Push Notifications are great for engaging your audience in real time. An effective push notification campaign can help drive traffic and increase engagement.
It does sound exciting, doesn’t it? But there are things that should be kept in mind both while creating a push notification campaign and also while sending it. In this article let’s go through some steps you can take to make your push notifications more effective.
Be aware of the frequency
The first thing you should keep in mind is not to send too many notifications in a day. This is the biggest mistake you can make make with long-term effects on your subscriber base. Lots of notifications in a day may boost traffic in the short-run but this will result in more subscribers opting out over time. Even if your subscribers don’t opt-out they would become accustomed to ignoring your messages and instead of getting any meaningful engagement you would be losing loyal subscribers.
Given that Push Notifications are delivered in real time, these direct conversations with your audience can become a double-edged sword if not done right. So what’s the right number of notifications to send in a day?
This varies depending on types of service or website you are running. For ecommerce portals, one to two notifications in a day works out great. For SaaS products, these should be limited to not more than 3 in a week. For blogs, media publications and news outlets, one notification in a day should be a good starting point and it can be increased to two based on usage statistics. As a general rule, no more than 2 notifications should be sent in a day.
Make your subscribers feel special
Stop looking at your audience as a whole, each individual subscriber is unique and they had a specific interest which drew them to your website. Your push notification would therefore be relevant to a specific part of your audience, and this is where segmentation or categorization comes in. With PushAlert you can create dynamic segments based on interests, pages viewed, time of visit and other characteristics giving you an insight into user behavior and helping you create separate buckets to target the right segment of your audience for maximum conversion.
Timing is the key
Another mistake we have seen websites make is sending notifications without considering the time zone of their subscribers. Push notifications on mobiles are accompanied by vibration, sound or even both, that coupled with the screen lighting up in the middle of the night with a notification is a surefire way of alienating your subscribers.
The easiest way out of this is scheduling push notifications to choose when the notification will be sent to a particular location or time zone. A well-timed notification can be the difference between subscriber indifference and meaningful engagement.
Define and Measure the right KPIs
If you have been only measuring click through rate as a sign of engagement, you are missing out on a lot of key indicators. Tracking churn rate, alongwith best time to send a notification can be as important a driving factor to determine how to get more engagement with your push notifications. Combining this with data from Google Analytics or any other analytics tool, you can determine what your visitors are doing after arriving at your website by clicking a push notification.
To optimize your campaign you need to define the key performance indicators (KPI) that are important to your website or business. Once you have that laid out, see how they are working in conjuction with your campaigns and improve your strategy.
Be Creative
Twitter changed the conversation with its 140 character limit, people came up with witty ways to fit what they wanted to say within that limit. Push Notifications are somewhat similar, but are more flexible. You can customize the title, message as well as the image sent. So why continue with a similar pattern for all your notifications?
Break out of the mould, try different combinations of images, titles and messages. One way to automate finding the right fit for your audience is through A/B testing which lets you send two variants of the same notification and finds the one which is performing better from a random pool and sends it to the remaining subscribers.
Keeping these 5 points in mind, you can easily master push notification campaigns. Try them out on your website or progressive web app by registering for a free account here: https://pushalert.co/register.
