4 main faults in using push notifications and how to correct them.
Push notifications are an extremely handy tool for attracting an audience to your site in real time. A good advertising campaign with using of push notifications, will help to increase the number of repeated visits and send traffic to the target content.
Sounds exciting, right? That's for sure! However, many websites can not take full advantage of push notifications due to some easily fixable errors. Here are 4 main errors of using push notifications and ways to avoid them. Let's start!
1. You are sending too many notifications.
This is the most common and most destructive in the long term error that you can make when sending push notifications to your subscribers. In fact, you swamp subscribers with notifications! It can look profitable in the short term, as long as you see the base growth, but soon it will force more and more subscribers to abandon your newsletter.
How to fix this
Push notifications are a great way to talk to your audience directly and in real time. The disadvantage is that too many direct conversations with subscribers can lead to unwillingness to talk with you more, and subscribers can refuse notifications at all.
As a business, you need to understand your audience, their lifestyle and their needs, you have to determine the frequency of your push notifications. The frequency will vary from case to case, but Push4site usually recommends sending messages no more than 2 times a week. We have developed a good filter in the form of topics that interest your customers. Fill in several topics which you use for sending most often and watch what topics are interesting to your subscribers.
2. You choose the time for sending notifications incorrectly
Another classic mistake that we see when creating notifications on many sites is sending notifications without taking into account the time zones where subscribers are located. If your mobile is at 3 AM, and someone has sent a message "10 amazingly inspirational songs for start your day"… I'm sure you understand what we're talking about!
Bad time chosen for sending push notifications is a sure way to annoy your subscribers, and this will lead to fewer clicks and higher closing and unsubscribing rates.
How to fix this
Use the local time distribution settings when creating notifications. A well-prepared notification that will come exactly when it's needed leads to user admiration. Imagine that you get "10 amazingly inspirational songs to start your day" when you are getting ready to go for a run at 7 am. A small change in logic, a big difference in the overall effect!
3. You send notifications to everyone
We are almost sure, that you already know about this, but let me once again remind you just in case: all people are different! Considering your audience and subscribers as a homogeneous mass is a classic mistake that many marketers, including us, once faced. However, users expect and require a high level of personalization. If you do not take into account the preferences of users, then the number of closings will increase and, possibly, increase the number of unsubscribers.
How to fix this
There are many methods that companies can and must implement in order to deliver their personalized notifications to their subscribers. We implemented the most popular methods within our system. For example, tags that allow you to track actions, such as viewed pages, and then segment your subscribers into different categories based on these actions.
4. You do not track performance indicators
If you track only number of clicks, you lose real conversions and the value of push notifications. As marketers, we tend to focus too much on immediate indicators. However, we must be careful with the vanity metric that prevents us from making business decisions.
How to fix this
Set up goals on your site that you think are the most important. These include buying, testing, completion of forms, viewing categories and contacts. Carefully analyze the data in Analytics or other analytics tools. Then find out how many visitors to your site, attracted by push notifications, actually perform these actions. This assessment is the only way you can really determine how well the new channel of communication works. After all, not all users make purchases instantly.