turned on again. Write compelling copy and provide value to your audience. Otherwise, you’ll just be ignored and muted. There is a whole family of push notifications where each different one has a specific purpose and goal. Use them correctly, and you’ll discover they have endless opportunities in different business areas and can be that little extra reminder your unknown audience needs to convert. Let's take a closer look at the different options push notifications offer.
1. Reminder notifications
These notifications are an easy way to bring your visitors back to your website and get them to complete their conversion. Retarget them and remind them to finish what they were doing.
The most popular implementation of this push notification is used in e-commerce. You can retarget customers that have abandoned their shopping cart and redirect them to the checkout page of your webshop.
The possibilities are a lot broader than just shopping cart reminders. For example, the recruitment industry can easily use this to retarget applicants that haven’t completed their job applications. This can extend to any industry that uses forms on its website. Once your possible lead has accepted the push notifications, you can always pull them back to the unfinished form and get them to complete the conversion.
2. Informational notifications
Informational push notifications focus on nurturing your relationship with your subscribers. Use these push notifications to provide them with new information or to educate them and show your expertise on certain topics.
When looking at business opportunities, these notifications typically push relevant blog articles, ebooks, or any other lead magnet towards your subscribers. This is a way for you to build deeper connections with your audience and to shift the focus to your knowledge rather than the sole benefits of your product or service.
3. Triggered push notifications
Triggered push notifications get activated at a certain point during the buyer’s journey. These messages get sent in response to a specific action done by a user or the lack of it.
They give you a chance to follow up on your customers and actively keep them engaged with your brand. Triggered push notifications can play a major part in your automated messaging strategy.
Even though triggered push notifications are often predefined by specific data points, actions, or other triggers, it’s crucial to personalize them. Try to segment your audience and approach them differently. This way, your notification won’t feel generic, and your audience will feel personally involved. You can personalize them based on many different criteria, such as the pages they have visited. This way, the push notifications will get sent by behavioral triggers rather than the one size fits all approach.
There are two types of triggered push notification campaigns. The first one is an open-ended campaign. This is a campaign where the messaging is predefined by a sequence of messages, and the campaign will end once your subscriber has received all the messages of the sequence.
The other one is called a close campaign. This campaign has a predefined goal and automatically ends when that goal has been reached and the subscriber will leave the campaign group.
4. Interest-based notifications
Businesses can use these notifications to target specific interests from their audience. If you’re a recruitment office, you can benefit your audience with this kind of notification when using it as a job alert. The same goes for real estate agencies that have relevant new listings that they would love to show certain people in their client base.
In e-commerce, you could use these notifications to inform a segment of sneaker lovers that an exclusive new sneaker drop will be launching in a few hours, for example.
Interest-based push notifications are a great way to improve the customer experience with your brand when they offer something relevant to the specific customer segment.
5. Time-bound notifications
Time-bound notifications are pretty self-explanatory as they are notifications that offer something that has a specific time limit. These push notifications are ideal for promotions, flash sales, and hot job alerts that will only be available for a short amount of time. Communicate the urgency in your messaging to pull your audience over the edge because it’s in our human nature to avoid any possible loss.
The endless possibilities
As you can see, push notifications have endless opportunities for different industries and different purposes. They can get you to deliver that extra boost your audience needs to convert or identify themselves.
An important thing to keep in mind when using push notifications is to ensure that your opt-in messages are attractive to get people to accept your invitation. Once they have done this, it’s important to only target them with relevant notifications to avoid annoying them. This will only lead to them opting out and losing a valuable lead.
Are you ready to use push notifications and increase your conversion rate?