5 Essentials For E-commerce Push Notifications

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

However, e-commerce apps tend to have much lower retention than other categories like messaging apps. According to a study, e-commerce apps only have a 13% retention after 1 month. 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 also be annoying when done wrong. Compared to emails, the bar for relevancy that a push notification has to meet is unusually high: firstly, there’s far less that you can say in a push notification; and secondly, unlike emails that can be perused later, push notifications interrupt the user with the expectation of an immediate response.

Relevant rich push notification from Groupon

Here are our 5 rules for driving superior e-commerce retention through relevant push notifications:

1. Personalize based on the user’s history: There are many ways of personalizing your push notification based on the user’s past behavior in your app and on your website. You could tailor the content to the categories they have shown affinity with in their browsing and buying history. You could time the push notifications to go out at the times when the user has interacted with the notification in the past. Reacting to the user’s implicit preferences in these ways can make the push notification highly engaging.
2. Target the user in-context: Another dimension for mobile personalization is the user’s context right now, or their recent behavior with your app. Has the user been highly engaged with the 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 do extremely well. Flash-sale sites do this really well 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 messaging.
5. Deep link to make it a smoother experience: Deep linking into relevant content within your app enables users to act on the push notification instantly, and drive increased conversions. Instead of opening the 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.