Introduction

When a customer thinks of buying a product or service they retain to the known website or store. It is because of previous experience with the brand. Experts report that only 18% of businesses focus on customer retention when returned customers spend more than new customers.

Also, the acquisition of customers is five times more expensive than retaining. Marketers are tracking down new strategies for customer retention using marketing channels like emails, social media, and push notifications.

All these channels work effectively. But with experience serving over 30K brands of different industries, we suggest push notifications can boost retention rates and drive sales. Marketers can use web push notification tool to manage subscribers, send notifications, segmentize users, and more to engage or retain customers.

What is Customer Retention?

Customer retention is turning one-time visitors to repeat customers without having them switched to competitors. Businesses can achieve considerable customer retention rates by maintaining product quality, positive customer service, and marketing strategies. Customer retention rate is a lifeline for every industry like e-commerce, subscription-based services, blog websites, and more.

For example, you have a particular percentage of users who have been your customers for a given period of time. In the meantime, you observe they haven’t visited your website and you lost them. Getting back these users to your website or using products is customer retention.

In this article, you will know about the working strategies to improve the average customer retention rate by industry using browser push notifications.

Why Web Push Notifications are Effective to Boost Customer Retention?

Web push notifications are actionable alerts sent to the subscribers through the desktop web or mobile web regardless of their presence on the website. Check out our knowledge blog on push notifications with all details covered.

Web push notifications with the right strategy have the potential to reach your users timely with a high view rate. They create a one-to-one communication channel with your customers and retain them back. You can add value to the brand and remind yourself among the customers.

Stats say that 65% of users return to the website within one month after enabling push notifications. Businesses consider push notifications to offer an equal rate of ROI to other marketing channels with a high average customer retention rate.

Many industries have adopted push notifications as a marketing channel to reach and retain customers. We need to take a deeper look into these industries to know how push notifications are helping to boost customer retention.

  1. The industries like e-commerce, travel, food delivery, fashion, and others use push notifications to convert their visitors into customers.
  2. Content-based websites like bloggers, news websites, and OTT platforms use push notifications to engage users and increase page views.

Few use cases of web push notifications for online retailers

  • You can push notifications regarding a product or service recommendation.
  • Announce a new product launch using this marketing channel to attract more existing customers.
  • Promote flash sales, and daily offers and let your customers know about them.
  • Ask users to provide feedback and reviews after the products are delivered.

Few cases of to use of push notifications for retaining customers in content-based websites

  • You can send notifications to users whenever a new blog, eBook, or testimonials are added to your blog.
  • Newsfeed websites can use RSS to push notifications to send automated notifications to their users.
  • Video content websites can push alerts about subscription updates, new streaming content, and the latest episodes of previously watched content.

How to Make Your Push Notifications Boost Customer Retention?

We need to have a working strategy to use push notifications to boost customer retention but not annoy and lose them. So, we have curated a few best practices to use push notifications for improving customer retention rates.

Plan Customers Opt-in Strategy

We can’t push engaging alerts to users until they opt-in to the push notifications service. It takes only a few seconds for the visitors to click on “Allow” or “Deny” on the opt-in message on your website. So marketers should make sure to create a favourable impression on the first visit of the users. They can define informative opt-in messages, different styles, opt-in positions, text, and button colours using the set-up opt-in features of the push notifications tool.

This is how an opt-in message looks on a website

For example, if you have a fashion blog, and whereas an interesting opt-in message that lets your visitors click on the “Allow” button.

Instead of writing “ Allow notifications from our store”

You can try “Get updates on the latest fashion trends”

Write Engaging Content in Push Notifications

After you have retained a user you need to send highly related notifications to engage them. Writing an effective push notification is not an easy task because of limitations. The notifications contain two content parts that are title and the description. We need to maintain an ideal count of 40 characters for the title and 150 characters for the description. So, that your messages are not truncated and convey the message. You can increase the open rate of push notifications by 85% by using rich content like emojis, relevant images, and landing pages.

Some of the best practices for writing push notifications are

  • Make your notifications actionable by adding CTA which lands users on desired web pages.
  • Write personalized push notifications by analyzing the user’s previous visit data.
  • Know what your audiences want to hear from you. It can be about price changes, offers, product updates, blogs on trending topics, and more.
  • Try to add action words in text like Buy Now, Apply Now, Click Now, and more to retain users.

For a deeper understanding, you can check push notifications templates for different industries.

You can see a difference in interaction created by the below push notifications examples.

In the above example, you can see the title and description are truncated and not giving enough reason for users to click.

In this push example, the title and description convey the right message and attract users to click and know more.

Maintain Frequency & Timing of Push Notifications

Over-sending push notifications will always lead to losing your subscribers. The average click rate of push notifications decreases by sending more than one notification per day. So, you need to make it efficient on the first attempt of the day and retain users.

Push notifications are effective in reaching users with relevant messages at the right time. For instance, if a subscriber receives messages at midnight will end up with lined notifications in the morning. In this case, there is a high chance that the user clicks on a clear button and you lose the click and view rate.

The push notification timing varies for every industry depending upon the subscriber’s behaviour. So, Truepush has analyzed the push notification’s best timings and days for the top 6 industries.

Web Push Notification Campaigns to Boost User Retention

Here are a few campaigns with examples, where you can use push notifications to boost user retention.

Retain Users with Price Drops & Flash Sales

As a user, we sometimes tend to go back to the website when we see a sudden price drop or flash sale on the searched product.

Now, as a marketer, you can retain users by alerting them with price drops or flash sales on abandoned cart products, formerly checked categories, and wishlists. As the user is already interested there are high chances of clicking the push notification and retaining to the website.

For Example, A top fashion store like Adidas can send price-down push notifications on a particular product to retain users.

Another example of a web push notification from an ed-tech website about discounts on courses to bring back users.

Attract Users with New Product or Blog Launch

Retain your existing customers who haven’t reached out for a while with updates about new products or services. You can send push notifications about product updates, podcast episodes, new fashion collections, trending blogs, and more. It is the best way to retain customers as they have previous experience with your product or service. You can segmentize subscribers depending on their previous purchases, and page visits to send relevant push notifications.

For Example,

A blog site can send push notifications about the latest writing on a trending topic to retain its users.

Attract with Product Recommendations

The purchase data of customers will help you to send relevant product recommendations to the users. You can expect high open rates for these push notifications as the customer has previously purchased a product from the same category.

For instance, if you have ordered groceries from a food and personal care app like BigBasket you get a transactional notification with recommended products. The notification is pushed with the intention to retain the user.

For Example,

This is a product recommendation push notification example from a fashion store to retain users.

Bring Back Customers with Back In Stock Alert

Back-in-stock push notifications are an effortless way to boost customer retention. You can recover the lost sales and build customer loyalty. There is a high probability of customers bouncing back from the page after seeing out-of-stock on the website.

In this case, you can analyze the customer behavior like product page visits, wishlists to what they are looking for. Now, restock the products and send well-curated push notifications that can increase your customer retention rate.

This is a push example of a back-in-stock product from a bookstore.

Retain Customers with Feedback & Rewards

Engaging customers can increase customer retention on your websites. Always ask your customers to provide feedback for writings, videos, products, or services. It promotes your brand from the user end in an effective way. You can encourage your customers with giveaways for sharing or reviewing your products.

For example, Flipkart, an e-commerce website asks for a product review after delivery and provides reward coins that are redeemable on the next purchase. In this way, the website engages users and retains them back to buy products.

Analyze your industry and design the best campaign and strategy that effectively works on your subscribers to bring them back.