12 Sep 3 Smart Strategies That Create The Best Push Notifications For Your Users
It doesn’t really matter what your business is, or what industry you operate within; the fundamental basis of every business is to provide a product or a service to a group of individuals. Knowing more about these individuals is what makes for the best push notification strategies.
We’ve already talked about the value of push notifications in today’s fast-paced business world, and we’ve touched on how to craft a strategy which best serves your goal.
However, we’d like to delve a little deeper into the practicalities of what makes the best push notifications, those that your audience actually want to engage with.
The Best Push Notifications
Before diving into a push notification strategy, we need to ask ourselves three vitally important questions.
The answers to these questions will provide the necessary foundation for our campaign and are the best building blocks to success.
Who Is My Audience?
You’ve heard of the spray and pray technique, right? Well, that’s absolutely not what you want to do in this instance.
Those marketers or business owners that think that a successful campaign is a “numbers game” are setting themselves up for a big spend and not much to show for it.
Winning push notification campaigns are rooted in a personalised message. This requires knowing:
- Your user’s name
- Their age groups
- Their location
- Their parental status
- Their income brackets
- Their job titles
- What they are interested in reading, playing or viewing
- How they spend their leisure time
Once you have this information or at least some of it, you will find that you can write a message that feels like it was penned just for that person.
Compare these two messages as an example:
“15% off seafood tonight at XYZ Restaurant!” sent to all registered users at 8 am as a bulk send.
Or…
“Hey Jack <first name> we are offering our valued customers <he’s been here before> 15% off all seafood dishes <he likes seafood!> this evening<message is sent late afternoon so he has time to action it>. Come and watch the game <Jack follows provincial rugby> and enjoy the warm comfort <Jack lives in Cape Town and it’s freezing today> of our restaurant with your family <Jack is married with two children>. Book now <clickable phone number because Jack uses his mobile most of the time>
It’s a bit of a no-brainer to consider which message is more compelling, relevant and personal to Jack.
Talking to the right people at the right time is an essential first step.
How Can I Segment My Audience?
Segmenting your audience goes hand-in-hand with your learnings about these individuals. And it’s an incredibly useful tool!
You can segment your users into subgroups by pretty much any trackable metric.
- Location
- Age
- Interests
- Gender
- Interaction rate
- Comments
…and the list goes on.
Ultimately, you are working to craft the best push notification for that particular individual. This means it needs to be relevant, timely and have value.
Once you are speaking to a group of people based on who they are, how they interact with your business, and what they are interested in, then you can hone your message down even further.
How Best to Test & Measure?
If you are putting in all this effort to get to know your audience and crafting the best messages that you can, then the next step is a logical one.
Test and measure.
They say that the only constant thing in life is change, and that holds true for your audience. You will gain some subscribers and you will lose some – churn is part of the package. Your audience segments will evolve and become more specific as you glean more information from them over the lifetime of your relationship.
We know this, but do we do anything about it?
Before embarking on a push notification campaign, ask yourself these questions:
- What is my goal?
- What do you want your users to do after each notification?
- Where do you want to position them in the journey?
- How do I measure success?
- Are your users re-engaging? Or are they opting out?
- How do I measure failure?
- Uninstalls, opt-outs and a lack of engagement should be carefully measured as well as all the great things that are happening with your campaign.
Once you know what your KPIs are then you will know what you track.
If engagement is your priority then you’ll be looking for comments, shares, questions, etc. If you want sales, take a look at your balance sheet at the end of the month. You get the picture.
The Best Notifications in a Nutshell
While we certainly recommend following a deliberate and often technical path to crafting the right messages for your push notifications, we would encourage you not to forget the human element.
A message may be useful…but boring!
Inject personality, humour or novelty into your messaging to ensure that your messages aren’t overlooked in the sea of information that comes at your users every hour of every day.
Need help? Contact the Panacea team for more information on getting your push notification campaign off to a rocking start.
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