As an e-commerce business in an unquestionably competitive market, you need a powerful 24×7 presence to engage your customers. This becomes even more pertinent in an era of consumers spending a staggering amount of time on their phones. To give your sales a push, you must provide your customers with a slight nudge in the right direction.
Push notifications are a powerful way to reach users with promotions, updates, reminders, and customized offers. Their importance in driving sales is evident from the fact that push notifications boost app engagement by as high as 88%. Because spam filters do not regulate them, these notifications are “pushed” to where users are active on their mobiles. This is perhaps why they enjoy a 3-10x higher click rate than emails.
What e-commerce players would do well to remember is that when users opt-in to receive notifications, they trust a brand to send them good communication. When they receive a flurry of irrelevant messages, they soon resort to cherry-picking and, worse, ignoring notifications. Brands must make their messages customized, relevant, and valuable. If used well, this channel can potentially beat email and traditional modes of marketing. Check out these innovative push notification campaigns and engage your customers in a significant way.
Personalized Campaigns
Your e-commerce app can be a treasure trove of valuable data that can be used to assess customer preferences for creating personalized notifications. Once you’re past the hard work of bringing the customer to your store, you need to segment them based on preferences and behavior. This is important to craft a targeted push campaign surrounding new products, items similar to previous purchases, sales, etc.
Wal-Mart’s app uses data from previous purchases, both offline and online, to suggest products that might be of interest to users. The app also pushed notifications about sales from brands that users have previously purchased. This method has made the company’s sales, increasing customer retention to 100%.
An excellent source of information is a user’s browsing history. Amazon is a trailblazer pushing personalized messages based on a customer’s purchase and browsing history. Your push notification campaign can similarly be based on a user’s browsing history – if they have browsed a category several times in a short period, upselling based on a recent purchase, and so on.
Abandoned Cart Campaigns
Source: Braze
Cart abandonment is an all-too-familiar scenario in eCommerce. A customer visits your app, browses through it, and adds items to their cart but leaves without making a purchase. This could be simple forgetfulness, distraction, apprehension about the purchase, or other reasons. Research indicates that, on average, 1 in 4 users will abandon their carts which is a loss for an eCommerce business. A simple solution for this is push notifications, which can be used to convert these likely buyers into customers. While emails see an average CTR of 1-3%, push notifications (for browsers) are wildly successful at 5-30%.
Implementing push notifications is especially useful for increasing revenue using cart abandonment campaigns. Customers could be lured with additional discounts, free shipping, etc.
Reminder Campaigns
Source: WebEngage
A great way to demonstrate your app’s value to customers is through thoughtful reminder messages. Please send them push notifications to remind them of items saved on a wish list, credit card limits, a sale ending, etc. Crucial to eCommerce brands are reminders about deals that are running. Send reminders about upcoming sales, coupon expiration, last-minute reminders, etc. Of course, recipients must find this information valuable, not annoying. To do this, you will need to collect enough customer data to craft targeted reminders.
Time-Sensitive Campaigns
When you’ve got to get the word out at the right time, there’s no better way to do it than push notifications. Because timing is critical for a marketing channel, use your push campaigns to have customers rush to your store. It could be a one-time-only deal ending, the start of a holiday sale, or limited edition items available for a short time. Your time-sensitive push campaigns could include messages about the last chance to participate in a sale, welcoming a new season with fresh arrivals, announcing a holiday sale, etc. Festivals are naturally a great time for e-commerce. So use this opportunity to attract existing and potential customers with discounts and offers. Do set a high relevance bar for these campaigns; customers will end up frustrated if they’re bombarded with “time-sensitive” messages that offer no value.
Location-Based Campaigns
Location-based push campaigns are beneficial for eCommerce brands to increase engagement and monetization. When a customer is near your location, you could send a notification reminding them to use a coupon or avail of a special in-store discount. Send context-specific notifications to drive sales – customers browsing through a specific category receive a discount code. If used heedlessly, they may end up annoying customers. Make your messages relevant by personalizing them for customers based on their behavior and interests, apart from their current physical location. Observe some discretion in putting such campaigns together, and you can increase your customers’ receptiveness to such messages in the future.
Weather-Based Campaigns
Source: Braze
Weather-based targeting has been around for a while and is an undeniably effective tool for fashion brands to use weather changes to their advantage. French Fashion retailer La Redoute grabbed eyeballs for setting up a dynamic billboard where the model’s clothing changed according to the weather.
To improve sales for your eCommerce brand, target a particular geo-location to push notifications. Start with integrating a weather-targeting API into your marketing automation platform. You could create unique weather-related triggers to create a compelling push campaign. For instance, you could promote winter wear when it starts to snow, summer apparel offers to customers in an area experiencing a rising temperature, and so on.
Price Drop Campaigns
Who doesn’t love a good bargain? Price drop notifications are a great way to encourage users to buy a product they’d previously viewed but not purchased. Price drop notifications are especially effective when the price of an item in a customer’s wish list has gone down. eCommerce brands could further attract customers by creating segments based on user actions. For instance, sending messages to customers when the price of an item in their cart goes down or the price of a frequently-interacted-with category drops.
Design Innovative Push Campaigns for Marketing
A marketing strategy that has gained ground with the penetration of mobile devices, push notification campaigns are an effective way to target your customers on mobile. Naturally, push notifications should be integral to your broader marketing campaign. Because loyal customers generally view these push notifications, incentivize them to buy more by combining them with in-app messages, emails, videos, and other channels.
These are a few innovative ways to use your push notification campaigns to engage your target audience better. All it may take for a customer to make a purchase is a bit of timely encouragement. Customized push notification campaigns benefit businesses and drive more traffic than email notifications. You can easily integrate push notifications on your Shopify mobile store. Plobal Apps can help you design an app with built-in push notification features so you never leave a customer behind.
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