How Do I Build A Push Notification Architecture?

The power of a push notification has become more and more apparent to businesses in the recent past. Everyone knows the results that they drive and the returns that come from using them well.

But for some businesses, getting to the stage where they are using them well is a struggle. Although the concept of push notifications is fairly straightforward, the issue lies in the groundwork and production of them.

Over your time as a business you will build countless notification campaigns. So, having a push notification architecture there and ready to go will make it easier for you down the line. You just have to make the hard yards at the beginning.

Laying The Foundations

Before you start to put together a structure for your push notifications, you need to lay out your foundations. You can’t go off on a whim and build them off nothing. 

The more work you do before you get on to the creative aspect of it, the more successful each push notification campaign will be. 

Understanding your customers and demonstrating that understanding will work in your favour massively. Your engagement campaigns will change for the better as they will be more personalised and relevant to your customers.

Data

The data that you base your campaign on will have a strong indication of whether it will perform or not. Consolidating your customer data helps you better understand your customers in a way that doesn’t lead to confusion.

Once you begin to analyse and understand your customers on a deeper level you can start to put together more relevant and engaging notifications. As soon as a customer sees a push notification that is relevant to them, they will want to open it. Far more than something that doesn’t apply to them much.

The more data you include, the richer the experience will become for your customers. There is a variety of data you can include as well. Including it will lead to far more successful push notification campaigns.

Using demographical, behavioural, or transactional data to build your customer profiles for your campaigns makes for a richer experience. Your customers will begin to realise that you understand them, building trust and fostering loyalty.

Segmentation

Running highly targeted push notification campaigns brings click through rates up to 30%. Furthermore, segmenting your customers into groups for your campaigns can lead to a 760% increase in revenue. This highlights the importance of including segmentation in the lead-up to your campaigns. The rewards are well worth the effort.

Your customers aren’t all the same, so don’t treat them like they are. You need to make sure your push notifications are tailored to reflect their interests. Without this relevancy they won’t be clicked.

Generic campaigns won’t peak anyone’s interest. This is because there is no real relevance for anyone who receives it. 

Sending out a push notification that isn’t built for a specific group of customers will affect you negatively.

Personalisation

The expectations amongst customers to be communicated with on a personal level is much higher now than it used to be. Introducing different types of data to inform your messaging and personalisation gives you the power to create some great campaigns.

When it comes to personalising messages you need to show them things that they have shown interest in in the past. Not just use their name in your messaging. This is where the customer data you have available to you is beneficial for your business. Including transactional data, purchase history, or recently viewed items are all examples of things to include to create powerful push notification campaigns.

Building The Structure

You need to lay out the foundations before you can go ahead and build a house. The same goes for a push notification campaign. Once you’ve done all the groundwork, it makes it a much easier task to put them together.

Below are some examples of things to include in your push notifications to get you started.

Call to action 

Your campaigns should always ask your customer to take some sort of action. This is an important element to include in your push notification architecture. If you don’t ask your customers to do anything in your push notifications, then they won’t.

Your call to action button should refer to what you want them to do. So if it is to go back to an abandoned cart and complete a purchase, then your call to action should display that. It could be something like “complete purchase” or “return to cart”. 

Doing this not only increases the likelihood of an action taking place but also makes it much more memorable for the user. Not every notification will end up with a conversion straight away, but the nudge may drive them to take action later.

Images

90% of the information that our brain absorbs comes from visual cues. A picture is definitely worth a thousand words when it comes to a push notification.

Open rates increase by 56% when a notification includes an image. So including images as part of your push notification structure is definitely worth doing. 

There are different types of images and videos that you can use in your notification campaigns to grab people’s attention. These come in the forms of:

Icons -These are small images displayed beside a notification’s main title and message. In general, companies use this to display their logo.

Hero Image – This is the image of your product or promotion that you want to take centre stage. More times than not it is where the eye of the potential or already existing customer is drawn towards. These generally make the notification more attractive or interesting, so use a cleaned-up picture of the product for the best results.

Videos/Gif – In its simplest form, a GIF is a short animated image that gives a bit more life to the notification than just a standard image. A GIF or video would be used instead of a Hero Image.

Personalise language

After you study your customer data to create relevant experiences, you should make sure that your push notification text shows off your hard work.

It should be more than just “Hey there, here’s an offer!”. That won’t get people clicking on your push notification. You need to make sure that they know instantly what you’re saying to them is relevant to their experience.

Providing you have product and purchase data you can make your push notifications far more personal. Featuring products that the customer has expressed interest in or an offer to a product line they like is much more likely to convert. The messaging you include should show this off.

Dynamic content

There are plenty of things you can do to improve your campaign performance. The use of images and dynamic content can be deployed to your advantage here. Using images, you can show someone exactly what they left in their basket. Or tease them with new product lines. Building this into your push notification architecture will improve campaign performance and yield results.

Dynamic content makes your campaigns far more personal. Transaction rates increase by up to six times through this type of personalisation. So you are almost certain to see some success, increasing sales and customer retention.

Make Changes When You Need

Whatever structure or architecture you put around your push notifications, it’s important to not be too rigid with what you put together.

It’s always important to try out new things and a/b test your notifications so that you can continue to make improvements. 

No matter how well they are performing, there is always some aspect that can be improved.

To learn more about push notifications and how they can increase sales, get in touch with the team to request a demo.