Maximize App Engagement With Push Notifications (Industry Examples Included)

Having high app downloads is not much good if your customers don’t use your app. Thankfully, you can increase your app engagement and help your brand play a bigger part in your customers’ lives through the judicious use of app push notifications.    

The State of App Engagement

There has been an explosion in demands for mobile apps in recent years, and global consumer spending reached US$120 billion on apps — a figure that is up 2.1x from 2016. 

Consumers love apps, as do brands. It is a great way to meet your customers’ needs and because they are on mobile devices, your customers can engage with your brand wherever they are.

However, to give your customers a reason to stick with your app, you need to craft your app engagement strategy carefully, and push notifications can be a great way to remind them about your app and what you have to offer.  

Why Use Personalized Push Notifications?

As a marketer, push notifications can be your greatest asset or your worst enemy. Using them correctly offers you a fantastic way to engage your users with personalized, timely promotions that increase their level of engagement with your brand. However, misuse them, and they can turn customers off your brand for life, increasing your churn rate and resulting in lost revenue.

Instead of just sending out generic notifications to all your customers, it is vital to make sure they are relevant to the recipient. The best way to do this? By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to gain actionable insights into your customers’ habits, profiles, needs and schedules.

AI helps you gather this information by analyzing your customers’ behaviors and interactions not only with your brand, but also on the wider web. If your customers only come to your shoe website to look at sandals, for example, and do the same on external websites, there is little point in sending them promotions on boots.

On the other hand, if they browse sneakers on external sites and not yours, it might be worth sending them a push notification highlighting your sneaker selection, in case they have overlooked it.

You can also create a unified customer view by knowing that web visits on a phone, tablet and laptop are all from the same customer, and not from three different users. This will help you with more effective targeting. Maybe a customer added an item to their shopping basket on their tablet, but didn’t complete the purchase. Why not send them an app push notification encouraging – and maybe incentivizing – them to proceed to checkout while they are using the phone in the morning?

In this way, you can make sure only sending relevant, timely push notifications that your customers are compelled to open.

Putting It Into Practice

Push notifications can create a high level of stickiness, increasing your conversion rate, without increasing customer churn. Here are some examples of the right kinds of notifications for different industries.

E-commerce

• Weather-specific. Is it sunny where some of your customers are? Why not send them a push notification promoting your sunglasses, sun hats and tanning lotion? Or if heavy rainfall is expected, you could promote your umbrellas instead.
• Price reduction. Instead of just promoting a sale, pick up on specific items a customer has clicked on, or even added to their basket and not completed the purchase, and tell them when the price drops.
• Re-engage inactive users. If your brand is struggling with customer retention, you can use an app push notification to re-engage inactive users. If they are inactive straight after installing the app, you can send them a promotional offer (say a coupon for 10 percent off their first purchase), and if they are inactive for a while after a few purchases, you could remind them of your new lines, sales offers, or even send a ‘we miss you’ coupon to entice them back.

Financial Services

• Upselling. Send your customer a push notification recommending which loans they qualify for based on their credit history and recent needs.
• Low balance. Some accounts do not come with an overdraft, meaning if customers go into the red they could face a financial penalty. A push notification will alert customers that their balance is low, so they can either curb their spending or transfer money from another account.
• Security alerts. Send alerts about potentially suspicious activities related to a customer’s account or that the account has been logged in from another device or location.

Travel

• Location-specific. Using your customer’s location will help you deliver more relevant push notifications – for example, ‘You’re just two miles away from the best steak restaurant in town’.
• Offer alerts. Having a sale on flights? Adding some new destinations? A push notification is a great way to let your customers know, especially if they have expressed an interest in them before.
• Reminders. Forgetting your passport, or to check-in online, or to work out the time difference before you travel in order to stave off jet lag can make a trip more stressful than it has to be. Reminding your customers of these – and other useful tips – will help their travels go smoothly.
  

App push notifications are a vital way to keep your customers engaged. Make sure you use them wisely, or you could do irreparable damage to your company’s reputation.

* Not sure how to create personalized push notifications to increase your app stickiness ? Chat to us now and learn how you can use artificial intelligence to identify the most valuable users and develop personalized content to boost app engagement. For more in-depth insights into a powerful app engagement strategy, download the white paper ‘From Download to Favorite: How to Engage Users Across the App Life Cycle’.