Last month, we introduced yet another power messaging channel to reach your target audience. The new eCommerce push notifications give you unique ability to reach users with special updates, sales, promotions and tailored reminders to lapsing customers. With proper usage, this channel has the potential to overtake emails in its effectiveness. Push notifications are not subjected to spam filters, nor any other form of inbox restrictions and messages are “pushed” at the point where users are active on their devices. As a result, eCommerce push notifications have 3 to 10x times higher click rates compared to standard email newsletters, and so this can boost your repeat users faster.
One question that we often encounter from our clients is how eCommerce can use push notification for marketing without being annoying. The answer is simple: keep your messages interesting and targeted! It’s particularly effective for encouraging users to re-engage or highlight time-sensitive offers. In this article, we introduce common ways eCommerce businesses can use push notifications.
5 Ways to Adopt eCommerce Push Notifications
1. Announce new offers or discounts
Push notifications are great for announcing new offers or discount on your site. Studies show that 50% of the people who opt-in for eCommerce push notification do so in order to get access to special deals. In other words, a majority of your subscribers are already looking forward to news on exclusive sales or promotions. To further boost the conversion click rates, you can feature a product category on sale that’s most relevant to the customers’ interests. For example, for customers who have previously purchased “shoes” from your store, you can feature the shoes that are on promotion to drive more clicks.
2. New Product announcements
Use push notification to introduce your new arrivals is another common way eCommerce adopts push messages. To avoid the risk of being “spam”, it’s also a good practice to segment your communication based on the customer’s past purchases.
3. Time-bound or seasonal reminders
A key characteristic of eCommerce push notifications is the real-time nature of this medium. Users who receive the notifications are already active on their device and likely ready to engage over the web browser. Consequently, it’s a great way to remind subscriber of any time-sensitive offers or expiring sales. Timing is inherently crucial for any marketing channel so push notification can make your visitors rush for the offer.
4. Price drop alerts
Price drop reminders is another form of promotional announcement. The main distinction for price drop reminder is the level of personalization. Price drop reminders often include the specific product(s) that went on sale after a visitor or customer had recently viewed it but did not purchase.
5. Personalized product suggestions
A highly targeted marketing message is one that’s effective in capturing the interest of the recipients. After all, what’s the use of suggesting “Women’s best seller” to all your male subscribers? By using a combination of segmentation and push notifications, you can generate personalized product recommendations to the right group of customers. This tactic can optimize sales conversions while preventing aggravating your opt-in customers with irrelevant messages.
Key Characteristics of eCommerce push notifications
Like all forms of marketing, understanding your target audience is the key. The good news is that the average opt-in rate for eCommerce push notifications is 46%. This means you have the opportunity to engage with your subscribers and overcoming the limitation of email communications.
However, push notifications tool come with a few unique features to be noted for effective adoption and less intrusive customer experience. Namely:
- Time Sensitivity with Scheduled Expiry. Using limited time offers that expire will increase your engagement as they instill a sense of urgency. There is no point in sending messages regarding offers that have expired. Hence, a scheduling and expiration feature that preventing the push notification from being display after the expiration is essential for time-sensitive campaigns.
- Near Real-time Access. Once opted-in, the recipient will receive the push notification on the device they have opted-in with. There’s no limitation. Hence it’s a complete game changer when it comes to accessing your audience.
- No Spam Filters (yet). Be careful with the excessive usage of eCommerce push notifications repeatedly. Excessive notifications are often intrusive and will force the users to unsubscribe. While there is no spam complaint feature for push notification yet, a high opt-out rate will eventually cause providers to examine the site for proper marketing behaviors.
- No Need to Collect Email Contacts. You can use push notification as an alternative form of remarketing to recover lost sales opportunities. Studies show that, on average, two-thirds of all orders can be recovered thanks to push notifications.
These characteristics make push notification a great channel for marketing. Moreover, by synchronizing your marketing efforts across all key channels, you will see a multiplier effect in their combined results. For example, generating an email campaign communicating a special promotion and using push notifications to remind subscribers when the promotion expires is a good combination of both channels.
ContactPigeon’s push notifications feature provides you with the necessary insights and features to effectively execute campaigns across multiple channels.
Successful use of push notifications requires a balance
Successful use of push notifications requires a combination of engaging content and frequency.
How frequently should I send push notifications?
Not everyone responds to push, they can easily annoy users if they are too frequent or aren’t providing value. 78% of users opt out if they don’t like the messages they are receiving. While there isn’t a spam filter or spam complaint yet for push notification. There is a direct correlation between frequency of notification to the number of unsubscribes.
The general rule of thumb is quality over quantity. Ideally, you should keep the reminders to under 5 per week. Since this is another message from your brand, you need to consider the customer experience as a whole, and not bombard them with notifications. However, 90% of people are willing to receive one push per week without disabling notifications. This makes experimentation relatively safe. Balance is key!
What type of content should I include?
The second key to push notification success is the use of engaging content. A rich and compact message accompanied by attractive and eye-catching images as part of your content increases its value. Send messages that are direct, appealing and, most importantly, relevant to your target audience.
Due to the size limitation of a standard notification, it’s important to get your message across in a concise yet persuasive manner. Typical chrome notification is limited to 120 characters in length. Hence, creativity goes a long way to find the best way to communicate your offerings within the allowable limits. A picture is worth a thousand words. Use the images to your advantage to support your messages and appeal to your audiences. All your target audience need is a glimpse of the notification to understand what’s in store when they click on it.
Final thoughts
Given the real-time and “push” nature of the medium, push notification is on its way to being a top marketing channel for eCommerce. In fact, based on recent studies, eCommerce industry takes lead in adopting push notification with more than 22% of push notification users opted-in to this industry.
However, like all form of marketing, creating content that’s appealing and relevant to your audience is a key success factor to push notification success. That’s why it’s important to consider push notification as part of the overall marketing strategy. By combining web behavior analytics and customer segmentation, a tool such as ContactPigeon’s marketing automation platform can help you optimize when, how and what your audience will receive from your brand. This will help you create a more consistent and higher performing customer experience across all your marketing channels.
