Push Notifications – Best Practices – The Future of Marketing Campaigns

Recently, Google identified push notifications as a major marketing trend that marketers can no longer ignore. In the GDPR era, where customers dislike being bombarded with unsolicited messages and emails, push notifications have emerged as a powerful alternative because they are based on permission marketing. As a result, more and more brands are adopting push notifications, and the Scal-e platform helps them make this strategy their own.

A push notification is a message that appears on a user’s mobile device or computer and prompts them to take action. People are much more likely to forget about the exceptional offers you promoted some time ago via email, or about the shopping cart they abandoned after adding several items. Receiving notifications has become a habit: users glance at them and, if they’re interested, they tend to act immediately after receiving the message.

At Scal-e, we want your customers to stay informed about your latest offers and to be reminded of the items waiting in their cart. Sending push notifications can be a highly effective way to communicate. With email open rates rapidly declining, notifications are an excellent way for businesses to interact with users and reduce unsubscribe or churn rates.

Why Are Push Notifications Important for Your Marketing Strategy?

The goal of push notifications is to help you build a loyal community of customers around your brand and, of course, to encourage them to use your products or services. Let’s look at why a marketing strategy that includes push notifications really matters, and how it can benefit your brand.

Better Reach

Using push notifications allows you to reach your audience wherever they are and share real-time updates about your products. Unlike other marketing channels, where people have to be active on a specific website to see your message, push notifications ensure you can reach them regardless of the website, browser, mobile app, or channel they’re using at that moment. This instant distribution also helps you avoid the clutter of social feeds and inboxes. The real added value of push marketing lies in the immediacy of the message.

Higher Engagement Rates

Push notifications are calls to action. They’re highly effective at driving traffic to your website and boosting engagement. In fact, it’s reported that push notifications can increase click-through rates by up to 700%.

Higher Retention and ROI

Push notifications don’t just increase traffic and engagement; they can also be a powerful lever for driving sales. One reason is that push notifications guarantee impressions because they are triggered only when the user is active. When done well—with personalization and compelling copy—push notifications can increase retention rates by up to 93% and boost ROI by as much as 3,500%.

Strategies to Make Them More Effective

Mobile is the most performance-driven platform, so you don’t need to guess—but everything starts with a solid plan. Mobile app marketers know this, yet they often fail to design a compelling push notification strategy for their app and, as a result, miss a major opportunity to strengthen retention.

Best Practices for Sending Push Notifications

When defining your push notification strategy, think about:

• The different triggers you can use for push notifications.
• The specific user behaviors you want to target.
• The objectives you want to achieve with push notification marketing.

The smarter and more relevant your triggers, the more likely users are to react.

Types of Push Notifications to Personalize in Your Campaigns

• Location-based notifications: send a simple push notification when users enter or leave a specific location.
• Informational notifications: can take the form of reminders, alerts, updates, or informational messages.
• Win-back notifications to re-engage users: alert users to exclusive offers, giveaways, or sales.
• Scheduled push notifications: sent to users once, on a specific date and at a specific time.
• Rating/survey notifications: surveys are an excellent way to gather user feedback and improve the customer experience.
• Order notifications: keep customers informed about the status of their orders.
• Lightweight or fun notifications: let you send users a little love with fun and entertaining messages.

Using push notifications in your digital marketing strategy creates a bridge between your brand and your customers, helping you keep users engaged and loyal. They should therefore be used thoughtfully—without crossing the line into spam—and strategically, so you can fully unlock their potential and get the most value out of push notifications.

Looking to add a new communication channel to your marketing stack? Our CDP (Customer Data Platform) Scal-e enables optimal customer data management and the deployment of all the marketing channels you choose from over 30 options (email, SMS, mobile wallet, social networks, messengers, and more). Want to talk?