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Have you ever wondered how to make tricky customers convert — or even how to retain them?
As marketers, that’s a common question that’s often top of mind. Let’s be frank, understanding how to keep your customers engaged at each stage of your marketing funnel is hard.
However, I have the answer to your troubles: push notifications.
In today’s competitive business environment, push notifications can completely set you apart from other businesses in your industry. They’re a useful tool to keep customers engaged by providing relevant information when they need it most.
To understand the benefits of push notifications, we must first look at how the marketing funnel works. This is the first part of our series about efficiency of push for marketers, so read on and don’t miss the upcoming second part.
What is a marketing funnel?
In the simplest terms, the marketing funnel describes your customer’s journey with your brand.
From the early stages when they first learn about your business, to the purchasing stage, it maps the route from awareness all the way to conversion.
Understanding the marketing funnel will help you understand how to influence consumers at different stages, ultimately driving greater sales, loyalty, and brand awareness.
Breaking down the stages of the marketing funnel
The marketing funnel is typically explained in stages known as the «AIDA» model. This model describes the four key stages a consumer goes through before buying.
Those stages are:
Attention: Your content grabs the customer’s attention, and they are curious about what your company actually does. This is typically via articles, advertisements, webinars, social media ads, etc.
Interest: The customer likes what they saw and wants to learn more about your brand. They’ll dig deeper by searching for more content via your website or newsletter, or following your social media pages or blogs.
Desire: The customer has now established that they know your brand and they like your brand. You’ve successfully built trust with them by serving great content and information. Now is the time that they download sales brochures, case studies, and visit microsites. They want your service or product and are gathering information to help them decide whether or not to move to the next stage.
Action: After generating enough desire with valuable content, you serve your prospects with the opportunity to act on it. At this stage, the customer has decided that they are buying your product or service. Your customer takes action after seeing a frictionless CTA on a landing page, push notification, or email newsletter.
How to integrate push at each stage of the funnel
Now that we have a solid understanding of the marketing funnel, we can implement a push notification strategy to help our customers move through the funnel with ease.
Push notifications can be separated into two main types:
Web Push Notifications: The user consents to receive notifications in their browser on their desktop or mobile device.
Mobile App Push Notifications: This is the type of push notification that people are most familiar with. Also known as in-app notifications, the user consents to receive alerts from installed apps.
Let’s look at how we can use these three types of push notifications to move our customers through the marketing funnel in the case of a hypothetical company.
Pet Nutrition Pro is a nutrition app for dog food. Content marketing and push notifications are core to their marketing strategy. They heavily rely on being a thought leader in the pet nutrition space and publish regular articles on their blog with the intention of driving user acquisition through brand awareness. Let’s see how this looks in practice:
Attention: Ellen is a dog owner who discovers a Pet Nutrition Pro article via a paid search advert on Google. She clicks the advertisement to read the article and becomes interested in learning more about the brand. She consents to receive web push notifications while using her browser.
Interest: Ellen is using her browser and receives a web push notification on a new article about L-Glutamine in dog food. She’s reminded of how much she liked Pet Nutrition Pro content before and decides to download the Pet Nutrition Pro app to monitor her pup’s wellbeing.
Desire: Now Ellen really likes this brand. She can analyze her dog’s daily intake of protein, fats, and vitamins. She’s able to log his exercise and get recommendations for new activities to do together. She realizes there is a premium feature of the app available for $5.99 per month. She wants to purchase it, and gets to the checkout page but bounces off.
Luckily, Pet Nutrition Pro’s push notification software, Notix is set up to deliver push notifications in cases just like this – when a new user downloads the app and doesn’t complete a purchase, Notix will deliver an in-app notification to encourage them to make the purchase.
After closing the app for 2 hours, Ellen receives a mobile app notification offering her a 20% discount on premium features. She is moved to act on her desire and makes the purchase as soon as she sees the notification.
What do push notifications look like for other industries?
Like our hypothetical pet nutrition business, we can also apply this process to a number of industries including:
Media outlets and news platforms: They can utilize push notifications for breaking news, cohort-based timely articles, and much more.
Social media sites: Social media sites can use push to keep users hooked via profile notification updates, news about published content, and relevant updates.
E-commerce websites: Like our hypothetical example, e-commerce websites can avail of push notifications to generate conversions. They can use app and web push notifications to promote sales, promotions, discounts, and seasonal trends.
Education platforms: These platforms can use push notifications to update customers about new courses, changes to class schedules, or other service updates.
Case Study: How Cracku Scaled Clicks with the Power of Push
The power of push notifications isn’t reserved for just hypothetical examples! Let’s look at how the educational platform, Cracku, used the power of push notifications to increase its subscribers by 27K and almost triple their engagement.
Cracku is an Indian educational portal. With 1.3 million monthly active users on average, they have high new and returning traffic with unique information delivery needs.
Before using Notix, Cracku tried other push notification services with mixed results. They weren’t new to using push notifications in marketing but needed help to scale their growth.
Before implementing Notix, Cracku’s performance on a typical push campaign looked like this:
- Delivered to 288,385 users
- 38,135 Views
- 32 Clicks
Based on this performance, Cracku was reaching roughly 22% of their monthly active users – there was plenty of room to improve.
The strategy was simple: Cracku would use Notix to deliver web push notifications to new and returning users at specific times. The notifications would be separated into user segments, where users would receive targeted messages depending on where they were in the funnel.
This meant that Cracku was being more strategic about push notification delivery, and would deliver to a smaller database compared to the wider campaigns from before.
Using this strategy combined with timely delivery at each point in the funnel, Cracku was able to achieve the following results in just one month:
- Delivered to 27,000 users
- 17,961 Views
- 86 Clicks
With a smaller, more strategic database and renewed strategy with Notix, Cracku was able to almost triple their engagement on every push – with 86 clicks on push notifications, vs 32 clicks on campaigns with their previous provider.
Using Notix and a renewed push notification strategy, Cracku has been able to deliver more efficient and effective campaigns to highly targeted audience segments. In addition to scaling its clicks, Cracku achieved the following metrics using Notix and the renewed strategy:
- 25,000+ new subscribers
- 100% delivery rate
Since this case, Cracku has continued to grow from strength to strength using Notix in their marketing strategy, achieving better performance at lower cost long-term.
Want some more tricks and tips? Read the second part of our article and find out how to choose a push provider and set your campaign correctly!