In today’s internet era, people are shopping online more than ever. As per statista, by 2022, online e-commerce revenue is projected to grow by 6.54 trillion dollars. It clearly indicates how fast customers are getting acquainted with online shopping. One of the ways to distinguish your site from other online websites and get a bigger slice of the market is Customer Engagement. A report on customer engagement done by Gallup suggested that an engaged customer represents a 23% premium in terms of revenue over the average customer.
This suggests how critical customer engagement is for every business. As a business owner, you need to engage customers efficiently and effectively. One of the best ways to engage the customer is to use Browser Push Notifications. Using push notification addresses four critical functions of every e-commerce business –
- Customer Subscription
- Segmenting the subscribers
- Brand building
- Instant and on-time reach
Customer Subscription
For every marketing campaign, a subscriber base is very important. To engage customers, we need them to register or subscribe to our website. The traditional approach has been either form filling or email subscription. However, with Push Notification, you can achieve a better subscription rate.
The average email subscription rate is around 1% to 5% whereas with push notification you can get up to a 15% subscription rate.
The reason for the higher subscription rate is single click subscription. For push notification, the users do not need to enter any personal details. With a single click, the user will get subscribed to push notification.
Segmenting Subscribers
Every customer is different and hence they have different tastes. In order to achieve a better engagement rate, we need to reach out to the right customers with the right product. If you send updates of apparel to a customer who is interested in electronics, the chances of him re-engaging with your website are very low. The infographic below shows the impact of segmentation on CTR:
Push Notification allows you to segment customers by various parameters. Here are the top three ways you can segment users for effective customer engagement –
- Based on subscription – Your website is getting traffic from different sources. Visitors are landing on different pages of your website and subscribing to your push notifications. Using push notifications you can categorize users based on the page on which they subscribed to your push notifications. Consider an example. You are running paid ads for electronics, apparel, and furniture to bring users to those pages. If the user landed on the electronics page and subscribed, you can then segment that user to the Electronic category and send him notifications related to his interests.
- Cart Abandonment – One of the most common causes of lost revenue is cart abandonment. Using push notifications you can easily re-engage those users and bring them back to your website. You can also send cart abandonment push notifications automatically whenever a user abandons his cart. A series of push notifications can be sent with product images, bringing users back to the cart. You can send a number of cart abandonment push notifications to the user until he converts.
- Based on user action – When a user comes to your website, he performs different actions. He may watch product videos; download an e-book or take other actions. This means the user is a potential customer and can be segmented. Later, you can send targeted push notifications to the user to re-engage and bring him back to your website.
Brand Building
To build a brand you need to constantly engage users and keep nurturing them about your brand. This can be easily done using push notification. There is a feature called Drip Push Notification which allows you to send a series of push notifications in an automated fashion.
How can drip help to create brand value?
- Automated – Whenever a user subscribes to your push notification, drip will start. You can send a series of push notifications at regular intervals to nurture subscribers about your brand. You can spread the notifications over a month or any duration to keep your subscribers engaged with your brand and to bring them back to your site. The image below shows how drip is being used by a SaaS website:
- Targeted Nurturing – You can create multiple drips for different segments or objectives. You can have a drip for new users, a drip for customers, a drip for potential leads and more. Create a series of customized and targeted push notifications. Sending a targeted drip will engage customers and increase brand recall. Whenever a customer makes a purchase, start sending them an automated notification with details about complementary products, discounts and more. This will help you to create an engaged and loyal customer base.
Instant and On-Time Reach
For an e-commerce website, timing is critical. Very often e-commerce websites run sale events for the customer. These events are time-limited and so it becomes absolutely necessary to reach out to customers on time.
By design, push notifications are delivered right on the customer’s browser and the chances of missing notifications is minimal. Even when the customer is browsing some other website, the notifications will be delivered on the browser in real-time.
To get a better engagement rate for sale events, you need to connect to users when they are active. This can be solved using push notifications –
- Customer time zone: If you are serving global customers, you do not need to create multiple segments and notifications to be sent at the right time. For example, if your event starts a 1 PM, you can send single notifications. The notification will be delivered based on the customer’s time zone. This will not only help you to engage better but will also save you time.
- Schedule notifications: Sales events are all pre-planned. Similarly, you can pre-plan the push notification that you will be sending and schedule it. Notifications will be sent as per the schedule. In this way you users won’t miss updates about sales events.
Conclusion
With so many e-commerce stores coming up, it’s tough to remain competitive. Using Browser Push Notifications, you can keep your users engaged. It costs a lot more to acquire a new customer than to retain one. Moreover, using push notifications is far simpler and easier as compared to other re-engagement tools. Give push notifications a try for your re-engagement campaigns.
Ravi Trivedi is the CEO and founder of PushEngage. PushEngage is a leading platform for browser push notifications with customers in 150+ countries serving 3 billion monthly notifications. You can reach out to him on Twitter and Facebook.
