Web push notifications for online stores

Push notifications are something you need to read about. This article tries to summarise how can push notifications get more sales for your store.

All online shops use email, social media, affiliate marketing, text messages, or ad networks to bring (back) traffic to their website. The results vary for each of these channels, so we won’t enter into details to compare them. Push notifications are a totally new channel, created a few years ago along with the new apps ecosystem for mobile phones.

They are sent in real time with a much higher response rate compared to email (50% higher). Along with a few other advantages they have a chance of becoming number one channel in terms of return of investment (they are almost free in some cases).

What’s the difference between SMS (text messages), email and push notifications?

The biggest difference between first two and push messages is that for the latest there’s no way to send them without permission received from the user.

A few more differences detailed:

  • Permissions for push gives user greater control over what kind of messages he/she wants to receive
  • SMS comes unsolicited and it’s sometimes impossible for the user to disable it
  • The costs of SMS are much higher, at about 5 cents per message, where push notifications are almost free

You can read here a more detailed article from The Next Web

Are notifications going to replace email marketing?

Mobile marketing and marketing automation is the trend for marketing managers. In the past 2 years one to one communication on email, text messages, or ad retargeting has taken the place of bulk newsletters or general campaigns.

Customers want personalized communication, alerts in realtime that can be easily discarded. These instant alerts, called “push notifications”, are being widely adopted by consumers. If your online shop is not using them, you are very likely losing money.
A survey by Responsys found from 1,200 adults that almost 60% of them have downloaded apps from their favorite brands and from those, 7 in 10 have enabled push notifications.

What are the benefits of push notifications?

Real-time communication

Instant delivery of push notifications allow you to communicate in real time. Being flexible in marketing strategies and having an ability to react to breaking news and relevant trends in order to communicate with customers is strongly encouraged for a business.

Non intrusive

Every visitor has to decide himself whether he wants to receive notifications or not from you. This means that as a business owner you do not have to worry about bothering your clients with push messages, as visitors themselves agreed to receive them.

Fast implementation.

Website push notifications are easy and fast to implement. In the case of our service, all you need to do is copy-paste ready Javascript into your web page. It usually takes just a few minutes and with an assistance of customer support can be done by anyone. Or simply use it through TagManager.

Mara features for push notifications in ecommerce.

While this is not an exhaustive list, we provide the following features related to push notifications:

  • Product/Category targeting.
    • You are able to segment your visitors and send them a specific offer based on their onsite interests in specific categories, brands or other catalog attributes
  • Abandoned cart or transactional push
    • Very similar to recovery of abandoned carts, this feature allows you to send push notifications based on user behaviour
  • Recovery of blocked notifications
    • Not all visitors block intentionally push notifications. Using Mara you can ask multiple times those people who initially rejected the permission 
  • Pre-ask before requesting permission
    • Show a sexy message or give something free before asking for permission. A user can easily allow or deny push permissions, so make sure you maximise your chances.

Are you ready to make more money using push notifications? Register now for a free account on MARA.

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