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How to Add Push Notifications to Your Ecommerce Marketing Toolbox

Adding push notifications to ecommerce marketing.

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Whitney Blankenship

Content Marketing Manager

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Every day new channels are emerging in the digital sphere, and while push notifications aren’t new per se, they are beginning to catch on for a lot of retailers.

In fact, according to our latest report, push notifications saw 3x yearly growth in coversion rates in 2020 Q2 – making the channel worthwile the attention of every marketer looking for new ways to drive sales.

In this article, I’m going to run through a couple of effective tactics to using push notifications for ecommerce, and how you can make the most of this channel.

What Are Push Notifications?

Push notifications are little popup messages that appear typically within a browser or on a mobile phone to give users vital information.

While a lot of push notifications in the beginning were about system issues, marketers have begun to use push notifications as another means of contact with their customers.

What’s interesting about push notifications is that a customer doesn’t have to be navigating a brand’s site to receive the notification if they’ve opted into receiving them.

This gives brands uninhibited access to their customers at a moment’s notice.

How Do Push Notifications Work?

Push notifications on ecommerce sites work by expressly asking for permission, aka the opt-in.

When you integrate push notifications on your ecommerce site, as soon as a new customer or visitor lands on your site, a small opt-in box will appear. If the customer opts in and allows push notifications, they’ll be added to your push subscriber list.

Push notifications

Once a customer has opted in to receiving push notifications from you, you can send them a small text-based message whenever you want.

But keep in mind that push notifications are a lot like email in terms of consent, and with great power comes great responsibility. If you abuse your push notifications, your consent can be revoked as quickly as it was granted.

4 Ways to Use Push Notifications for Ecommerce

There are plenty of interesting ways to use push notifications to connect with your online shoppers.

#1. Announcing New Products or Promotions

If you’ve got big news, a push notification is a great way to make sure your customer gets the information quickly. While an email might be read hours after the fact, you can be sure that a push notification will be seen by your customer instantly.

This can be particularly useful for ecommerce stores who have implemented a wishlist system. I typically get emails about my wishlist items going on sale. I usually open the email, check out which item it is, and then I may or may not click through to the site.

However, with a push notification, there’s less content you add to a message, kind of like an SMS message. You have to be very precise about your offer and fit it into a enticing, yet short message.

#2. Abandoned Cart Recovery with Push Notifications

We all know how useful email is with abandoned cart recovery. But we also know that those email series are time sensitive.

Now add an extra kick to your abandoned cart email series by tacking on a handy push notification to remind a customer that they’ve left items in their cart.

As push notifications are instantaneous, you can make sure that they get the message as soon as it’s sent. In Omnisend, you can add push notifications to any of your existing automated workflows.

#3. Useful Information about Orders and Shipping

A push notification is especially useful for time-sensitive information, as I mentioned with cart abandonment. Giving your customers the opportunity to get instant updates as soon as their order is confirmed or when it ships means providing a next-level customer experience.

Also, if you have shipping deadlines before major holidays, this could be a great moment to use a push notification too.

By letting your customer know there’s only three days left to get their order in before the holidays, you’ll make sure your customer won’t end up with a delayed gift on their hands.

#4. Use Segmentation to Send Personalized Offers to Your Customers

Much like with email, customers are going to respond better to personalized push notifications than just general blasts.

Using the segmentation that you already use for email marketing, segment and customize your push notifications based on

  • Profile data
  • Campaign behavior
  • Shopping behavior

When you use personalized push notifications for your customers, your instant message will be even more powerful and will create the ultimate customer experience.

How to Connect Push Notifications with Omnisend

Push notifications are currently available through Omnisend for customers with a Pro plan and trial users trying out Pro plans.

Push notifications work with Shopify, BigCommerce and API integrated ecommerce stores, and they will only work if you have an SSL certificate. They’re currently available for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera.

Note that push notifications will only be shown to your subscribers who have opted-in to receive them. They won’t just automatically go out to users whose email addresses and phone numbers you’ve captured.

With a Shopify store, connection takes all of two clicks from your Connected Apps menu (check the tutorial here). If your ecommerce store is on BigCommerce, there’s one extra step, but integrating your store with push notifications is simple nonetheless. You can check out the how-to article and see the video for BigCommerce stores here.

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This article originally appeared by our friends at Omnisend.

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