The Unrivalled Importance of Effective Communication Via Your Push Notifications
Out of all the various aspects of our ancestors, “History of Communications” is one of the lesser talked about topics.
And while the printing press wasn’t invented until 1448 by the German goldsmith Johann Gutenberg, if you try to think about it, the earlier methods were actually quite innovative. Right from human messengers on foot & horse backs, to pigeons, to hand illustrations, to town criers (official criers with loud voices to read proclamations to large groups of people), all of these methods were innovative as well as hugely efficient.
Now, you must be thinking, what does town criers and pigeons have to do with marketing communications.
If you notice from all the above examples, one common thing stands out — the right messaging. Which is why, there was always only one person / medium delivering the message as the chances of messages getting convoluted increase, if it passes through multiple ears.
Along with that, even timely delivery was one of the important aspects of communications at that time because of frequent wars and calamities.
Now, it won’t be wrong to say that the situation is pretty much the same even today.
Where timely, relevant and effective messages can make your business stand out and make more people take your desired actions.
But you knew that already, didn’t you!
After all, businesses everywhere are today using more contextualized and relevant means to reach their user base, employing new cutting edge technologies to nudge their buying behaviour. And you, being an informed founder, are always abreast with the latest trends that could influence your business.
One such tool today, which I’ve particularly found to be of great use, is Push Notifications. And you’ll be amazed to know about the kind of advancements it has seen over the past few years and its efficacy in engaging with your users today.
According to Accengage’s report, push notification opt-in rates across both iOS and Android platforms stand at a staggering 67.5%. And if that was not enough, according to a research by the Marketing Automation platform Localytics, push messaging not only drives 88% more app launches but drives 2–3 times higher retention as well.
Now, it’s fair to say that if you’re still not using push notifications to engage with your customers, you’re missing out on a lot, causing a loss of revenue as well as increasing your app churn rate. But you’re an informed founder and you know what’s best for your business; hence, you don’t need all this coaching on push notifications and have been using it right from the very first day of your business.
But let’s assume for a second, just for one second, that you’re pretty new to the business stratosphere and are yet to employ a push messaging service to engage with your user base.
Let’s see what all could you be missing on then.
1. Nudging Your Users From One Funnel Stage to the Next
Whatever tool you use for capturing your user data as soon as they land on your platform, the same tool must also be giving you information about where your users are in the different stages of your funnel.
Now, what good is this data if you’re not able to employ it to engage with your users and push them from one funnel stage to the next?
Push Notification is the easiest way by which you can hit your users multiple times and engage with them to move them deeper down the funnel. And you wouldn’t want to bet against that, especially when as much as 50% of app users say that they find push notifications very helpful.
Add to it that you can personalize your push messages and can also add rich media to it and you’ve just found an entirely new and hugely effective tool to engage with your users. One that you can keep iterating for better results.
2. A/B Testing
A/B Testing is that cracker of a new technology which can change the entire dynamics of your marketing communications.
Think about it. How great would it be if you’re able to communicate with your user base in the exact way they like and at the best times when they’re most likely to respond.
But how would you know which kind of messaging works most effectively in your case? What you think is great might not generate the same kind of emotion from everyone else.
That’s where A/B testing comes into the picture.
In your push notification platform, you feed in multiple variations of the messaging you want to convey to your user base, and the platform will automatically select the best one based on its open rates. In short, the platform will pick out the winner from every campaign that you create and will modify the messaging of the campaign accordingly, ensuring higher conversion.
This will make you always stay on top of your communications, with no two ways about what you want to convey to your user base.
3. Geo-fencing
Geo-fencing is one of the newest advancements in the field of push notifications. And while it has many use cases, it mostly finds its usage in proximity marketing.
The way it works is it lets you create virtual perimeters around real geographical locations and sends personalized content to users (anyone who steps inside this virtual perimeter) to either help them with information or nudge their buying behaviour, through tailor-made incentives based on their past behaviour.
One of the greatest examples of employing geo-fencing was done by Whole Foods when they partnered with location based marketing firm — Thinknear, which saw their conversion rates more than triple. Here’s the case study for it.
Employing Geo-fencing technology can help you in building location-based campaigns.
Apart from the 3, there’re many other benefits such as do not disturb hours, dynamic templating of messages, different types of campaigns, etc, that you could be missing out on, if you’re yet to use push notifications to engage with your customers.
And I’m only saying that if you’ve not done it yet. But as I’ve already mentioned that you, most seemingly, are an informed founder and know all about the effectiveness and greater use cases of push notifications today.
Hence, before I cap off my post, I’d like to talk a little about the one platform which I advocate, when it comes to Push Notification services.
In my professional career, I’ve worked on quite a number of marketing automation platforms, but the one I’ve come to like the most is WebEngage. And I’ve just three small reasons for that.
- Easier to setup campaigns
- Granularized data
- Cost effective
And they’ve really upped their game with their latest offering — An AI + ML Powered Mobile Push Notification with Geo-fencing & A/B Testing platform.
After I lobbied for it in my current company, my CEO agreed to get the subscription for the new tool (after a lot of pestering) and he’s really impressed by not just all the data points the platform helps to capture but also the smorgasbord of options the tool has given us to engage with our users.
And did I tell you that since we started A/B testing our messages on WebEngage, we’ve seen a two-fold increase in our app open rates and a marked reduction in the app churn rates?
