Today online shopping is a household term. From a nail pin to a yacht, you will get everything online. With internet penetration increasing from 11.3% in 2016 to 15.2% in 2018, global e-commerce is expected to rise by 20.7% in 2019. There are more than a million online websites selling products. Today, the consumer can order products from anywhere in the world. The question is how to get more business for your online shop? This is a tough question and every marketer is trying to answer.
Online marketers have been exploring and using many tools to increase traffic and conversion. Web Push Notifications is one of the new marketing tools to re-engage your customers and bring them back to the website.
Before we get into how to use web push notification in e-commerce, let’s understand in brief about Web Push Notification.
The small alert type message that appears on the right-hand side of your desktop browser is called Web Push Notification. The push notification appearance varies based on the browser. Below is an example of notification in chrome browser:
Web Push Notification appears as alert on the desktop as well as on mobile and is hard to miss. This has led to better CTR and an open rate as compared to E-Mail.
Below are the 4 ways to use Web Push Notification to increase e-commerce conversion
1. Segmentation
Consider the below scenario –
The customer is interested in getting updates about the new mobile launch but receives notification about new shoes.
The customer will obviously get irritated and will unsubscribe from your notification. Such a situation can easily be avoided using Subscriber Segmentation.
Web Push Notification allows you to segment users –
- Based on Customer Location
- Based on Device
- Based on Subscription URL
- Based on User Action
You can decide what kind of segmentation you want to use for your subscribers and implement them. Segmentation based on user action allows you to create custom segments. You can decide what kind of action is important and accordingly segment subscribers based on them.
How segmentation can help increase conversions?
As per research, in the e-commerce industry, notification sent to segment lead to 2X CTR (Click Through Rate) as compared to the notification sent to all.
Two important benefits of Segmentation –
Targeted Notification: Using Segmentation you can send a relevant and targeted notification to the subscribers. This leads to higher CTR and conversions.
Lesser Unsubscription: Since subscribers will be receiving an only relevant notification, this will reduce the unsubscription rate and improve subscriber base.
2. Drip Push Notification
To create a brand you need to engage regularly with the customers. However, in the busy schedule, you may miss out on engaging with your customers. To solve this, you can use Drip Push Notification.
Drip allows you to send automated push notifications on regular intervals to all new subscribers. You can decide when and how to start drip for the subscriber. Below is an example to convert the lead to the customer, when the Drip Starts, once the user subscribers.
You can share details about your product, reviews, case studies and more to convert your lead. This helps to keep the lead warm which is very important in conversion optimization.
How drip can help increase conversions?
Using Drip, you can nurture your customers and increase your brand’s presence on their minds. Some of the benefits of drip push notification which can help to increase conversions –
- Targeted Drip: You can include segmentation in a drip campaign. For each segment, you can create a different drip. This enables you to send customized drip notification to each segment.
- Brand Awareness: With drip, you can send series push notifications at regular intervals. You can use this to talk about your brand and products. This increases brand recall when the customer is looking to shop.
- Smarter Way:
Drip allows you to run multiple campaigns at the same time. Some of the
e-commerce campaigns you can run using drip are:
- Purchase history: You have the customer purchase history. Based on that you can create a drip campaign. For e.g, if the customer has bought a mobile and you have segmented them under Mobile. Now create a drip campaign promoting mobile accessories.
- Upgrade: If you have a subscription-based product, you can easily run a drip campaign for product updates. If someone is at the lower plan, run a drip campaign showcasing the benefits and features of higher plans.
3. Cart Abandonment
One of the most common reasons for loss of revenue is Cart Abandonment.
Cart Abandonment – When a user adds the product to cart and leave without purchasing.
As per the report by Salescycle, 75.8% online shoppers abandon their cart. The study also shows that in the retail sector the average cart abandonment rate is around 75.8%.
How web push notifications can help in improving the cart abandonment rates and increase conversions?
As mentioned, push notifications are delivered in real-time on the browser. When a user abandons their cart, you need to remind users about their cart, nudge them and entice them to complete the conversions. Push Notifications can help you in creating effective cart abandonment campaigns –
- Cart Abandonment Reminders: Once the user abandons their cart, you can send a series of automatic notifications in intervals with details about the product and link to the cart page. This way you can keep the user informed about their product in the cart.
- Instant Re-engagement: Whenever the user abandons their cart, you need to instantly reach out to the user. Other engagement tools need the user to either opens their emails or apps. However, with push notification user gets an instant alert on their browser. This creates an immediate impact and chances for the user completing the conversion are high.
- Urgency: To get the user to complete conversion, you need to entice the user. Let the user know that the stock is limited or share a limited-time coupon. This will create urgency and may lead to conversions.
Cart abandonment campaign is very crucial for e-commerce to recover sales. Case Study shows that an e-commerce site was able to recover 10 sales per day using cart abandonment notifications.
4. Optimization Techniques
Using push notification you can run multiple types of a campaign to improve re-engagement and conversion for your online business. However, to get the best result you need to optimize your push notification campaigns to get the best results.
How can the optimization techniques help improve conversions?
Using push notification is very simple. In three simple steps you can send a notification to subscribers:
- Title: Enter your push notification title.
- Description: Give a small description of your push notification.
- URL: Enter the landing page URL where you want your user to land.
Once done you can send push notification to your subscribers.
Being easy doesn’t mean it will give you the best results. You need to employ optimization tactics to make it work. Some of the most important optimization tactics for e-commerce website are:
- Schedule: Time to time e-commerce website run sale campaigns to bring in more customers. To bring in customers, you need to inform the user in advance. To ensure you do not forget to inform the subscribers, you can schedule your push notifications in advance. This will give you time to focus on another aspect of the business as the push notifications will be sent as per the schedule.
- Time to Live: Consider a situation – “user opens his browser and receives a notification of a sale event. He clicks on it only to know that the event is over.” The user may get disappointed and unsubscribe. Using Push Notification you can easily avoid such a situation. You can put Expiry time for the push notification. This way you can fix the time to live for the notification. After the scheduled time, the notification will automatically expire. So, this way when the user opens his browser, he will not see any of the expired notification. This will prevent miscommunication and will reduce the un-subscription rate.
- Timing: What happens if you send a notification when the user is busy? They will miss the notification and your CTR will decrease. To ensure your notification is seen by the user, send when the user is active. This brings out the fact that timing is very important for the effectiveness of push notification. Check out the push notification analytics and see when your customers are more active. Ensure to send notification during that time to increase CTR. While creating any of the campaigns like Cart Abandonment, Drip, you have the option to choose the timing.
Conclusion In recent times push notification has shown good results for online websites. If you are an e-commerce website and haven’t started Web Push Notifications, give it a try. Most of the push notification service provider has free plans or free trial plans. Get started and see the impact on your business.
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