Push notifications are a key resource for digital marketers, but also for those who want to get great results from their online campaigns. Nowadays, it is important to keep your audience interested and united around your business. You have to work hard to form a community and make sure that people return to your page often, even if they leave the website. The problem can be solved in different ways.
The newsletter is also a great way to retrieve contacts who wish to receive your communications, but push notifications are direct, immediate, and visually decisive as well. If you are wondering “Why don’t push notifications arrive?“, you need to know that they need to be activated, so I recommend reading this article to learn how they work quickly and easily.
At first sight, they might not seem useful, but their potential is so great that if they were not used it would be counterproductive for any kind of communication. Of course, there is no secret formula that works for everyone, and the best way to develop a strategy that works for your company is to understand the possibilities and how best to use them. It is equally important to identify where push notifications are on different devices to make good use of them.
Training and constant updating are essential in this field. Digital Coach offers a range of professional courses for companies and individuals, such as the Inbound Marketing Manager Certification, so that you can become a professional who is always able to bring new customers to your online business.
What are push notifications?
I will now explain what push notification means. This term refers to a notification technology (for any activity that allows immediate communication with its users) that allows different messages to be sent to various devices or the web. Therefore, it is a system that reminds the public that there are new things to see, such as:
- Articles
- Discounts
- Products
- Information.
When discussing what push notifications are, it is important to emphasize that they are not an advertisement hoping to attract disinterested people by imposing their presence, but if done well they become a useful and non-intrusive resource. Therefore, if you are wondering why push notifications do not arrive like regular SMS, the answer is that they are more like pop-up ads and have an immediate effect. Once the company’s customers understand how to activate push notifications, they can benefit from some direct channels with the company providing the program, via WhatsApp Business, other applications, and browsers.
Benefits of push notifications for your business
By sending push messages, the company can easily reach customers on the web and convert their actions into sales in a non-intrusive way. Users have the advantage of seizing the opportunity, such as buying items long left in the shopping cart at a special price or receiving alerts of the arrival of important emails without having to constantly go into the inbox. Well-designed services with high-quality content that users are genuinely interested in bring long-term benefits to the customer retention process.
The main advantages of this new channel can be summarised as follows:
- Is a new way of communicating with your contacts;
- At the same time, however, anonymous contacts may also be contacted;
- Interest types and participation levels determined by web push messages constitute additional segmentation criteria;
- You can increase sales by sending customized offers using channels other than traditional pop-up windows;
- Allows you to generate new potential customers (redirect to anonymous contacts on the site page, and then leave your details by filling in the form);
- The response that users give to these messages helps to make their progressive analysis more precise.
3 tips for creating engaging push notifications
Knowing how to use push notifications is very important in order to take advantage of all the potential that customized apps offer us and exploit all the benefits to drive revenue growth.
Given its simplicity, such a message must be written carefully, and one must never forget that its purpose is to make users click on the link.
Therefore, for them to be effective, it is necessary to emphasize the intrinsic value associated with the proposed action: people often expect something in return when they do something.
Here are 3 fundamental tips for writing web push notifications:
1. Be creative to attract the user’s attention
The purpose of push notifications is to allow customers to open the app to see what you want them to see. To do this, you should attract their attention and convince them to click on the ones they receive. For example:
- Ask the question “Who will win the free dinner this week?”;
- Creates ‘did you know that…’ curiosity;
- Share content on your website by writing interesting article titles;
- Provide some useful tips on the most frequently asked question “How to read push notifications on Android?”.
Create useful messages for customers, word of mouth will enable you to expand your range of services! Let users understand your suggestions immediately so that they are clear and direct.
2. Check the time for contacting customers
In these situations, timing is crucial. Of course, it all depends on the target users: if you have a restaurant, your schedule will be different from, say, a news app or a travel app. In the first case, the best time to contact customers might be in the late afternoon, when they will be looking for proposals in the evening.
For the second example, it is more appropriate to send the notification in the morning. Finally, for travel applications, the appropriate time to attack is the weekend. The time zone must also be considered. In the background, you have the possibility of sending push notifications to specific users based on different criteria (e.g. geographical location). Then check the box ‘Send at a local time’ and the notification will be sent at the correct time.
3. Define objective and content strategy
First of all, you need to be clear about the objectives of using push notifications in your content marketing strategy. Why do you want to do this? Keep in mind that sending the same message to all customers will not help.
In fact, if you follow this approach, you will ensure that those who are not interested will unsubscribe. It is useless to send a notification about shops in Naples to users living in Piedmont. The notification should only be sent to potential customers who have the opportunity to enjoy the content provided.
Take the test and discover the skills of a web marketing expert in the management and operation of push notifications for companies
How to activate push notifications
Sending push notifications that can provide consumers with valuable personalized information is a very powerful marketing tool. Companies are still learning and discovering new ways to use SMS and push notification apps as tools to attract consumers. Each of these two technologies has its advantages, and it is important to understand what they are when defining a mobile marketing strategy.
You are not the only one asking ‘how do I activate push notifications? You can activate notifications on your smartphone in the relevant menu: their purpose is precisely to allow you to learn in real-time from social networks, e-mails, messages, and other activities such as friend requests, friend invitations, tags, and so on.
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Android
Regarding how to use and activate Android push notifications, you have the option of finding Facebook push notifications on your device, for instance. In that case, activating or deactivating them is very simple if you follow these short steps: Account Settings “Notifications” – “Push Mobile”. At this point, you will have to select (or deselect) the various types of notifications you wish to receive.
For Whatsapp, on the other hand, push messages could be useful to display incoming alerts on the app directly on the home page of the device. To configure notifications, you have to follow the path ‘System Settings’ – ‘Applications’ – ‘Whatsapp’ and select ‘Show Changes’.
To turn Instagram push notifications on or off, visit the app, click on your profile, then on the three dots set. Finally, scroll down next to Notification Settings, click Edit, and finish by pressing Close.
IOS
To activate push notifications on iPhone (or IPad), you have to go to the ‘Notification Centre’ – ‘Facebook’ and then set the alert style to ‘Banner’ or ‘Notification’.
After completing this operation, follow the path ‘Account Settings’ – ‘Notifications’ – ‘Push Mobile’ to go to the corresponding notification section. You can select or deselect the message types you are interested in here.
To manage WhatsApp push notifications on iOS, you should initially choose the type of notification package, banner, and sound from the “Notification Centre” and finally, the notification itself. Once this is done, I recommend turning the device off and on for a few seconds to make sure that these settings have been saved correctly.
To make Instagram alerts work, you have to visit the app, clicking on your profile. Then click on the three dots in the settings, scroll down to the ones in question to change them, and finally, close the page.
Desktop notification
Desktop notifications fall into a different category than the push notifications I showed you earlier. In fact, it is developed for browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Alerts are used by many websites (usually news websites) to send messages to their readers via desktop.
On the one hand, the system allows you to establish more effective channels of connection with your audience, but on the other hand, the accumulation of these requests often leads to a frustrating surfing experience. The aforementioned browsers allow the reception of messages to be managed by means of a wide-ranging blocking system, and this includes the possibility of manually setting up a list of sites that can do the same job.
To manage desktop messages on Google Chrome, you must first open the notification settings page. The first option you will come across is ‘Ask before sending’ and what you should do is make sure it is enabled. You will then find two parts: ‘Block and Allow’. Under each of these two sections, you will see a list of apps and websites to which you can block or allow notifications to be sent.
In the blocked list, you can agree to receive push notifications by clicking on the three-dot icon next to each blocked site. Conversely, from the allowed list, you can block the receipt of notifications by always clicking on the three-dot icon, in which case the icon can also be found next to each site or application in the list.
Conclusions and more information
As I have shown you in this article, the potential of push notifications is significant. This strategy, if properly managed, can outperform email marketing. The downside is that if you don’t handle it correctly, potential customers may interpret push notifications as negative and annoying.
In order to always provide interesting and useful content, it is necessary not to bombard users with sudden messages on the web, but to develop appropriate utilization strategies through professional planning and organized communication. You will see that in this case, it is the customers themselves who will want to receive notifications.
If you want to focus on web marketing strategies that will help you retain customers for your online business, request a customized and completely free Strategic Consultancy with an industry expert who can guide you on the best digital marketing project.
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