Polina Zakaryan December 7, 2021 
In today’s competitive digital landscape, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to get consumers to click through marketing messages and engage with them. Push notifications represent a versatile marketing tool that can help you drive user traffic, stimulate engagement and boost user conversion and retention.
However, push notifications can only work for the benefit of your business when done right. Herein are common mistakes that marketing teams make when managing push notification campaigns and how to correct them.
1. Not Implementing User Segmentation
Appropriate audience segmentation is an essential component of any marketing activities, including push notification campaigns. Failing to assess, group, and segment your target audience means that you’re unable to formulate tailored messages to appeal to consumers in unique stages of your sales funnel. Failing to segment your audience for tailored messages, especially for mobile push notifications, leads to frequent subscriber opt-outs.
It’s imperative that you know your target audiences. Analyze and segment your audience into groups based on on-site actions (behavioral segmentation). These actions may include reading a blog, viewing a certain product, watching a video, or subscribing to a newsletter. Other types of segmentation include geographic, demographic, and social.
With push marketing technology, you can track custom data points far beyond automatic tracking. Utilize custom tracking and other tools, including metadata filters, aliases, and tags to engage segmented audiences with relevant push messages. Overall, analyze brand interactions and activity and align them with your push strategies.
2. Sending Generic Non-Personalized Messages
Sending generic push notifications indicative of a lack of customer research and consideration will result in low click-through rates and engagement. Consumers today want relevant, personalized marketing messages. It indicates that you understand their needs. It also saves users’ time by catching their attention with actionable updates, information, or offers that are of interest.
Serve personalized recommendations based on specific user behavior (purchasing or browsing history), user purchasing stage, known preferences, and personal information. A good practice is to utilize placeholder tags. These tags enable you to replace placeholders with users’ first names and relevant data for every push notification. With message tags, you can extract data from your data system and incorporate user-relevant information into the messages.
3. Not Scheduling and Automating Push Notifications
Failing to schedule and automate your push notifications is a big mistake for marketing campaigns. With push notifications and any marketing communication channel, timing is a critical aspect. Even the best-designed push messages won’t receive attention if you time them wrongly.
Ensure that you collect your subscriber/consumer profile. Utilize analytics data to learn your users’ time zones, day-to-day activities, and when they are most active. Using this information to segment your audience. Doing so enables you to plan, schedule, and create automated push sequences using marketing automation software to send your messages at appropriate dates and times.
4. Failing to Formulate a Clear Call-to-Action
The attention span of the average user is just a few seconds for any notifications they receive on their computers or mobile devices. Your push messages are likely to be discarded if your push notification does not include a clear CTA. Notification messages allow you to include a limited text, and you need to make the most of it. A clear CTA influences your audience to take a well-defined valuable action.
Utilize proven CTA phrases and words in your push messages and avoid jargon and filler words. You need to create a sense of urgency. Aim to avoid vague messages that your audience won’t know what to make of. Since you have limited text, it’s good practice to include images that denote a clear CTA. Visuals catch the user’s eye and elicit better response rates.
5. Choosing the Wrong Landing Pages
Where you are sending your customers is a crucial component of a push notification campaign. The landing page you direct your audience to must contain what you want them to see. Suppose you want to communicate to your customers about an attractive discount on a certain product category. You prepare the push message and activate your campaign. When your customers click on your CTA, they are directed to your homepage.
The above scenario clearly represents a subpar user experience since they can’t locate your amazing offer that caught their attention. Consequently, you lose traffic, sales, or even subscribers. Ensure that you link the appropriate landing pages to your push messages. Your landing pages must have relevant information for a rich experience that boosts user retention.
6. Failing to Track Key Metrics
Much of web and mobile push notifications campaign success originates from hard-learned lessons. Not tracking key metrics and optimizing appropriately equates to doing your campaign a great disservice. It’s crucial to closely monitor KPIs to determine deficiencies/gaps in your campaigns and inform future campaigns.
Clearly define the parameters necessary to benchmark campaign success to determine the effectiveness of your push notification strategies. Some of the top metrics you should use to measure campaign ROI include view rate, CTR, opt-in rate, retention rate, unsubscription rate, conversion rate, and website performance.
Utilize statistics regarding visits, clicks, interactions, and overall user engagement to formulate data-driven push notification strategies. Ensure that you conduct A/B testing for different variables, including wording, personalization, visuals, and timing.
Conclusion
Overall, web and mobile push notifications have become an effective marketing channel to engage your target audience. Providing the ability to reach your audience at a personal level, push notifications, especially when automated, serve as a direct communication path throughout their purchasing journey.
Getting relevant information, updates, offerings, and deals across to your customers at the right time via automated push messages is becoming ever-critical. Leveraging marketing automation software to bolster your push notification strategy enables you to save time/effort, gain new users, re-engage inactive users, boost conversions, facilitate continuous user engagement, get valuable feedback and retain clients.
The article was originally published here.
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