Introduction

“Customer retention is the single most important thing for growth”

Have you ever thought about what difference it could make if you concentrate on customer retention to grow your business?

Making that initial conversion is great but nothing can beat customers coming back to your website. Returning customers spend 2 times the amount of new visitors and these loyal users never search for alternatives. Also, customer acquisition costs 5X more than customer retention for the website. But only 18% of businesses concentrate on improving their customer retention rate.

If you looking to increase your customer retention then browser push notifications are an effective tool you have in your hands. A customer value is more than their first purchase–a long-term relationship provides more revenue and numerous referrals.

What is Customer Retention

Customer retention is the process of engaging customers and having them in the loop of returning without switching to competitors. It indicates the user’s trust and experience in your products/services or website. This is an important metric for every marketer should keep an eye on to keep push campaign success numbers high. Retention rate is a cheaper way to cultivate brand loyalty, repurchasing, positive word of mouth, referrals, know your customers, and more.

Formula to Calculate Customer Retention Rate(CRR)

CRR=((E-N))/S X 100

S= customers at the start of a time period

E= customers at the end of a time period

N= Customers acquired during the time period

Let’s see this customer retention with a simple example

A user visits an eCommerce website, login, browses his favorite categories, and makes a purchase. But he has never visited back the website or checked the products. In this case, the website can push marketing campaigns of sales, new products, and exclusive offers to get the user back.

Why Push Notifications for Customer Retention

Push notification is a popular and effective one-to-one communication channel between customers and marketers. A relevant push message sent at the right time encourages instant engagement. You can send push notifications at every step of the customer journey according to their interests and give the right nudge to bring them back. All you have to do is to plan a perfect push notification strategy and implement it from the day of customer acquisition to engage and retain.

Benefits of using Push Notifications

  • Consistent user engagement
  • Get insights into user behavior
  • High response rate than other marketing channels
  • Subscribers have complete control
  • Easy communication
  • Boost conversion rate
  • Ease of notifying users

8 Push Notification Strategies To Improve Customer Retention Rate

Now, let’s explore different push notification strategies for increasing your customer retention rate.

Welcome Push Notifications

Start implementing your customer retention strategies from the instant you acquire a customer. With push service, you can send encouraging push messages to visitors. It is also helpful for users to confirm successful push notification subscriptions. Use various opt-in styles and strategies to encourage visitors to complete the process.

Things you can say in your welcome push notifications

  • A greeting for accepting the push service
  • About Welcome offers & discounts
  • Give more information about the product/service
  • Tell them what updates they will receive
  • Ask them to follow social media platforms
  • Tell subscribers what to do next

Try to think from the user’s perceptive and know what they would like to hear from you in welcome push notifications. Here is an example of a welcome push notification from the blog page of the free push service, Truepush.

Provide a Reason to Visit Back

Users will not show interest in returning back to the website if they don’t see a value forthcoming. Send push notifications that motivate your users in returning back and make a conversion. You can push notifications about exclusive offers, rewards, and early promotions to the users.

You can send push notifications about 

  • Reward points for signing up
  • Push time-sensitive offers
  • Updates of loyalty points
  • Free e-book download offers
  • Discount on subscription cost

For example, below is the push notification example that holds users in making a meaningful action.

Push Friendly Reminder Notifications

A friendly reminder to your audiences at the right time encourages users to make a conversion. This is the best and most working customer retention strategy for eCommerce and subscription-based websites.

You can push reminders about

  • Upgrade after a free trial session
  • Exclusive coupon code after purchase
  • Product recommendations
  • Cart abandonment notifications
  • Commodities repeat purchase notifications
  • Promote other related services or products

For instance, you can send push notifications about SEO and paid Ads services to the user of your content marketing service. With the experience of using your service, there are high chances of subscribing to others.

Phrases you can use in your push notification reminders

  • It’s your last chance to grab an offer
  • Today is the last day for a discounted subscription
  • We are here to catch up with your cart products
  • The exclusive coupon code ends in 24 hrs
  • Free trial on our new product, Login & try

Don’t Push Too Many Notifications

This is one of the common misconceptions of marketers about push notifications. Sending too many notifications can only annoy your users and unsubscribe from your updates. The worst that can happen is not visiting your website again.

Unless you are a news & entertainment website it is not recommended to send 5 to 6 push notifications per day. Truepush suggests you send 2 push notifications per day in the early stages and analyze user real-time reactions and plan the strategy. But during special promotions, you can push 4 to 5 notifications but it’s advisable to be more relevant and timely.

Eye for Push Content

Push notifications should be precise and crispy. Customers opt out of push subscribers because of boring and irrelevant push messages. Add rich text and media that is appealing and attractive. Use power words, numbers, emojis, and CTA buttons in the push notification sample to have a higher rate of engagement. To make your push messages more relevant curate copies by analyzing user behavior, tracking location, and providing useful content.

Always consider your subscribers are busy people and won’t like to solve some tricky questions in their push messages. So, when they take a look at your push message they should be captivated. You can use trending lines, song lyrics, and phrases to make them more interesting.

For example, you can observe these two push notifications from a website. They both promote the same offer but the first notification is more engaging with emojis and crispy lines.

Truepush has a rich editor format to craft creative push notifications. You can also see the preview of your push notifications on different platforms. Marketers can add test users to the Truepush dashboard for A/B testing.

Add User Interaction

Your push notification hardly stays 5 to 10 seconds on the user’s home screen and disappears to the notifications panel along with other notifications. If a user turns on the network after a busy day he receives all notifications at the same time and clears out everything without having a glance. To avoid this you can make user interaction mandatory while creating push campaigns. So, your push notification sticks on the home screen until users take action. Truepush, a free push service provides this useful feature to its clients to improve the success of push campaigns.

Use Segments to Target Audiences

If you are not gaining enough traction with your push notification then there are chances you are targeting the wrong audiences. Tracking every user and sending push messages is a tedious task so we have brought a user segmentation feature that helps you to target the right audience.

You can segment your target audiences using metrics like countries, OS, subscription date, platform, and more. Now, send relevant and timely push messages to the right audiences and see more conversions.

For example, promotional sales on Black Friday convert more in the United States and Diwali sales in India. There is no brilliance in sending both push notifications to everyone. Now, with Truepush intelligent segmentation you can segment users by country and send respective push notifications.

Don’t Ignore Time Zones

Timing of your push notifications is very important in retaining your customers. A compelling push message at bad timing may be overseen but a poor message at the right time is likely to be seen. You can segment the audiences according to the country and send messages at respective time zones.

For example, you can’t invest resources in sending the same push notification to Indian and United States subscribers and expect the same engagement. It is because of the difference in the time zones. Using the Truepush push notification service you can schedule the messages and increase the success rate of push campaigns.

Improve Customer Retention Rate

Push notifications strategies outlined above are tested and working in improving customer retention. Try to implement them in different stages of your customer journey and reduce the churn rate.

Every push notification is a chance to build a relationship or get an opt-out subscriber. So, you need to be careful before sending a push campaign. But don’t worry we are here to help you with working with push notifications. Truepush Blog page is a great resource to know everything about push campaigns. Do check our useful and informative resources.