Integrating Push Notifications Can Make Your Omnichannel User Engagement Strategy Highly Effective

An average consumer picks up their phone 58 times a day. 70% of these ‘sessions’ last for less than 2 minutes. These are usually to check notifications, catch up on conversations, and do a quick Google search. The fundamental idea of having an omnichannel marketing strategy is to reach your customers where they are and provide a connected and seamless customer experience. And this is why Push Notifications are a must-have in your omnichannel marketing strategy.

Due to its low cost, high impact nature, Push Notification Marketers and Product Managers use the channel for user engagement. In 2020 alone, approximately 53% of all user engagement messages (both dynamic and lifecycle) were sent using App Push Notifications.

Why Mobile Push Notifications?

Getting users to engage and re-engage with mobile apps is a challenge. Push notifications offer a fast and efficient way to engage with your users and go a long way towards helping brands retain customers and foster brand loyalty over time. With Push notifications you can:

• Attract users to other digital touchpoints besides your app. Have an active social media campaign? Redirect users to your social handles using Push Notifications.

• Convert and revive inactive/dormant users. Sending high-value, personalized messages can increase your user retention by 3x to 10x.

• Drive your conversion rates. For example, suggesting similar products, sending abandoned cart reminders and promoting deals and sales, and so on.

• Create a perfect online-offline synergy - drive store footfall using geofencing functionalities while sending push notifications to your app users. With location access, brands with both offline and online business models use geo-fencing to promote in-store footfall.

• Track the entire user journey and get valuable insights on user behaviour like the type of content they like and the best time to reach out on their hand-held devices. These insights help in optimizing other channels in your marketing mix as well.

• Share last-minute, urgent and critical updates. For example, a recent update in Google’s Android WebView caused a lot of android apps to crash. Brands (especially BFSI) utilized Push Notifications to alert their users of the issue and requested them to update Android WebView from the Google Play Store to avoid their apps from crashing.

• Shorten the customer’s journey by enabling deep-links. Deeplinks send users directly to a specific point in the app saving their time locating a particular page themselves. Brands that use an omnichannel approach to customer engagement often use deep-links through Push Notifications. This helps them optimize the sales funnel and improve conversions.

Making Push Notifications ‘More’ Humanized

The real power of push notifications is unleashed when they are hyper-personalized with customer information. Integrating with a customer data platform can help marketers utilize existing data such as past purchases, user attributes, and behavioural patterns to send relevant and hyper-personalized notifications that encourage the users to take the desired action.

While every user responds differently to different types of messaging, you need to focus on users’ behavioural segmentation and build your way forward through A/B Testing. A/B Testing has a massive impact on the outcomes of your messaging campaigns. Using Push Amplification Engines is also an amazing way to increase deliverability on devices. It also hibernates apps in the background for “better RAM Management”.

Parting thoughts

As customers are becoming channel-agnostic and avail products and services across multiple devices, including push notification in the overall engagement strategy, can enhance customer experience and drive conversions significantly. There’s a lot that brands can and have done with Push Notifications to improve the overall user engagement leading to richer user experience and eventually higher key business metrics.