How to drive your ecommerce sales with desktop push notifications

Successful business communication entails tailoring messages to different types of audiences

Not so long ago, digital marketers and influencers used to make bold statements such as Email marketing is the best communication channel and shall continue to dominate for eternity. Today, the tables have turned and such statements make little business sense. Many businesses are relying on mobile and desktop push notifications to communicate and engage with different types of audiences. And importantly, push messages are agnostic to ad blockers. No wonder ads are playing second fiddle to push messages!

Unfortunately, many marketers are not fully aware of using push notification services to their advantage. The express purpose of this article is to throw light on how to drive ecommerce sales with desktop push notifications.

If you are looking forward to best practices, read on.

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1. Categorize your target audience

It’s nearly impossible to build personalized engagement with audiences if you fail to categorize your target audience. Here is how you may categorize them:

• New Users
• Retarget drop-offs
• Regular users
• Loyal audience
• Mobile audience

New users are users visiting your ecommerce store for the first time. If they leave your website without purchasing anything, browser and desktop push notifications can be used to offer various options in relevant categories.

Let’s now understand the meaning of retarget drop-offs. Retarget drop-offs are those who spend a lot of time browsing your eCommerce site but do not purchase anything. To convert them into high paying customers, you should provide dynamic feeds and personalized desktop notifications.

Coming to regular users, focus should be on re-engagement. Keep an eye on previously viewed categories and offer discounts to regular users. There’s a subtle line of distinction between regular and loyal audience. Loyal audiences purchase only from your eCommerce site or app. Regular users may not be brand loyal. They are interested in shopping, buying and browsing.

To entice loyal audiences, you must work on customer delight. The key is to offer discounts, coupons, piggyback subscriptions, etc., exclusively to loyal audiences.

Desktop push notifications will definitely resonate well with non-app and non-mobile users. To target mobile audience, you should use a software/tool which caters to mobile phones.

2. Create and execute the correct campaign

One of the many problems with digital marketers is that they have little knowledge of different types of campaigns.

If you run a drip campaign for re-targeting users who abandoned their shopping carts, you are likely to dislike the outcome. Let’s understand the different types of campaigns:

• Cart abandonment campaigns: Have your users abandoned shopping carts? Do the shopping carts have un purchased items? Emphasis should be on re-targeting and re-engagement.
• Browse abandonment campaigns? Have your users abandoned your website abruptly? Are they looking for product categories and listings? Is your site falling short of their expectations? To find answers to such questions, you should run this type of campaign.
• Trigger campaigns: These are action-based campaigns. Let’s say a prospect downloaded an Apple phone manual. You can design an up-selling campaign to entice him / her. Subsequently, you can create a cross-selling campaign and engage him / her with new product and service offerings.
• Drip campaigns: Looking to send an array of push messages using software? Use drip software / tools to your advantage.

3. Use power words in push messages

Generic words will ruin push notification campaigns. Power words will improve conversions. Power words that yield positive dividends on Google may not yield positive results on LinkedIn. It’s important to segment power words by platform. But here’s a caveat – quite a few power words can ruin push notification campaigns.

For instance, the word win has extremely poor open rate. This implies that people are skeptical of the word win. There are popular and run-of-the-mill words and phrases such as get your, do it, etc. They are gangbusters. In essence, go-to copy messages and routine templates may not be effective every time. It’s important to understand and know what to include and what not to include.

Look at your competitors’ push notifications. Know the rules. Keep experimenting and testing.

4. Focus on behavior-based sales

More often than not, marketers and ecommerce entrepreneurs fail to focus on trivial aspects. For instance, many ecommerce sites do not have a Wish list feature.

Do you want to boost conversions? You should immediately incorporate this feature. Wish lists are personalized collections of items that a customer(s) takes pride in.  Customers intend to possess them at desirable rates and ownership is what matters to them. If your ecommerce site has wish list items going on sale, it’s an effective strategy to send relevant push notifications.

Behavior based push notifications may sound fundamental. But fundamentals can help you achieve your business targets!

5. Know when to notify your target group

It goes without saying that different days have different open rates. Different times of each and every day have different open rates. Here‘s something worth your attention – According to a study by Localytics, push notifications sent between 10 AM and 1 PM can improve open rates by 66%.

Thursdays are considered propitious as they register better open rates. Of course, this may not be universally true. But be informed that different communication channels have different open rates. It’s important to keep experimenting and adapting to customer responses.

Here is a list of important actions:

• Always send personalized messages. Establish a context.
• Do NOT send irrelevant push messages. They are bound to backfire
• Do NOT bombard your prospects with an array of push messages. Too many messages will increase opt-out rate
• Respect opt-outs. Take feedback from the lost prospects. You may use a push notification software in this regard
• Use rich multi-media in desktop push notifications. For all intents and purposes, push messages shouldn’t be verbose. Brevity is absolutely desirable
• Before executing any digital marketing strategy, always define your KPIs. I generally focus on the following parameters (not an exhaustive list):
  • Customer lifetime value
  • Long term conversion
  • Return on investment
  • Customer engagement
  • Customer retention
• Always track the efficacy of your campaigns. Learn from your mistakes. Get your basics right

Driving ecommerce sales through desktop push notifications is not a mystery. It’s an art and science. If you face any difficulties in segmenting your audience, drop a line in the comments section. If you have any questions pertaining to CTRs, push notification services, and digital strategy, etc., feel free to shoot them in the comments. I shall reply in a day or two.

Keep visiting this page for informative and legitimate stuff on emerging push notification trends.