In this fast-paced age, keeping up with the customers and their changing habits means pushing more than you have already done. We are living in the digital age and user engagement has become essential for all businesses and developers to create loyal, long-term customers.
Since they have more choices than ever, your users tend to abandon the app the moment they find it is not worth while anymore, thus diminishing your hard-earned user base.
Therefore, while you focus on growth prospects, you should not lose your existing customers. Having a great app or seeing more downloads is not enough. User retention matters, too. This is where push marketing comes to rescue, reducing your churn rate.
Here are 8 ways push notification strategy helps retain customers and reduce churn.
Effective Role of Push notifications
The word ‘push’ in push notifications doesn’t really mean you need to pushy and lame about convincing customers of your brand or app. Push marketing actually means sending contextual, relevant messages to users when they are offline or logged out of your app.
Using effective push messages fulfil your expectations you had behind all the investment you made after online app marketing (PR & Social Media) and App Store Optimization (ASO). Without using meaningful messages for better engagement, you may miss out on great opportunities to attract and retain them for longer life cycle.
With Apple and Android both supporting push messages, your viable push marketing strategy can:
- Allow users to gain more knowledge about your app/brand
- Remind users of your app content and advantages they get
- Enable users to take quick action on brand approach
- Strategically improve customer interest in your app
- Reduce churn rate considerably
- Help keep users exploring your app more often
Let’s get into the depth of how your future mobile push marketing strategy help reduce user churn rate:
1. Get the Users Onboard, Smoothly
The journey of retaining existing customers with push notifications starts a little before you get users for your app. Before you opt for push notifications content, first you should be religious about getting your users to opt-in to your app.
In this process of user on-boarding, the principle of first impression works as well as it does in real life. If users are upset at the very first stage of on-boarding, they will delete your app instantly.
iOS enables app developers to customize their splash screen to convey their message to users. Be creative as you try to craft an appealing message for making them believe that opting-in to push notifications will not be regrettable. If they are positive, you can give an opt-in prompt for confirmation. If not, either withdraw or gently ask again a little later.
2. The effect of purely quality-oriented messages
We all know to an extent how push notifications can save your app from drowning. But rarely do you come across its true effectiveness. This is because fruitfulness of your push marketing strategy depends greatly on the quality and meaning it serves to app users.
Weave certain value in your messages and avoid randomness in your timing, frequency and message structure. On the contrary, users will get annoyed and some of them may even uninstall your app if you keep pushing wrong, irrelevant, random notifications to their screen.
3. Pick your target audience
Push notifications show proper results only when you have picked the nerve of your target users. If you don’t know who you are planning to touch or retain, you might end up hitting the wrong target. Look into your dashboard and use reliable analytics services so that you can build a user-oriented, action-specific push marketing strategy and pro actively reach your app users.
When you are sure you are addressing right customers, you increase your chance to capture your real audience and reduce the old tendency to lose user base, which ultimately improves your churn rate.
4. Contextual thinking in custom messages
The success of push notifications partially depend on how tailored your messages are, or how meaningful. In order to truly influence readers, you must first gather accurate insight about each user and how they interact with your mobile app.
Based on this data, you can powerfully compose a custom story designed to interest a specific group of users/customers.
The effect of customization is deep as it makes customers feel privileged, important and cared for. To provide such insightful push text to your target users, install strong analytical software that displays everything from user’s preferences, visited app pages, geographical location to their behavioural history. This way, you will be able to cut down on existing churn rate on your app.
5. Spark off re-engagement
Some users tend to use the app once a month or even less or not all. In this case, revitalize their interest and eradicate their lull by re-engaging them into your app. Here their past behaviour is key to understanding their needs and sending effective push messages.
There must be a strong reason why they almost abandon your app. But they still have it installed, which means you can still convert them from inactive to active.
Solidify your push marketing strategy with case-specific offers, discounts or other elements that can re-capture their engagement with your app. E-commerce business apps can hugely leverage such marketing campaigns to minimize app churn rate.
6. Personalizing your reach
Leanplum in its analytical report on push data discovered how personalized content of push messages are four times more effective than generic ones. This indicates that users must be segmented in order to send them customized messages so that you can reach different users based on their personal profile.
Personalized approach can be well built using the analysis of users’ reasons of installation and their resultant interactions with the app.
Once you determine the life cycle and navigation journey of users, it becomes easy to segment and personalize the content of push notifications. Such content is conversational and rich with all personal details of demographics including their age, locations, favorites, choices, gender and recent history.
7. Special time-sensitive offers create temptation
There is no wonder why putting a tag of time on your push offers attract customers to your app more rapidly than with any other method. Irrespective of nation’s economy, using limited time offers in your next push marketing strategy is a great way to engage more users.
Device a special time-sensitive deal that you know will be valuable to your app users.
Incorporate it into your upcoming push notification prompt and keep the balance between your objective and customer’s comfort level.
If you own an e-commerce store, prompt them to take advantage of a 24 hour deal that has merchandises sold at flat 50% discount. This can draw them in to learn more.
8. Show the Benefits of App Updates
Not all devices or apps support automatic app updates. Many users still remain unaware of new improvements and updates in your app. This can be a great opportunity for you to engage with users using app updates push notification.
Based on what they like or prefer, you can craft a beautiful, personalized message showing them the benefits of installing latest updates. Toss a message to prompt them to update the app for more amazing features.
Finally, why push notifications?
Gone are the days when app success was measured with number of downloads and installs. App marketing analysts say that nearly 23% of users uninstall an app after one-time usage.
Also, smart marketers believe that customer engagement is new way of customer acquisition since acquiring new ones could cost 5 t o25 times more than retaining the existing ones.
Further, existing customers are more likely to consider your new product than prospective visitors. Just 5% increase in user retention can boost profit by as much as 25 to 95%
A well-made push notification strategy therefore makes a huge difference when it comes to controlling app churn rate and increase customer loyalty. It lowers the number of customers leaving your app. Ultimately, it also helps increase the revenue of your mobile app.
Conclusion:
Above discussion helps you gain more leverage and satisfaction among your app users. Executed thoughtfully, push marketing strategy could an effective way to keep users immersed in your app and reduce app churn. However, use push messages at right frequency since too many of it can exasperate your users, leading them to quit your app.
Lack of it can harm your app engagement quotient. Be strategic and clever and you can make things work in your favour.