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We are only a few weeks away from Black Friday (November, 24), and we all know what this means – crazy shopping hype all around the world, marketing campaigns announcing huge sales, and people creating long lists of goods they are determined to purchase. But also, the same rational people with lists react quite impulsive on this exact day, stimulated by well-presented and promising discounts.
If you have goods or services to offer, we assume you don’t want to skip this shopping madness. Which is why we are about to present how to get your piece of the Black Friday pie and increase your revenue with the help of push notifications.
But first, let’s see why web push notifications are such a great option for eCommerce websites.
Perfect match: Push & eCommerce
If you think about what all eCommerce sites strive for, you will quickly notice three things that impose as their primary goal:
- A great number of registered users
- Repeat traffic
- Increased conversions – this one in particular
And push notifications are a perfect answer to all of these prayers. Here’s why.
Push notifications can help you grow your business by:
- increasing your subscriber base (every new subscriber is most likely brand new registered user)
- pointing to new offers and sales (ideal for occasions like Black Friday)
- reminding your audience about an abandoned shopping cart (helps finalize lost sales)
- presenting new content material, you prepared and posted on a website
- offering your audience to join surveys and other forms where they can give feedback
This way, whichever push strategy you use, you are constantly reminding them you are there with your tempting offers, interested in what they have to say, and presenting things they might need or want, even if unaware. Plus, with your subscription sign-in prompt, you are working non-stop on enlarging the number of your subscribers/potential customers.
Main eCommerce push strategies
As we mentioned, there are several types of push you can use to lure site visitors into your world and keep them within:
#1 Welcome push notifications
With a welcome push message, you are confirming that the user is subscribed to receiving your notifications, and you are acknowledging them as your new subscribers. It’s a nice gesture to send them this type of message, and you can use it to offer some welcome discounts or coupons, or to simply take them to your website with the latest offers. Even though the majority of people do not make a purchase when they are first visiting the website, you never know – they might bite the bait.
You can increase your engagement rate by creating a customized opt-in request (it’s more likely users will better respond to welcome push afterward), but also by relying on audience segmentation to form groups of subscribers right away, and send them interest-based push notifications.
Segmentation helps to increase the CTR by 46% and the open rate by 27%. All you have to do is select the Categories prompt to allow your audience to choose their field of interest (up to four) when first subscribing to push messages.
#2 Abandoned chart push notifications
It often happens that people enter the eCommerce website, pick some items and place them in a cart, but don’t pass the finish line and don’t actually make a purchase. Why? There can be several reasons – a problem with the interface, change of heart, the lack of trust (especially if they were not previously familiar with your website), or something simply distracted them and they forgot.
What you can do with your push is remind them of this to try and try to recover lost sales. Triggered push notifications are an ideal option for this situation, given they allow you to target your subscribers by the actions they take. In this case, the action would be the abandonment of the cart.
Note: With Notix API integration these triggers will work automatically, but bear in mind that it would be best to make push alerts a bit personalized – this will increase the chances of subscribers actually responding to this message the way you want them to.
#3 Cross-selling push notifications
According to Zipdo, 35% of Amazon’s revenue is generated from cross-selling. So one-third of their total revenue comes from presenting the existing customers with products similar to those they already purchased. Using push notifications to achieve conversion increment is an absolute must – there are 60-70% chances of selling to an established customer, they just need to be presented with the right offer.
So it’s up to you to identify the right product, or list of products for cross-selling within each audience segment and create a push alert that would be hard to ignore.
Push tactics on BlackFriday
Now, let’s move on to the subject of Black Friday and how exactly you should approach your push strategy when there’s a tendency for your revenue to go up through the roof.
- Dynamic and engaging content
Know this – you have a small time window to attract the attention of your audience – overall, a week (Black Friday week). And if you add the fact they are probably being spammed by numerous ads pitching the same thing, you are about to, then you must find a way to stand out.
How to do that? Firstly, by basing your push alerts on fun and catchy content. Push notifications are not about presenting your offer extensively, but being very direct and right on point. Your message needs to be relevant, but also appealing.
Include emojis, they are CTR boosters, and think of the language you are about to use. You know your audience, don’t be too formal if the majority of your subscribers are young people interested in video games, for instance.
- Themed creatives
Now, this is crucial. Every image you place in your push MUST be screaming Black Friday discount! We are visual creatures, we remember 80% of what we see and only 20% of what we read. So make sure your subscribers do not miss your alerts by presenting a creative that’s not too illustrative.
Some reports show that there’s a 56% higher open rate when push notifications contain images. Even more, we suggest using a large image for this occasion in your push to increase the number of conversions. Apparently, there’s a 63% CTR increment when push messages contain larger images.
- Personalized approach
Once again, we come back to knowing your audience well. It is a really essential thing so you can adjust the message to those who are on the other side of the screens, presented with your push. The notification needs to resonate with them and push them towards the action.
So, if you are alerting video game fans about a huge discount on gaming equipment, make sure to use the vocabulary they would understand, even slang, why not? If you’re referring to sports gear lovers, insert some sports metaphors, maybe.
- Sense of urgency
This one is the key to push campaign success when occasions like Black Friday are in place. You don’t want to leave room for your audience to think twice before clicking on your push and deciding to purchase what you are offering right away. You need to make them feel like they are about to miss out and regret it if they don’t follow through immediately.
After all, these discounts and special offers aren’t going to last forever, they really are limited with time. So use this in your message, phrases like “Limited time offer,” “Don’t miss out,” “Last chance,” etc. This psychology principle, where you are emphasizing the potential loss, is very powerful and does work as an additional encouragement for users to act promptly.
When you are dealing with time-bound notifications that have an expiry date, you should use the Notix feature called Time-to-live. It will allow you to resend the notifications to your subscribers who haven’t received them, over and over again, until a specific time you set as the very end of the push campaign.
- Call to Action
And finally, we come to the very essence of push notifications. A call to action – CTA. Sure, you can use a push platform to simply inform your subscribers about something, like the change in working hours of your store. But in the majority of cases, push alerts are there to encourage subscribers to do something. Some particular action.
In this case, it is especially important. Because only letting them know about your discounts or sales isn’t enough, you want them to react instantly, and that’s why the CTA exists. Not every push will lead to conversion, but with CTA, you are increasing the likelihood of that happening.
Additional advice: Pay attention to targeting
Depending on the type of offer you are willing to present through push, your target audience can be wide, or narrowed down. But bear in mind that highly targeted push campaigns have much higher CTR.
We suggest you use targeting options Notix developed in order to achieve your goal. You can geo-target your audience by country, region, and city, select a specific platform and operating system, as well as the exact device and browser (+ browser language). You can base your targeting on audiences you created already, by including or excluding some of them. And there’s the last activity option you will especially appreciate.
With the Last activity option, you will be in a position to target users who were active on your website at some specific time. You can choose to send push notifications to those who visited your site in the near past (let’s say a day ago, or 3-5 days ago), and exclude those who were inactive before that. It is a very powerful tool that works its magic when it comes to customer retention strategy.
Final thoughts
With this little guide, we hope you are all set for the end of November. The only thing left is to prepare your Black Friday push strategy in time. We wish you a great amount of traffic and crazy high revenue at the end of it.