Push Notifications: How to Make Them More Effective (+Video)

One of the most used communication and engagement tools today in mobile marketing, but also on the web, are push notifications. The challenge as marketers is to get these push notifications are more effective and stand out from the competition and the other mobile communication channels that exist (SMS, email, etc.). If you want to discover some tips to achieve this, stay with me, but first of all, and in case there is someone in the room who is not aware, let's see what push notifications are.

What are push notifications?

I have to tell you that I would be surprised if you got here motivated mainly by the title of the article, and you still don't know what they are. Push Notifications. In any case, I will tell you that push notifications are lDirect messages sent by mobile application owners or managers to users of these applications with the aim of keeping these users informed and retaining them.

Once we have seen What are push notifications?Do you want to know how they can be useful to you if you ever find yourself in the situation of having to send one?

What goals can you achieve with push notifications?

• Keeping the user informed: As I indicated in the definition a couple of paragraphs above, you can use push notifications to notify the user about (upcoming) news about your app, product, company or service.
• Increase frequency of use: If you send notifications with calls to action that involve returning to your app to perform some action, You will get many users to increase the frequency of use of your app. And remember that this is a very important value to improve your positioning in the marketplaces.
• Avoid abandonment… and uninstalls of your app: closely related to frequency of use. With push notifications you can prevent your app from becoming a living dead on the verge of being uninstalled by encouraging people to return to it from time to time. Maintaining a good balance between installations and uninstallations is also key to its positioning.
• Improve ARPU (Average Revenue Per User): There are times when it is better to get more out of old customers than to spend more time attracting new ones. With push notifications you can send promotions to those existing customers and launch upselling and cross-selling actions. This way you will be able to earn more from each customer.
• Increase recommendations: Not only downloads, but also recommendations are very important when the customer has to make the decision of whether or not it is worth downloading your app. With push notifications you can ask all your users or just the segment of them that interests you the most to rate your app in the marketplaces.

Now you know What goals can you achieve with push notifications?Let's see how to improve them to make them much more effective.

How to make push notifications more effective

• Be clear about the objective before starting: Not only for sending push notifications, but for any type of action you take: if you don't know what you want to achieve, it's difficult to be able to measure the success of your action.
• Segmenting, the key to success: Sending the same message to all users is not going to work for you. Every person is different, so it is best to segment your entire audience based on characteristics they share to achieve successful notification.
• Adapt the message to the user's behavior: similar to the previous point but at “god level”. If in addition to segmenting by sociodemographic characteristics, you are able to send notifications based on user behavior Regarding the application, you will surely get a match.
• Don't burn the user: although Users are increasingly more tolerant of push notificationsIf you send too many messages, your clients may go from loving them to hating them. Try sending several messages a week, as long as you have something of value to communicate.
• Do A/B testing: Unfortunately you never know for sure if your message will work, so it is best to do it comparative tests. Conduct A/B testing with a small sample and then launch the message that works best to the rest of your audience. You'll see how your numbers just keep getting better!

What type of push notifications can you send?

• Rich Push Notifications: Not only text and images, you can also include gifs, videos and sounds in your notifications. This way, you can be much more creative.
• Onboarding: If your app or a feature of it has to overcome a certain learning curve, you could, for example, create an onboarding with gifs that guides the user through your app.
• InAPP Messages: You can also use push notifications when the user is inside your app. Send alert messages, banners, interstitials, etc. that push the user to perform the action you are looking for.

As you can see, you have more and more options to Achieving success with your push notificationsIt's up to you to take advantage of these tips and make your messages help you achieve your goals.