Think of the last generic piece of marketing you received. Whether it was an email, a piece of mail, or an ad on TV, if it didn’t interest you, you didn’t care. Generic marketing encourages recipients to unsubscribe, throw the mail in the recycling, or change the channel. Broadcast marketing becomes an annoyance in your life, potentially even causing you to dislike a brand.
In contrast, when you receive a material piece that relates to your interests, you’re more likely to appreciate and engage with it. Reaching the right audience is crucial for successful marketing campaigns.
If you want to get your message across and make sure it sticks, segmented push notifications are a powerful solution. Browser push notifications allow brands to stay in touch with website visitors with less risk of your messages getting lost among junk mail. They also make creating segmented marketing pieces a breeze. Do away with one-size-fits-all marketing and discover how to reach the right audience for your business using segmented push notifications.
Why Segmentation Is Important
The ultimate goal of marketing is to get conversions, so why waste time and energy on generic marketing campaigns that don’t deliver? Segmentation ensures you send the right message to the right audience for the best results. Sending push notifications without a strategy is almost worse than not using them at all, because they risk annoying subscribers. Without segmentation, push notifications only harness a fraction of their capability.
In 2017, 85% of push notifications were segmented. If you’re not sending segmented push notifications, you’re quickly falling behind. To get the most out of your push notification strategy start by educating yourself on why segmentation is important.
According to Localytics, the click-through conversion rate for segmented push notifications is significantly higher than broadcast campaigns. This is because a segmented campaign reaches its ideal audience instead of blasting out to everyone on a subscriber list. If your brand sells pet food, you wouldn’t send cat food coupons to your subscribers that own a dog. It makes sense to know your subscribers and use that knowledge to send the most appropriate messages. In this example, segmentation helps the right content (dog food coupons) reach the ideal target audience (dog owners).
Not only do segmented push notifications increase click-through conversion rates, but they also lead to less unsubscribes. Growing a large subscriber list doesn’t matter if there is a high unsubscribe rate. When subscribers receive a large number of notifications that don’t interest them, they begin to view this is as spam content and eventually unsubscribe.
With a declining subscriber list comes less returning traffic to your website and thus fewer sales. Using segmented push notifications will help you maintain your subscriber list and website traffic, as well as keep customers happy.
Another reason why segmented push notifications are important is that they acknowledge the different stages of a buyer’s journey. With generic messaging, each subscriber receives the same message, regardless of where they are in their customer journey. A customer who recently made a purchase won’t benefit from a free shipping code as much as a customer with an abandoned cart would. Customers appreciate marketing that helps move them along in their buyer’s journey, not take them a step back.
Segmented push notifications are also important for recognizing the location diversity in your subscriber list. With time-zone scheduling, you can reach customers around the world at the right time. Notifications sent at the wrong time is what annoys 38.39% of push notification recipients the most. Sending segmented messages with time-zone scheduling helps prevent you from becoming a nuisance in your customer’s life.
Each of your subscribers have different interests. Sending a broadcast message about one of your products without segmentation is not an effective marketing strategy. For example, 55.74% of push notification recipients unsubscribed because the content was irrelevant to them.
Additionally, segmenting subscribers based on their preferred device choice will help deliver notifications at the right time to the right device. For subscribers that browse your website on their desktop, you may find they’re doing so during working hours. Another subscriber may prefer to use their tablet to view your website on the weekends. By segmenting your subscribers based on device use, you can send notifications at their high usage times to their preferred devices.
Segmentation is important for not only increasing your conversion rates, but for optimizing your customer’s experience. Sending relevant notifications at the right time will help keep customers subscribed and happy.
How to Segment Your Audience
Now that you understand why segmentation is important, you should focus on how to get audience segmentation right. Creating segmented push notifications is simple to accomplish with Pushnami. You can segment your subscriber list based on location, device, demographic, activity, interests, and more.
One strategy that we can recommend to get your campaign started is to start by separating your subscribers into 4 different segments: all subscribers, active users, engaged users, and inactive users. From these segments, you can create sub-segments for better targeting and more personalized pushes. Different segments require different campaign topics and frequencies. The more specific you make each segment, the better experience your subscribers will have.
If creating your own segments sounds difficult, don’t worry, Pushnami makes it easy. By applying different filters, you can create as many segments as you want. Based on the filters selected, Pushnami automatically creates each segmented list for you. Pushnami’s advanced API updates your lists every time a user subscribes, unsubscribes, or logs additional user activities that will impact your push campaigns. This allows you to always reach your target audience for each campaign.
Segmented Push Notification Ideas
Once you’ve segmented your subscriber list, you can start brainstorming different push notification ideas possible with segmentation.
Geo-Targeted Notifications – Create different push notifications based on the different areas your subscribers live in. For example, Southwest Airlines sends its subscribers flight deals for their home airport location. A subscriber who lives in Seattle might receive a notification that states, “Flights from Seattle to around the US starting at $66 one way.” Southwest can create a campaign that sends this message to US users that automatically updates the price and location according to the subscriber info. Segmented push notifications based on locations help keep content locally relevant.
Buyer’s Journey – When subscribers are at different points in their buyer’s journey, they require different content. Send subscribers making their first purchase a shipping information notification, or send a previous customer a flash sale via push to entice them to re-engage. With segmented push notifications, you can also create triggers that automate pushes for different points of the buyer’s journey, such as abandoned cart notifications or up-selling at check-out. This helps point subscribers in the correct direction down the sales funnel.
New Subscribers – Welcome brand new subscribers with an automatic push notification. This will help them feel special for opting into your notifications.
Take Segmentation One Step Further With Personalization
Once you get the hang of segmented push notifications, it’s time to take your strategy one step further with personalization. Using artificial intelligence, Pushnami makes it easy to personalize campaigns for each individual subscriber. Campaigns can include names, locations, and suggested content based on subscriber activity. Personalized campaigns can also self-schedule and optimize to save you time.
For example, a news website has a story breaking in San Diego about an avocado shortage. They can send a push notification to subscribers based in San Diego who have shown an interest in agriculture, restaurants, or foodie culture based on their story browsing history. With more specific segmentation, open rates and click-through rates increase.
Adding personalization to your push campaigns communicates to your subscribers that you care about their interests. You don’t want to bombard them with irrelevant content as much as they don’t want to receive it. Utilizing user data with Pushnami allows you to create relevant push campaigns your subscribers look forward to opening.
If you’re ready to take your marketing strategy to the next level and reach the right audience with segmented push notifications, Pushnami has all the tools you need to get started. Our Push Success Team is here to help you optimize your push campaigns and segment your audience. Try segmented push notifications for yourself and sign up for a free trial today.
