three key best practices for push notifications

Mobile, the most disruptive tool of the 21st century, is revolutionizing the customer experience both offline and online. And you can’t talk about mobile without talking about push messages. They’ve served a multitude of purposes like alerting customers to an offer, clicking a link to a website, informing news, pick-up notifications, or reminders of a pending item in a mobile basket. These are all good reasons to use push messages; however, with the mere swipe of a finger, users can ignore your push messages faster than they unsubscribe from your email list.

Effective push messages are particularly critical in industries like retail and quick-service restaurants, where the need for engaging with a customer or potential customer at the right moment can make the difference between a sale or not. Many misuse push messaging and end up clumsily spamming users at random times. The ability to integrate push messages into an overall omnichannel customer experience strategy is key. For example, Burger King executed an integrated customer experience strategy to increase sales in the Russian market and capture the highly competitive customer base. Below are three types of push message that they utilized in their omnichannel strategy to engage, delight, and ultimately convert customers.

1. The Welcome Message

The customer experience begins the millisecond your user downloads your app. Sometimes referred to as onboarding, this is the stage where you’ll need to make a good first impression. Welcome your customers with a personalized message when they first download the app. According to mobile expert Andrew Chen, “sending a single onboarding-focused push notification to new customers during their first week on the app increased retention by 71% over two months.”

2. The Urgent, Limited-Time Offer Message

When in a market as competitive as Fast Food or QSR, driving traffic sometimes requires instilling a sense of urgency. An effective type of push message is the classic urgent, limited-time offer. What Burger King did below is trigger a message when users entered the store. It’s a message with a barcode to scan at the register and it’s offering a deal on chicken nuggets, only available to redeem for 7 minutes. This moves people to purchase quickly, within a timeline that allows them to move customers through the line faster. And with integration into their POS system, coupon redemption is quick, easy and results in happy, fed customers.

Burger King also leveraged the power of proximity marketing for this push message. They trigger the message based on the customer’s location, knowing which store they are in to serve them the appropriate promotion. They leveraged proximity marketing techniques for both outdoor (geo-fencing) and indoor (beacon) targeting.

3. The Personalized, Reward Message

An effective, comprehensive customer experience strategy includes some type of loyalty program or campaign. Messages triggered based on customers’ loyalty status is a tried and true way to delight. Instead of spammy, non-targeted messages, customers get personalized notifications that they’ve reached a certain status or they’ve accumulated enough points for a reward. Burger King did this by coaching the users through the program, then alerting them as they’ve accrued “crowns” for which they can redeem for items at purchase. The message below welcomes the customer and guides them through the crowns program and how to earn more crowns for more rewards.

Overall push messages are an integral part of an effective omnichannel customer experience strategy.

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