Drive action with push notifications
More than 72% of ecommerce sales take place on a mobile device. While text message is seen as a predominantly sales-driven channel, consumers often respond well to other types of content via push notifications.
Push notifications are particularly beneficial when sending time-sensitive reminders and promotions unique to your brand’s mobile app. Let’s dive deeper into how you can seamlessly weave push into your marketing strategy.
Note: To enable push notifications, you must have a mobile app.
Follow best practices for push notifications
When you use email, text message, and push within 1 strategy, you should play to the strengths of each channel, leveraging the right message type at the right time to stand out from your competition. Your ultimate goal: build a communication cadence that feels relevant and helpful.
Follow these best practices as you expand your campaign strategy to include mobile push:
Keep messaging consistent
Different channels allow you to tailor messages to meet your customers in a way that leverages each channel’s potential. That said, don’t stray too far from your central marketing goals. Create a cohesive experience across email, text message, and push, maintaining 1 unique brand voice throughout.
Be sure to align deals and promotions (unless intentionally different for certain segments) so you avoid sending mixed messages. That said, because push is less intrusive than a channel like text message, you can use it to follow-up or complement messages. For instance, if you send a text message about a New Year's calendar launch, send a push to anyone who viewed but didn't buy one during the last week the calendar will ship in time for January 1.
Or lead with push notifications for product drops since you can change what's listed on your app separately from your website. Push can also be used later than text message and can send images for cheaper. While you still shouldn't send it late in the day, this could be a plus for push.
Be mindful of the timing of your messages
Think about your customers' experience and what messages they have recently received. For instance, you don’t want them to receive a text message and then a push notification 30 minutes later with the exact same content.
Push alerts should either be sent for:
- Timely, relevant alerts that someone has not yet received through another channel.
- Messages that specifically follow up on a message sent via another channel as a reminder to act now.
- Alerts that build a habit around consistent engagement or tracking milestones.
This is particularly important for text message and push, since the same customer may see these alerts back-to-back on their phone if you aren’t careful to exclude text message subscribers from receiving the push alert (or vice versa). Consider all the content that someone will experience during their customer journey and how it motivates them to take a desired action.
Get right to the point
Use active voice and have 1, clear and compelling call-to-action (CTA) per message (e.g., shop now, learn more, upgrade, etc.). This rings true for email, text message, and push.
That said, push has specific character limits (which can vary between iOS and Android). As a general rule of thumb, we recommend keeping your character count under 178 characters long.
With minimal copy, ensure the content is direct and intentional, leads with value, and tells the user precisely where they will be sent upon clicking. The trick is to be as specific as possible in only a few words.
For example, some clear and concise alerts may include:
- Free shipping for purchases before 4pm EST
- Tickets to {{ name of favorite artist }}: available now.
- { promoted_item }} is trending this week, check it out!
- It’s bake-off week, celebrate with our aprons, 15% off through Friday.
Encourage brand loyalty
While all subscribers are valuable, your push subscribers tend to be your most engaged audience. Treat them as such.
When you send push alerts that deviate from a time-sensitive announcement, make sure that the deal, discount, or promotion is worthwhile for them and emphasize the exclusivity of each offer. For example, you may offer a higher discount via push as opposed to email or text message; alternatively, you may open up a sale early for push subscribers so they’re the first to know and shop while supplies last.
Build habits using push notifications
Consistency is key, not only for your push notification planning but also for customers to build habits around your brand. Find the right cadence for your own product and audience to build a habit around engaging with your app, whether that's purchasing something or simply navigating the app to complete an action that reminds them of the value of your brand.
What does this look like in action? Think of a fitness-related app. While you may not be purchasing every time you head to the app, you may navigate there to track fitness data, set a healthy habit, share an achievement with your community, reward yourself for hitting a personal milestone, etc.
Regardless of which notifications actually earn revenue, the act of habit-building and driving someone to your app can become lucrative over time.
Gather deeper customer insights
This advice is twofold since you should:
- Gather customer input in the form of properties about someone, and
- Uncover data through A/B testing your push notifications in flows
First, a huge reason why brands have apps is to find and collect information about users in detail, and in a way that's easy and personal for their audience to engage with. Ask for and encourage the sharing of information that can add to your customer experience and power your business offerings. For example, you may seek information about someone’s location, taste or style preferences, yearly goals, daily routines, upcoming life milestones, etc. so that you can better engage with them on your app.
Since push is so short and snappy, you should constantly test your content to see what drives action. This is not only beneficial for your brand's growth but also a quick process for generating multiple push variations at a time. Take time to A/B test push messages within Klaviyo flows, so you can further enhance the content you send via this channel.