Web push notification best practices for eCommerce

Web push notifications are considered a powerful tool to deliver messages to customers in the eCommerce industry. This method has been widely used all over the world to help businesses grow their companies and drive more conversions to their website.

However, not everyone knows why you should use this effective tool and how to use it in your Magento store. If that’s the case, you can check out the benefits of using web push notifications first, and then apply the best practices of web push notifications we’re going to introduce right now to keep your business profitable and thriving.

What are the 6 elements of web push notifications?

There are many different elements of web push notifications but today we’re going to focus on critical factors of effective push notifications in eCommerce: 

• Title
• Content
• URL
• Notification Image
• Call to action button

Plus, emojis can be added to help your web push notifications become more attractive for visitors in your marketing campaigns.

1. Title

This is no doubt one of the most important parts of any web push message. Although some brands just use their name in the title, it needs more than that to attract customer attention when they first see it. It’s a great idea to produce urgent and interesting content that can convince potential customers to click on your notifications.

2. Content

Content is a crucial part to tell people what your message is about, so it’s supposed to be concise and crisp. Short and direct messages like “Last Day Of Sale, Buy 1 Get 1 Free” would be prime examples of an effective way to deliver content. Remember that this element needs to be in line with the title as well. It’s good to convey your idea constantly and ensure your message remains strong.

3. URL

The URL of web push notifications is the website domain that will send the push notifications.

4. Icon

It’s advisable to add icons to your notifications as they will appear as a signature to your brand and make a website push more noticeable and distinguishable. Your customers are bombarded with notifications everywhere, so it’s vital to help your customers recognize your brand push notifications.

5. Notification image

Include some images to present your messages in a more impressive way. Images certainly make your web push notifications become more visually appealing to visitors. Statistics have shown that using appropriate images can lead to an increase in CTR rates by up to 42%.

Although this step is optional, it would be beneficial to use them in your message to maximize your chance of getting clicked. A picture is worth a thousand words after all.

6. Call to action buttons

Once the customer has read your notification, what should they do next? It’s time to show the Call to Action or CTA buttons to let visitors reach your online store more easily. The URL should be contained in the landing page so users can easily find more information about your products and make a purchase without much effort.

Remember that notifications sent without CTA buttons could lead to a decrease in CTR. Some bright examples of CTA would be: “Start My Free Trial”, “Get Free Access”, “Send Me Code” etc.

Best Practices of Web Push Notifications

1. Promote urgency to call for faster conversions

It’s human nature to react quickly and take action without hesitation if there’s a sense of scarcity and urgency around an item they feel attracted to. Take advantage of this mindset and add more urgency to your push notifications to persuade customers to open their pockets. This can be done simply by mentioning when the flash sale ends or how long the sale program will last.

It’s been shown that notifications that instill excitement and urgency are more likely to get clicked and gain higher CTRs.

2. Target audience segmentation

We all know that no user is the same so don’t send mass generic notifications to all your subscribers.

Segmenting your audience is an essential step to create an effective marketing strategy. Typically it means your users will be divided into targeted groups based on certain criteria. This approach allows you to work with separate consumer groups and deal with their different demands. Categorize your customers before sending them relevant push notifications based on their actions and preferences. Usually, to get the maximum benefits out of your notification marketing, your segmentation process should consider these kinds of data below:

• User interests and attributes including gender, age, location, device, and so on.
• User browsing history
• Past purchases

Your entire audience is a unique mixture of people and segmenting them enables you to create more personalized campaigns that would result in higher CTR rates over time. Personalization is not just a passing trend in eCommerce marketing, so make sure you understand its importance and apply this practice to your web push notifications. 

3. Deliver relevant and personalized push notifications

There’s no point in knowing and understanding your customers’ shopping habits if you don’t know how to make good use of the data in your web push notification campaigns.

There are many different methods to personalize content in your messages sent to potential customers. One of them is establishing various custom attributes to add dynamic factors to your notifications. For example, you can mention your customer’s first name to make them feel more related and pay more attention to your advertisements, along with product images and recommendations.

By personalization, we didn’t mean “Hi Jane”. You should go beyond that to achieve your marketing goals, gather customers’ behavior data and tastes to help you create personalized messages accordingly.

4. Optimize your web push notification timing

A perfect time to send web push notifications is a significant factor to boost your CTR rates. If your messages are sent at the wrong time, they’re  likely counterproductive and may lead to a low success rate and user opt-outs.

You may have heard of customers complaining about receiving push notifications at undesirable times such as midnight or busy early morning when they aren’t ready to check out any information. It’s undoubtedly annoying to be disturbed by the buzzing notification sound in the middle of the night when we’re about to fall asleep. 

Those who feel annoyed with wrong-timing push notifications can easily decide to unsubscribe from your website anytime and you don’t want that. Therefore, creating a segmented user time zone and making your notifications pop up at the right time should not be underestimated when developing a web push notifications strategy.

5. Always do A/B testing with your web push notifications

It’s best to use A/B testing to test various elements of your website push notifications. So far, A/B testing has proven to be one of the most effective solutions to increase conversion rates or CTRs. Things like various headlines, body text, and action buttons should be tested to see what works best for your eCommerce site. 

With A/B testing, ideally, you change one element at a time to optimize the result. For example, when testing two different headlines, it’s best to keep the rest of the notification unchanged. That way if there is an improvement in notification performance, we can know it’s the new headline that has made the difference in your sales activity. In contrast, if multiple elements are tested at the same time, there would be no way to figure out what leads to that change in the notification performance. 

6. Track your conversions and CTR

Finally, always measure the effectiveness of your web push notifications by carefully following CTR and conversion rates to have a better understanding of your website’s productivity. Especially if you are an eCommerce brand, you must regularly track sales from web push notifications to come up with more proper solutions.

To understand how well your web push notification campaigns are performing, you need conversion tracking because only the CTR rate is not enough. If you got a high CTR rate but a low conversion rate, there must be something wrong with your eCommerce site, and don’t hesitate to check up on things immediately.

Conclusion

This should be the end of the article. If you wish to learn more about how to effectively use web push notifications, we highly recommend checking out the detailed guide on this wonderful tool.

It’s the effectiveness and ease of use of web push notifications that make them so popular in any marketing campaign worldwide. No matter what your company model is, there’s always room for improvements so you need to keep these best web push notification practices in mind as they are a powerful tool to your business success.