Push Notifications To Add To Your Marketing Strategy

You may have already heard that using push notifications for marketing can help boost your mobile app engagement and conversions.

According to Statista, “63% of 18 to 34 years often or always agree to an app’s request to receive push notifications.” The opportunity to build long-term customer relationships and high lifetime value is there.

That may be enough to convince you to develop a push notification marketing strategy. But how do you get the rest of your team or organization on board?

We’ve put together some tips to help you make the case. We’ll also show you how to set your push notification campaigns up for future success.

How to pitch your push notification strategy internally

Many businesses are afraid to test push marketing because too many pushes, or the wrong messages, can annoy app users and drive them away. However, running and testing push campaigns can help you fine-tune them to work in your favor—even reducing your churn rates.

“One of the most common ways companies seek to address mobile app churn is to use push messaging. It’s a no brainer and can be extremely effective, but push messaging can be tricky to get right,” says Patricio Robles at Econsultancy

Here are some of the benefits you can present to your team:

• Push marketing messages can be more personal than email: Your customers can instantly receive custom, personalized messages that add value to their shopping experience. These time-sensitive, one-to-one messages are received in the palm of their hand.
• Push campaigns can be hyper-targeted: With the right data collection, you can segment by different user groups. Or use geo-location targeting to attract customers into a retail store or to a pop-up store event.
• Trust and loyalty can be built through message personalization: According to a  2018 study by Edelman, “80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a company that offers personalized experiences.”
• A/B testing your campaigns can improve your message quality: Think With Google recently revealed that “69% of consumers agree that the quality, timing, or relevance of a company’s message influences their perception of a brand.”
• You can keep customers up-to-date about changes to their account: It’s especially helpful for fraud protection and other urgent matters.

After selling the proof points, outline the necessary people and teams that must be involved in the strategy and execution of push campaigns.

Who needs to own and support your push marketing campaigns

Marketing teams often take the lead on messaging, writing copy and running promos. Still, your product team must be aligned on the strategy and delivery—especially when setting up transactional pushes. Product and development teams also have to work on the backend to get everything ready before a campaign.

Sometimes campaigns are even led by the product team. Our most successful push marketing clients have a really open line of communication and all departments are always in sync.

Additionally, it’s necessary for product teams to ensure the right campaign data is being collected. Your push marketing messages can then be better targeted and tailored to different types of users, customer journeys, and more.

Other resources required for your push marketing strategy

There are several other resources that must be in place before you launch a campaign. Those resources include:

A push marketing campaign management tool

At a basic level, this software needs to not only send out push campaigns, but also create rich messages (e.g., with images and even emojis), offer automation, track results (with integrated analytics tools as described above), help you segment campaigns for customers, and more.

Creative resources (either internally or externally

You’ll need team resources who are experienced with crafting effective messages using the right text and content to drive optimal results.

Your team’s time

Plan ahead to ensure all necessary team members (as listed above) have the bandwidth to execute key deliverables before your campaigns go live.

Analytics and A/B testing software integration

To take your campaign to the next level, it helps to test whether your content is resonating with customers and provides real value. You can also evaluate the best days and times to send out messages, and the right frequency to drive app engagement without creating churn.

Once you’ve got your resources in order, it’s time to develop your push notification marketing campaign launch strategy.

Your push notification strategy template

When launching a push campaign, there are some crucial steps that need to be followed. Let’s break it down for you now.

1. Get customers to opt-in: It sounds obvious, but you need to develop a strategy to get customers to first opt-in to receive your notifications. You also have to sell the benefits of your messages up front. This post on how to increase push notification engagement will guide you through the necessary steps.
2. Have a kick-off meeting with your team: Identify key metrics and campaign goals, establish a campaign workflow and assign timelines and deliverables to everyone involved
3. Create the push notification messages and customer segments: This step involves your creative resources I mentioned earlier. Your customer segments should have already been identified in the kick-off meeting and bucketed in your push campaign manager.
4. Setup Quality Assurance (QA): To test the messages before sending them out.
5. Launch and execute your campaign: After the QA, send targeted messages to the right customers. Also, monitor your campaign to see how it’s performing.
6. Review: After the campaign ends, review and report the success of your program, and assess your overall push marketing platform partnership. Did they meet your team’s needs?
7. Iterate on successful campaign and A/B test results: Make a plan for your next campaign, using the data from your campaign analytics and A/B tests. Let’s review how to do that next.

Iterating on your best push marketing A/B test results

The fear of running mobile push marketing campaigns often correlates with how experienced and comfortable an organization is with using the communication channel.

At Taplytics, we break this comfort-level into different stages of maturity:

Level 1: This is more of an exploration and benchmarking phase. You’re doing research and trying to find out whether push marketing is right for your app. Maybe you’ve read some case studies about successful push campaigns and are ready to test the medium.

Level 2: Is when a business might create its first campaign as a blast out to all users—perhaps to notify them of a Black Friday sale. You may not have a pre-defined strategy at this phase, but you can still build on the outcome.

Level 3: Businesses at this phase might begin sending a few ad-hoc notifications out with a basic level of personalization, maybe segmenting messages to a few user groups. You might realize at this time that you’re ready to experiment and test different strategies.

Level 4: You’ll start A/B testing at this phase and want to optimize future campaigns based on in-app user behaviors after a push is sent. Before this phase, you should collect baseline data (from Level 3 pushes and beyond) to begin benchmarking new campaigns against it.

With A/B testing, you can start to look at different ways to personalize messages—sending different rich content to specific customer segments—trying to learn which time of day or days of the week are the most effective. To build-up your send list, you can also start A/B testing a few different push marketing opt-in strategies.

Level 5: This final level has an end goal of sending out one-to-one personalized messages that are specific, tailored, and relevant to users. Your messages might include someone’s first name, and details from an item that they favorited in your app (or a particular product they purchase all the time). The purpose of these messages may be to let a customer know about a new product launch or to inform them an item they liked is back in stock.

Successful push marketing campaigns rely on better insights

The success of your push marketing campaigns is only as good as the data you collect. You must evaluate both your open rates and your in-app user behavior after a campaign is sent.

The best way to do it is through integration with third-party analytics and A/B testing tools via your campaign management platform.

More data will also help you prove the ROI of campaigns and get your organization bought-in to running more push marketing messages in the future.