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5 Essentials for Optimizing Your Ecommerce Push Notifications

Blueshift

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Essentials for optimizing your ecommerce push notifications

Mobile commerce is growing much faster than ecommerce. Mobile apps are not only extending commerce beyond the desktop, but also enabling new ecommerce use cases like social commerce and on-demand services.

However, ecommerce apps tend to have much a lower retention rate than other categories like messaging apps. According to Business 2 Community, shopping apps typically see relatively low retention due to high marketplace competition and consumers being loyal to multiple brands at the same time Although shopping app retention rates have increased since 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, implementing a dynamic ecommerce marketing strategy to retain your customers is essential.

On that note, push notifications are often used for increasing user retention and re-engagement within apps. While push notifications can be extremely effective when done well, they can be bothersome for customers when done wrong. Compared to emails, the bar for relevancy that a push notification has to meet is unusually high. First of all, there are far fewer words you can say in a push notification; secondly, unlike emails that customers can read later at their convenience, push notifications can burden the user with the expectation of an immediate response.

Below, we outline our five rules for driving superior ecommerce retention through relevant push notifications. Keep reading to learn more.

THE FIVE ESSENTIALS

How to Power Up Your Push Notifications

  1. Personalize based on the user’s history: There are many ways of personalizing your push notifications based on a user’s past behavior in your app and on your website. You could tailor the content to the categories with which they have shown affinity in their browsing and buying history. You could schedule the push notifications to deploy at the times when a user has interacted with similar notifications in the past. Reacting to the user’s implicit preferences in these ways can make your push notifications highly engaging.
  2. Target the user in context: Another dimension for mobile personalization is the user’s context right now, or their recent behavior within your app. Has the user been highly engaged with your app recently? Have they abandoned certain activities? Has their search behavior shown them to be in market for certain items? Targeting based on such context, especially around location or recent activity, is highly effective.
  3. Surface real-time and time-sensitive content: Since push notifications encourage immediate action, time-sensitive content like new product launches or time-bound promotions perform extremely well. Flash-sale sites do this effectively by notifying users of new events.
  4. Engage users with rich content: Rich push notifications enable you to send multimedia or app content to your users. By providing more information about the notification upfront, rich push helps increase the relevance of your messaging.
  5. Deep link to create a smoother experience: Deep linking to relevant content within your app enables users to act on the push notification instantly and drive increased conversions. Instead of opening your app’s home screen, users perceive the push notification to be more relevant when it lands them directly onto the offer or product promised by the push notification.

Want to make these push notification best practices the gold standard for your ecommerce brand? Discover Blueshift by scheduling a demo of our platform with one of our experts today.