Top 6 Web and Mobile Push Notification Mistakes and How to Fix Them

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

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

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.

Setting up push notification sending in Altcraft Platform

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

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.

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.