In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of an increasingly mobile world, with 80% of users owning smartphones. We’ve turned towards these devices more and more, with apps to conduct our businesses and organize our daily lives—from tracking our fitness to keeping up with our budgets, even finding love.
An increasingly mobile world means marketers also need to evolve in terms of how to reach their audience. While traditional channels of communication like email are still open, you may be missing out on a big opportunity to reach your audience.
A business that has an app already has an edge, especially since 58% of smartphone users don’t go one hour without checking their phones. A company that knows how to use push notifications not just to communicate but also to observe and obtain key consumer data based on engagement with these notifications is ahead of the curve.
What data can you get from push notifications?
As you launch your marketing campaigns and measure its results, you’ll be able to get customer data to improve marketing campaigns. The four main types of customer data are:
- Identity Data. The most basic information that identifies an individual; examples include name, gender, age, phone number, address, account information, and email address
- Descriptive Data. Includes information such as family details, lifestyle details, career, etc.
- Behavioral Data. The patterns that a user performs when interacting with your business such as opening emails, clicking on CTAs, and viewing certain pages
- Qualitative Data. A user’s attitudes, opinions, and motivation; this kind of data is usually obtained via survey
While there are tools such as surveys or heat maps that can also be effective in gaining customer data, the way users interact with your push notifications can tell you more about their preferences and help augment these other sources. Plus, data gathered from push notification engagements are valuable in that they are almost always behavioral or qualitative data:
- What mobile device they’re using. You’ll be able to figure out the type of mobile device they’re using and what OS they’re running. An important consideration is the difference between how push notifications work on Android and iOS.
iOS is based on a push opt-in model, which means users must affirmatively accept push notifications while Android automatically opts users in to receive notifications. You’ll need to keep this in mind to deliver a better digital marketing experience.
- What are their demographics? You can use push notifications to prompt reminders to your users to finish filling out their profile (thus securing you more customer data), turn on their location services, or even fill up a survey in exchange for deals.
- What are their interests? Perhaps one of the best insights you can gain from push notifications is knowing your customers’ preferences. Sending them recommendations via push notifications and then analyzing their engagement with these notifications can earn you some valuable data as to what interests them (or what doesn’t).
What makes push notifications effective?
Push notifications are often seen as disruptive or annoying. But the problem isn’t push notifications as a medium itself but rather how it’s used. Too many businesses are trigger-happy when it comes to push notifications and haven’t taken the time to properly analyze behavioral data and create a strategy around it.
Perhaps Noah Weiss, Slack’s Head of Search, Learning, and Intelligence, puts it best:
| “A great push notification is three things: Timely, Personal and Actionable.”
To be timely, make sure you’re strategic about when to send push notifications. Apart from considering your users’ time zone (you wouldn’t want to wake anyone up in the middle of the night), you should also make it a point to study what time your users typically engage with your app.
According to Leanplum, notifications that pop up during the times when users are more likely to engage with the app have open rates three times higher than any other time.
To be personal means tailoring your push notifications according to your users’ preferences. It’s not just about inserting the user’s name and leaving it at that. Personalization means every push notification you send to a user should be relevant, engaging, and adds value to their experience.
For example, an ecommerce app can create recommendations push based on a users’ wish list or create a reminder about items in their cart that they’ve yet to check out.
Finally, a push notification should be actionable. You should clearly state what the user needs to do next. Whether they should open your app to update their information, finish a purchase, check out a new feature, or fill out a survey.
The Last Push
One thing to keep in mind about push notifications is there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach to them. As with any marketing piece, it should be driven data-driven, user-focused, and does not ignore your customer service metrics.
Another key to successfully gaining data from your push notification campaigns is to keep measuring your engagement and experimenting with what works best for your users.
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source: Jess Andriani works as a Marketing Manager at Connext Digital. She believes that everyday is a chance to learn something new. On her free time, she writes about Digital Marketing.
