5 Push Notification Best Practices For Online Banking Engagement
In today’s mobile-enabled age, using push notifications to engage with consumers is commonplace. The average smartphone user receives 46 notifications every day—an account update here, a sale reminder there—so what are the best practices for push notifications to ensure your message is heard?
If you’re a marketer in the banking or financial services sector, the stakes are even higher.
Banking apps face the difficult challenge of mastering the “art” of balanced push notifications. Users expect frequent messages for account-related events, such as security alerts, significant changes to balances, and alerts for suspicious account activity. But beyond these passive status indicators, consumer expectations for marketing-oriented push notifications, like those offering additional services, are highly sensitive.
More digital services hit the market every day, and financial institutions need to stay on top of their messaging strategy to stay competitive. Understanding online banking push notification best practices ensures that you’re able to provide a balanced experience for every type of consumer.
Consumers Rely on Mobile Banking Now More Than Ever
Nearly two-thirds of all Americans use a financial services application on their mobile device, according to a recent Bankrate survey. Full-service banking applications are the most common (55%) of these applications. Citigroup found that banking apps are now the third most frequently used category of applications, closely following social media and weather categories.
And with limited in-person banking services due to the global Covid-19 pandemic, the American Banking Association finds that even more consumers have adopted digital banking:
With this growing majority of Americans using mobile or online banking, full-service banking apps represent an ideal channel to reach consumers with proactive marketing messages about banking products or services that may fit their needs.
Push notification best practices help you create and manage campaigns that can boost engagement with your service and build stronger relationships with your users.
What are Push Notifications?
Push notifications are messages that pop up on your mobile device. App publishers can send them at any time. They typically let you know about something happening in a timely fashion, like the latest sports scores or a flash sale. They’re great for engaging users and reminding them about an app to encourage higher usage. Push notifications are like SMS text messages and mobile alerts, but they only reach users who have installed your app.
What Do the Users Say?
Push notifications are a great way to solve customer problems in real-time by offering value. Push notifications don’t get caught in spam filters which could be applied in emails because they come right to the user’s phone. And unlike email, because these messages do not need an open app, they can be used to remind customers to use the app itself. As a result, they have a click-through rate of twice that of email, making them a highly effective way for users to be contacted.
Improve Your Mobile Engagement with Push Notifications
Push notifications are a direct connection to your user’s smartphone. To boost adoption rates and get the most out of this channel, you need to understand how to connect with people directly without negatively impacting their experience with your service. Using a marketing and growth automation platform like Taplytics ensures that you have the functionality to send these notifications at scale.
How to Stand Out?
By creating a personalized and targeted experience for users, you can stand out and catch their attention. Sending timely, relevant, and personalized messages to users provides them value and gives them a reason to take action from your message. Leveraging deeper analytics through running A/B tests with your messaging will also allow you to gain a deeper understanding of what performs well. Here are 5 things you can do to make your notifications stand out.
1. Target the Right User
Whether you’re notifying users about an update to their account, introducing an offer for additional services, or reminding them of an important bill—sending push notifications to the right person is crucial. Creating user personas based on your existing behavioral data helps make the process of targeting specific audiences easier.
Just keep in mind that online banking customers are very concerned about their data privacy and security. Financial organizations handle a lot of sensitive and personally identifiable information (PII), so it’s important to take that into consideration when you create these personas. Helping users understand the way you manage their personal data and how it adds value to their experience helps put their minds at ease.
Dynamic messaging that’s specific to the user’s behavior or customized to their needs is also a great way to boost engagement as it shows users that you’re invested in providing the most relevant experience possible.
2. Understand Regulatory Compliance
As with almost everything within the financial services industry, it is vital that your marking notification strategy complies with regulations. Combine that with increased concern over the types of digital data collected, and it’s easy to see how engaged consumers are with their PII and behavioral data.
Make sure you understand the implications of privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, as well as industry-specific regulations like HIPAA, as you create your push notification campaigns. These regulations specify what kind of data you can collect, as well as how that data is shared and used by both your business and any third-party integrations.
3. Send at the Correct Time
Timing is important for push notifications, especially those related to account balances or PII. Being able to connect with users at the right time not only boosts engagement but also ensures that important information is current and correct.
Let’s say you know that a certain segment of your user base needs new credit cards sent out before their current ones expire. Sending push notifications to that segment 60, 45, and 30 days before the cards are sent can help you cut down on the potential of sending cards to the wrong address.
Sending messages out based on behavior or with ample time to make changes to their account builds trust with users as well. Marketing automation with Taplytics is one way to ensure that these messages are triggered by customer behavior, like a recent deposit or an upcoming account change. Online banking users rely on timely notifications to manage their finances.
4. Have a Specific Goal in Mind
Every push notification you send has to provide value to the recipient. That value is easy to define when the notification is directly related to the actions the user takes in their account, but when you send upsells or other non-account-related information, it’s harder to ensure that value is clear.
Let’s say you’ve identified a group of users that regularly have high balances in their checking account. You know it would be valuable for them to transfer some of that balance into a high-interest savings or money market account. Then the goal of your push notification should be to recommend the type of account for that user based on their previous history with your product.
Never send a message for the sake of the message. Every push notification should have a clear call to action that can be completed by the user.
5. Test, Test, Test
Messaging, timing, personalization, and content all have big impacts on users converting towards your campaign goals. Understanding those impacts requires rigorous testing. Using A/B Testing with Taplytics, it’s easy to refine your push notification messages over time and once you understand the overall impact on engagement and revenue of your campaigns.
When you understand how to create engaging and effective A/B tests, it helps your team connect with users on a more personalized level. Each push notification you send has the potential to either add or subtract from your existing relationships, so being able to test out your content on an ongoing basis is key.
Build a Better Banking Experience
Being able to add value to the online banking experience with push notifications can have a direct impact on your ability to make users happy and retain them long-term. When you understand push notification best practices, it ensures that you can make the experience of interacting with your service valuable at every touchpoint of the customer journey.
Learn More with Taplytics
Taplytics allows you to send out personalized and timely push notifications to help keep your audience engaged with your brand.
Create and schedule your push notifications all on one platform and see your campaign’s success in real-time. Taplytics gives you the power to test your push notification’s content, visuals, and timing on your general userbase or segments of users while tracking metrics to compare performance when running A/B tests. To gather even deeper insights, you can integrate with third-party analytics tools.
Get started creating push notifications with Taplytics.