In today’s world, we all use smartphones, right? And while using our smartphone we often see notifications from various apps on our smartphone or sometimes the notifications are from websites too. These notifications pop up with updates of new products or content of any website or apps.
As consumers we mostly know that push notifications provides us information about new contents or products of an ecommerce site or app but have you ever thought how push notification can be used to drive ecommerce engagement and the benefits of using push notification for an ecommerce platform?
Well, push notifications play a very important role for e-commerce platforms to increase traffic as well as to get new consumers and to know how, you will have to stay with us till the end of our discussion. So, let’s begin with our discussion on using push notification to drive ecommerce engagement.
What is Push Notifications?
Push notifications are basically pop-up notifications displayed at users’ devices based on their uses of the device. These notifications are quick information about new products, discounts or about customer feedback sent by businesses. When a consumer uses an e-commerce app or website on their device, it allows publishers to send push notifications.
Misjudgement About Push Notifications
Before we jump into our main course, there is definitely some wrong information about push notifications we need to clear. There are a lot of brands who don’t properly understand the full potential of push notification.
They think push notification annoys the user, distracts them and pushes them to use the app less frequently. But there are several statements that say otherwise about push notifications. Let’s take a closer look at them.
- It is estimated that, depending on the industry of an application, a push notification can increase user retention by 3 to 10 times.
- A new app can boost their app activity for up to 70% in their first two to three months by push notification if the app is used accurately. When Average open rate of an email notification is 3-7%, a push notification has an open rate of 13-15% or more.
- Click rate of an app can effectively increase by push notifications. As a result, push notification can give a 33% better click-through rate with proper personalization.
- E-commerce push notifications also have so much potential and hold maximum benefit globally. With these notifications alone, some businesses have reported a 3500% ROI.
Where Push Notifications Are Effective To Increase Online Sales?
Consumers are becoming more dependent on online shopping day by day and they seek value from ecommerce platforms. This is a great opportunity for ecommerce platforms to maximize their progress.
You have to come up with the best price or best product to meet the demand of your consumers. Push notifications are effective to stimulate online sales and increase engagement between brands and consumers in both e-commerce apps and websites.
Mobile App
In today’s e-commerce, mobile apps are the most important source for brands to increase engagement. Mobile apps are gaining more popularity day by day because of the convenience they offer. Although consumers may have different preferences, some of them find websites better and some of them don’t, but it would be a foolish decision to remove the importance of mobile apps for ecommerce.
Mobile apps give brands the ability to send push notifications at certain times and targeted consumers to generate sales. Almost 60% of the app users keep push notification enabled of an ecommerce app on their device.
For example, if an ecommerce app has 1,00,000 installs from google play store, 60,000 of those are enabled with push notification which impacts in generating more sales.
Web
Mobile apps have various importance for brands but in absence of an app, push notifications boost the engagement and visit rate of a website as well as it helps an e-commerce site to boost revenue too. As a result, push notifications can boost the unique visitor rate of a website by 25-35% which is beneficial for a site to increase their sales and to get popularity.
Push Notification: What Are The Benefits?
Boost Engagement
We all use our phones or computers everyday right? At least once a day we use apps or browsers on our devices. You can send push notifications at that time to let your consumers know about new deals, new offers, discounts or whatever services you have for your consumers.
This will encourage many users to visit your app or website, check your products or use any of your offers. There is a chance that if you can come up with a good quality product with great value, people often make the transaction within their first visit at your website or app.
Increase Open Rate
As a result, push notifications have a better chance to be opened compared to email notifications. Push notifications have 50% more open rate than an email notification.
We are not saying that email notifications are not important, obviously email notifications have their own advantages and no one can disagree with that but you can’t ignore the boost or power of push notification. In order to improve your business and generate more sales, you should make proper use of both of them.
Drive Registration
With the help of push notifications and web notifications, the percentage of user registration will increase and it will decrease the amount of anonymous users. The more a brand gets registrations, the more it has a chance to do in-depth research about their consumers. Registrations also help brands to engage with their consumers in multiple platforms such as email, sms or even on their socials too.
Time Efficient
Push notifications save a lot of time. When a brand sends a push notification to their user, they have the opportunity to immediately analyze the action of that user with the notification. Also help brands to know what attracts their consumers and what not.
On other types of marketing methods you have to wait for a long time to analyze the response of a consumer which is now much easier with push notifications because you can do the same thing immediately, without waiting for a long time.
Optimize Retention
There are thousands of situations like this when a user is not interested in your products or services. With push notifications, you can retain those users back.
Say a customer has not interacted with your brand app or website for a while. With an interesting and attractive push notification, you can again pull him back to your brand.
Decrease Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment, which is a common problem for e-commerce brands and publishers. Consumers add products and services to their cart but for some reason they sometimes abandon the cart and forget to make transactions and place the order.
If a consumer abandons a cart and for some reason forgets to make their purchase, a push notification can make the work done. A push notification can directly guide the consumer to return to the cart and make the transaction complete.
Types Of Push Notifications
Push notifications are based on various things to recommend to consumers any product or services. Let’s discuss some of the types of push notifications for product recommendation.
Based On The Behave Of The User
Users may get discouraged to visit an ecommerce website or app if the notifications are not informative and attractive enough. In that case, notifications can be an annoying thing for users.
A user’s previous shopping history is used to determine app notifications based on their behavior. Most of the users are likely to buy the same category products on their last visit to the app or website.
For example, if a user is buying a romantic poetry book, there are chances that the user may buy products from the same genre or same author which allows brands to keep targeted consumers.
Based On Information
Push notifications can be based on the age, location or gender of individuals because not every product is for everyone and you have to make sure that you provide the right information to the right consumer.
For example, if a brand sells fitness goods, it won’t be beneficial for the brand to send notification about women’s workout outfits to a man.
Similarly, if a brand sends recommendation notifications about winter outfits in a humid location, it wont work.
Based On Time
According to some research, the opening rate of push notifications can impressively increase if the notifications are sent at the proper time. Mostly ecommerce has a better chance to get responses during afternoon or evening.
Although it totally depends on the app’s genre and use case. For example, music apps are likely to get more responses during evening and night. On the other hand, food delivery apps have a better chance to get responses during meal hours such as breakfast, lunch or dinner time.
Brands should utilize the use of time to maximize getting responses on their app.
Common Mistakes To Avoid
Now that you know where push notifications are used, types of push notifications and the benefits that come from push notifications for a brand, it’s important to know about some of the common errors or mistakes you need to avoid while using push notifications.
Don’t Use Irrelevant Information
As a result, people look at these notifications for a few seconds only. Which means you have to utilize the very little attention from your consumers.
Don’t use any irrelevant CTA or information in your notification. You need to keep the notification attractive and at the same time the notification needs to be brief too.
You can use ‘offer’ or ‘discount’ or similar words to attract your customers from the push notifications.
Don’t Be Dull
Simple and dull notifications can be missed easily by the users. You need to do it attractively to make a point for the users. As a prediction, using emojis and rich texts can increase the click rate of a push notification for 20-30%.
At the same time, if a push notification contains a photo of a product or any attractive graphical design, it can increase the CTR rate by 35-40%.
Don’t Overdo
Push notifications can attract consumers to your ecommerce app or website but overdoing them can surely make a user lose interest from your ecommerce app. Users get annoyed and distracted when they receive too many notifications. It is ideal to send 2-3 notifications a day depending on users preferences, age, locations and some other factors.
Also, some apps scam their users with their false notifications which is the worst. Keep your notifications real and similar to the services you are going to provide them.
Deficit Of Testing
Sending a notification without testing the preferences of a consumer will cost you time and money both, but it won’t bring any benefit for you. A/B testing plays a very important role in these types of situations.
Run a test on what your user wants or what they are looking for. If your user is searching for winter outfits then you can send them notifications about offers on hoodies or sweatpants. This will attract them toward the app.
Run these tests on various groups of consumers and collect those data and add your theory with it and you will get a better success rate. Take these push notifications live once you have sufficient data.
Final Words
There is no doubt that push notifications have the capability to provide brands extra disclosure as well as the opportunity to increase the amount of sales too. Push notifications are a great option for engaging with consumers more frequently and attract them toward the ecommerce app or website by providing them offers and discounts.
E-commerce platforms are the most beneficial platform for brands to generate additional revenue and push notification plays a huge and important role in this.
We hope our article above will be helpful enough for you to use push notifications to drive ecommerce engagement.