6 Ways to Optimize Your Push Notifications to Get More Out of Your Mobile Marketing Campaigns
Push notifications can be a powerful tool for marketers, but they can also quickly become an area of waste when done wrong.
If you’re sending irrelevant content that doesn’t catch the reader’s attention, you might just be adding to the noise and wasting your time. That’s why it’s so important to take the time to learn how to optimize your messages better when it comes to launching a successful mobile marketing campaign.
In this article, we’ll help you do just that. By looking at six different ways you can improve your current push notifications, you will identify new opportunities to wow your audiences and increase engagement rates.
You’ll also leave with a list of platforms that can help make managing your mobile marketing channels easier.
Here’s a look at what’s ahead:
- How push notifications can help improve your mobile marketing campaigns
- Six ways to optimize your push notifications for higher performing campaigns
- Ten mobile marketing platforms to help further optimize your campaigns
How Push Notifications Can Improve Your Mobile Marketing Campaigns
Push notifications are a great way to engage with your audiences and drive users back to your mobile app. They can also be used to help build relationships with your customers to increase retention and grow loyalty.
Push notifications can help increase app retention by 3-10 times.
There are a number of different ways that push notifications can help to improve your mobile marketing campaigns. Here are a few that you’ll want to keep in mind:
- A way to increase users engagement
- Messages bring people back to your app
- You can re-engage inactive users
- Send highly personalized and targeted messages
- Instant delivery to your customers most used device
- Drive users down the sales funnel and encourage purchases
All in all, push notifications are a very effective way to reach your audiences and increase app engagement. By sending messages with the right content, at the right time, to the right customer, you can make a significant impact on the success of your mobile marketing campaigns.
6 Ways to Optimize Push Notifications For Higher Performing Campaigns
Are you finding that your push notifications aren’t performing quite at well as you had hoped? Then it might be time to look at new ways to optimize your messages. Luckily, there are a number of things you can do that can make a big impact on the success of your campaigns.
In this section, we’ll take a look at six things you can do to optimize your messages to increase your push metrics from open to engagement rates. From adding personalization to your messages to integrating rich and dynamic content — you’ll leave with plenty of ideas on how to improve your campaigns.
- Use Customer Data to Send Personalized Messages to Your Subscribers
Personalization has quickly become a buzz topic in the marketing industry. It’s something that consumers have come to expect from brands, which means you can’t ignore the power of adding personalization to your marketing campaigns — including your mobile push notifications.
61% of people expect brands to tailor experiences based on their preferences.
A few of the common things customers expect businesses to know about them include their name, location, purchasing history, and product interests.
Knowing what your customers expect from you and actually delivering on that are two different things, but it doesn’t have to be a painstaking process.
While you might not be sending push notifications about flight updates and gate changes, this is an excellent example of how personalization can work. Simply identify specific content elements that can be changed based on each subscriber’s profile, and they’ll receive a push notification created for them. Image courtesy of Accengage.
There are a number of different ways that you can tailor your push notifications, here are just a few examples of how you can accomplish this:
- Use the subscriber’s name
- Share content relevant to their location
- Send transactional and trigger messages based on real-time interactions and data
- Let users know when the products they were browsing are back in-stock
Adding personalization to your push notification strategy is a good business decision. According to Epsilon, 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences. The more you personalize your mobile content, the higher chance you have of increasing sales and revenue.
- Get the Timing Right When Sending Push Notifications
Nothing is more annoying than being woken up at 5 am on a Saturday morning to an irrelevant push notification from an app you forgot you installed. On the other hand, receiving a notification from your favorite about an upcoming sale (at a reasonable time of day) can be exciting news.
Knowing who your audience is and understanding when to send your push notifications can significantly impact how successful your campaigns are. It could be as simple as keeping track of where your customers reside so you’re not sending them that message at 5am or learning what days typically bring the highest engagement.
These are a few of the things you’ll want to consider when determining the right time to send your push notifications:
- The timezones that your customers are located in
- The days and times do your audiences engage with your content most
- The frequency and amount of notifications you are sending
In a time when 50% of users find push notifications to be useless, you need to find ways to make your messages stand out. People are quick to disable push notifications or uninstall apps if they are being bombarded with messages or don’t find them relevant to their needs.
Sending too many push notifications can annoy your subscribers and cause them to disable notifications, but sending not sending enough could make your brand out of sight out of mind. Finding the right balance will take time but is an important step for successful campaigns. Image courtesy of Business of Apps.
By putting together the personalization factors we just discussed and knowing when to send your messages, you can set your campaigns up for success. The more relevant and timely the push notifications you send to your customers are, the higher engagement you’ll see.
- Increase Engagement with Location-Based Push Notifications
The idea of location-based push notifications is to create automated messages that are sent to app subscribers when they are in a specific location. You may have heard the terms geofencing or geotargeting to describe this type of mobile push notification as well.
When using geofencing technology, you set a radius ranging anywhere between 1 and 10,0000 meters that triggers a message to be sent to a user when they enter or leave that location.
Sending these types of push notifications allows you to interact with your subscribers in real-time with relevant content.
An example of how you might use location-based notifications is by sending messages to customers who are near your physical location. Encourage them to stop in and check out your new products or take advantage of a current sale.
Adding location-based notifications to your mobile marketing strategy just makes sense if you’re already using push notifications and can target audiences when they’re close to your physical location and drive more traffic to your store — why wouldn’t you take advantage of this feature.Image courtesy of Dynamic Yield.
As with any mobile tactic, you need to keep in mind that you don’t want to spam your subscribers.
Make sure to carefully identify where and when you want to use geofencing to reach your customers. You don’t want them to receive multiple notifications from your app by walking into different targeted areas.
Using location-based push notifications is a great opportunity to reach your customers in real-time, increase app engagement, and drive increased revenue.
- Incorporate Rich Notifications Into Your Campaign Strategy
Rich notifications are push notifications that can include photos, videos, gifs, audio, and interactive elements. Adding these additional elements to your push notifications can make your messages eye-catching and grab the attention of your subscribers.
They do say that a photo is worth a thousand words, so why not take advantage of that and integrate one into your upcoming push notification? Rich notifications are a quick and easy way to grab your subscriber’s attention and increase engagement. Image courtesy of Business2Community.
Think about it this way, if you received two notifications, one with just text and one with an image or moving GIF, which are you more likely going to pay attention to? That second message with the visual element will most likely stand out and intrigue you to learn more.
Using rich push notifications in your mobile marketing campaigns can increase your direct open rates by 56%.
While rich notifications are a great way to engage with your audiences, there are still a few considerations you’ll want to make.
For example, there are some limitations based on the type of phone your subscribers use. Knowing this means that you should always add alternative text and detailed captions to your rich media notifications in the event that the imagery cannot be displayed.
Although these types of messages may require a bit of extra spending and time investment, they’re well worth it. Optimizing your push notifications by adding rich notifications to your strategy will directly improve the success rate of your campaigns.
- Send Triggered Push Notifications Based on User Behaviors
Triggered push notifications are messages that are sent to a user based on real-time customer data, behaviors, and interaction. These messages are much more likely to be welcomed by your customers because they are timely and relevant to their needs.
For example, if you were recently shopping and left an item behind in your cart, you might receive a triggered notification to remind you of that product. You may have forgotten about the item, and that notification might be all it takes for you to go back into the app and complete your purchase.
48% of mobile app users made an in-store purchase after receiving a push notification that was triggered by profile data.
There are tons of different ways to integrate triggered push notifications into your mobile marketing campaigns. From sending recommended products to creating customized messages based on customer data — you can use triggered messages to increase relevancy and user engagement. Image courtesy of Dynamic Yield.
But triggered messages don’t all have to be transactional in nature. In fact, there are a few different types of triggered push notifications you can implement as a part of your mobile marketing strategy:
- Re-engage lapsed users
- Abandoned cart alerts
- Time-sensitive discounts
- Price drop alerts
- New user acquisition
- Restock alerts
While these are just a few examples, the possibilities are endless when it comes to creating triggered messages. You can always find new customer attributes or interactions that will fit perfectly into your mobile marketing strategy.
At this point, you might be wondering about what benefits come with creating triggered push notifications. Well, here are a few perks you can expect to see:
- The ability to re-engage inactive subscribers
- Drive users further down the purchasing funnel
- Increase brand value and customer loyalty
- Metrics that are easy to track and understand
By choosing to integrate triggered push notifications into your campaign strategy, you’ll be providing your customers with highly relevant and personalized messages. This will, in turn, increase engagement and conversion rates.
- Integrate Dynamic Content to Increase Relevancy
First, let’s define dynamic content.
Dynamic content is a message that has various elements that can be changed based on customer data. In its simplest form, dynamic content can be something like adding a user’s name to the message, but with the right data, you don’t have to stop there.
Integrating dynamic content into your messages can increase open rates by 5.7%.
Using dynamic content will help improve the personalization of your messages and grab your customers’ attention. Because these types of messages have personalized content, they feel more timely and relevant to your audiences — resulting in higher engagement rates.
When compared to traditional broadcast and even segmented campaigns, dynamic content outperforms them all. But to really make an impact, combining segmentation and dynamic content will really set your campaigns up for success. Image courtesy of Business of Apps.
Here are a few examples of how you can add dynamic content to your mobile push notifications:
- Start simple — add the subscriber’s name
- Share location-based messages
- Include order or purchase details
- Change imagery based on user interests
- Send product recommendations based on browse behaviors
Dynamic content is a great option when looking for ways to optimize your push notifications, and the best part is you already have everything you need to do it. You’re already collecting customer data and sending messages to your app subscribers, so why not make these two things work together for an improved experience.
Tools to Further Optimize Your Mobile Marketing Campaigns
When it comes to optimizing your push notifications and launching successful mobile marketing campaigns, having the right tools can make all of the difference. From making the message design and creation step simple to automating user workflows and sending personalized triggered notifications — it can all be done.
In this section, we’ll provide you with a list of ten mobile marketing platforms that can help you take your push notification efforts to the next level.
- Listrak
Listrak is an integrated digital marketing platform that helps businesses maintain everything from email and mobile push marketing to predictive personalization and cross-channel orchestration. When it comes to push notifications, this platform will allow you to create, manage, and orchestrate all of your needs from one central location.
When it comes to mobile marketing, you need a partner that can handle sending messages across multiple platforms, device types, and operating systems. With Listrak, you have the tools in place to ensure your messages are sent, seen, and interacted with — no matter what operating system a user has.
Mobile Marketing Capabilities:
- A mobile app push message composer that allows you to create new messages and see real-time previews easily
- Contact management dashboard where you can edit, maintain and manage your subscriber data
- Measure and track push campaign success with reports that include metrics on clicks, average order value, revenue, and more
- Integration with mobile app push software development kits for both Android and iOS
Pricing: Price is customized and based on business needs
Current Customers: Kirkland’s, Soft Surroundings, TULA, Rainbow
Website: https://www.listrak.com/
- AppsFlyer
AppsFlyer is a mobile marketing platform that focuses on providing customers with accurate data while keeping a customer-centric approach. It can help you manage all of your mobile marketing needs, from attribution tracking to deep linking and campaign reporting.
By understanding who your users are and where they are engaging with your content, you can send them down the right user journey. Then, once they have downloaded your app, the ability to incorporate deep linking into your mobile push strategy will help you see higher success rates.
Mobile Marketing Capabilities:
- Deep linking technology to improve the customer journey and make the most out of each digital touchpoint
- Audience management tools including intelligent segmentation, data visualization, and audience insights
- User acquisition and attribution tracking to pinpoint what campaigns attracted new app installs
- Analytics and dashboards to help you understand what campaigns are high performers and which ones need attention
Pricing: There are three plans available: the Free plan, the Growth plan that is a pay as you go plan, and the Enterprise plan that is customized based on business needs
Current Customers: eharmony, McDonald’s, TikTok, Nike
Website: https://www.appsflyer.com/
- Leanplum
Leanplum is a digital marketing platform that provides businesses with the ability to create multi-channel customer engagements and message optimization. Whether you’re looking for a platform that provides you with content management capabilities or need to develop customized journeys — Leanplum can help you achieve these goals.
Leanplum makes creating mobile push notifications easy. With the tools you need to draft your message, add imagery, and build custom user flows, you’ll quickly see an improvement in the success of your campaigns.
Mobile Marketing Capabilities:
- Content management tools that include personalization, message templates, and preview environments to eliminate errors
- Mobile app UI and UX assistance to make customized experiences simple and include elements such as image, buttons, and more
- Workflow tools to move subscribers through their journey on the path you want them to take, from push notification to in-app purchase
- Optimization and reporting capabilities to help you better understand your audiences and improve future campaigns
Pricing: Price is customized and based on business needs
Current Customers: TED, MyPostcard, Tesco, GameDuell
Website: https://www.leanplum.com/
- Insider
Insider is an AI-powered growth management platform that helps businesses manage various channels, including mobile apps, web, messaging, email, and additional advertising channels. Adopting Insider can help improve your campaigns with personalization, rich notifications, send-time optimization, and more when it comes to push notifications.
Never miss an opportunity but understanding the interest and engagement data of each individual customer. Historical behaviors will allow you to identify the most optimal time to send messages and categories of interest.
Mobile Marketing Capabilities:
- Leverage highly personalized rich push notifications that stand out to subscribers and boost open rates
- Segment and target audiences to provide more compelling and relevant app experiences
- Integrate dynamic content to incorporate personalization into each message sent automatically
- Utilize the InTime feature to send messages to subscribers at the most optimal time to increase engagement
Pricing: Price is customized and based on business needs
Current Customers: CNN, Samsung, New Balance, Puma
Website: https://useinsider.com/
- Branch
Branch is a digital marketing platform designed to help businesses grow and increase end-to-end user engagement across all devices, channels, and platforms. Using Branch can help you attract new subscribers and increase engagement from various other platforms you’re already using for mobile push.
The key to a successful mobile marketing campaign is to continue to find and engage with new audiences. With the right tools, this process doesn’t have to be another burden on your marketing teams. Make the most out of the channels you’re already using.
Mobile Marketing Capabilities:
- Deep link from your social media and blog platforms to drive users back to your app content
- Grow app subscribers and installs with text-me-the-app where users can text themselves an install link
- Give potential subscribers a sneak peek into what they get by installing your app with deepviews
- Increase organic search in Google and Spotlight search results to attract new audiences
Pricing: There are two plan options available, the free Launch plan and the customized Enterprise plan, which is based on business needs
Current Customers: Instacart, Reddit, BuzzFeed, Omio
Website: https://branch.io/
- Vibes
Vibes is a mobile engagement platform that focuses on helping businesses deliver personalized experiences and relevant mobile messages. This platform gives you everything you need to launch a successful push notification campaign — from ease of creation to hyper-personalization.
Sending the right message at the right time can encourage your subscribers to click into your app and complete a purchase. Adding rich notifications that provide visuals to back up your text can make those conversion rates even higher.
Mobile Marketing Capabilities:
- Send push notifications that create value with deep links, surveys, abandoned cart details, and more
- Use rich notifications to wow subscribers with push notifications with something a little extra
- Use customer attributes to create personalized journeys and appeal to their wants and needs
- Access multi-platform support to integrate push notifications and your mobile app
Pricing: Price is customized and based on business needs
Current Customers: Lane Bryant, PetSmart, Redbox, Dick’s Sporting Goods
Website: https://www.vibes.com/
- Emarsys
Emarsys is an omnichannel customer engagement platform that can help businesses build customer-centric campaigns across multiple channels and tactics. When it comes to mobile marketing, this platform can help you increase personalization and provide your customers with the content they really want.
Develop personalized campaigns and increase engagement by driving users back to your mobile app. Using a multi-channel campaign approach will allow you to leverage the tactics you’re already employing and grow your app usage.
Mobile Marketing Capabilities:
- Personalize the mobile experience for each subscriber with real-time data that can identify and predict customer needs
- Having all of your customer data in one central location allows you to approach campaigns with a customer-centric mindset
- Improve customer retention by understanding what your audience is expecting from your brand
- Drive revenue and increase app usage by developing mobile retention campaigns
Pricing: Price is customized and based on business needs
Current Customers: Betclic, Bulk Powders, Pretty Little Thing, Rutastic
Website: https://emarsys.com/
- WebEngage
WebEngage is a marketing automation platform that lets businesses reach their customers with real-time messages across various mobile channels and devices. This platform can help improve your push notification campaigns with pre-designed templates, rich notifications, integration abilities, and much more.
Send your customers push notifications that they can get excited about. Adding imagery makes it much easier for a customer to visualize a new product and can catch their attention much quicker than a simple text notification.
Mobile Marketing Capabilities:
- Gain access to an entire studio of pre-designed template to make push notification creation simple
- Send rich notifications with eye-grabbing imagery that help attract subscribers and bring them to your app
- Easily add personalization by integrating specific customer attributes and preferences into each message
- Connect with other platforms such as your CRM system to ensure you’re seeing the full customer view
Pricing: Price is customized and based on business needs
Current Customers: C2FO, Junglee Games, Shaw Academy, Coverfox
Website: https://webengage.com/
- Iterable
Iterable is a cross-channel marketing platform that allows businesses to build unified customer experiences that span multiple channels and devices. It offers a number of mobile push notification capabilities, from pre-designed templates to intelligent user workflows.
Easily put together well throughout and professional-looking mobile push notifications that engage your audiences. From there, you can identify user attributes and create customized campaigns based on specific user needs.
Mobile Marketing Capabilities:
- Easily create push notification campaigns that are sent to all customers or targeted triggered campaigns
- Use workflows to automate push notifications and send users down a specific journey
- Tap into template options to make creating push notifications quick and easy, even if you’re not a designed
- Identify user events such as notification opens, clicks, and more to understand your customers better and create customized campaigns
Pricing: Price is customized and based on business needs
Current Customers: Zillow, Doordash, Curology, SeatGeek
Website: https://iterable.com/
- CleverTap
CleverTap is a marketing platform that is designed to increase app engagement and help businesses reach their growth goals. This platform provides you with everything you need to create personalized campaigns to keep your audiences engaged and active.
Let your customers know about new products or services and bring them back to your app with rich notifications. By showing them what they’re missing, you can pique their interest and have them wanting to know more.
Mobile Marketing Capabilities:
- Grab the attention of your audiences with personalized, media-rich push notifications
- Set reminders to be sent to new users to get them back into your app and looking around
- Target inactive users and let them know what they’re missing out on by not using your app
- Create interactive notifications to keep your customers engaged and prevent high churn rates
Pricing: Price is customized and based on business needs
Current Customers:
Website: https://clevertap.com/
Start Optimizing Your Push Notifications and Creating Successful Mobile Marketing Campaigns
Once you’ve taken the step to optimize your push notifications, you’ll be making strides towards creating more successful mobile marketing campaigns. By adding elements such as personalization, location-based messaging, rich notifications, and dynamic content, you’ll be making the most out of your time and set your campaigns up for success.
So what are you waiting for? Start optimizing your push notifications and improving your mobile marketing campaigns today!