The success of your mobile app depends on your ability to engage with your users based on their individual behavior and their actions within your app. Whether you’re a Product Manager or Developer, you need a smart mobile marketing strategy to drive user retention.
CleverTap has outlined ten key customer life moments below and ten examples of smart push notifications that you can repurpose for your app marketing strategy:
1) Make them say ‘I do’ with a soft ask.
Always suppress the default IOS prompt for opt-ins. Send a push notification when the user is most likely to be engaged and pose the question as an extension of their user experience.
2) Don’t say goodbye before you say hello
On-boarding messages are a critical piece of your app success. With a smart analytics and engagement platform, here is how you can get started.
- When an ‘App Install’ event is tracked, the user can be added to a Live User Segment called ‘New Users.” Let’s call this Day 0. Trigger a welcome notification immediately. You can send a video tutorial or a round up of all your services to get the user acquainted with your app.
- Day 1 – It’s time for a follow-up push notification. Check to see if the first desired action (watch a video, clicked on the introductory offer or entered credit card info, uploaded profile pic) has been completed. If completed, wait for the next opportunity to engage the user.
- If the desired action has not been completed, send the first action reminder email. It may also help to add an incentive for performing an action. For example, if you’re trying to encourage a purchase, offering a promo code can help!
- If the desired action has been completed, move the user to the next behavioral segment in the series.
- Day 1, 3 and 7 are the perfect days to schedule your onboard messaging with the most proven results.
- Welcome messages get very high open and click rates averaging up to 50% since right after signup, your app commands high mindshare in the user’s mind.
3) Eliminate lost opportunities
If you are an e-commerce app, abandoned cart campaigns are one of the most valuable campaigns of all. If executed well, you can say goodbye to lost opportunities. Here is how you can tackle your abandoned cart situations:
- The user enters the Live Segment when the added to cart event is tracked.
- If a ‘Charged’ event is tracked, the user will be added to a Live User Segment’ to receive a thank you note. You can also use this opportunity to upsell with related products and a discount code.
- Based on the average shopping time on your app, if a ‘Charged’ Event’ is NOT Tracked, the user will be added to another segment which will trigger a Reminder Notification with a preview of items in the cart and a link to check out. You can also add additional discount codes with an expiry to incentivize the buyer.
4) Loyalty is inversely proportionate to churn
Ultimately your app success is dependent on the longevity of your user base and their engagement within your app.
- If you invest your engagement efforts into keeping your users happy from Day 1, your churn rate will reduce dramatically. But that is not to say that your app uninstalls will be completely 0. There are still the cases of bloating, user experience, etc. that will lead to uninstalls.
- For both IOS and Android, you can add how many users uninstalled your app automatically into a past behavior based segment. You can trigger an email to these customers either with a re-engagement proposal or a survey to find out the reason for the uninstall.
5) Timely messages triggered by user inaction
- For social apps, when users who have registered but not posted anything, they can be added to a segment to receive a notification within x minutes/hours or days since registration.
- Where users have posted a message, a trigger can be set up to prompt them to share on social media within x minutes
6) Geography based hyper-local segments combined with behavior
- When users are at Coachella who have more than two friends at the event, but have NOT uploaded a Flipagram yet.
7) Campaigns designed to tackle the app version upgrade
- Whenever you release a new version of your app, users who are still on the old version can be automatically added to a Live segment to receive a notification to nudge them to the latest version of your app with your version-specific message
8) Non-payment side of the Payment App driving conversions
- Stores like Walgreens use Apple Pay and Android Pay etc. that also has options to ‘Add Coupons’ to the app. When you can trigger a ‘coupon expiry’ notification when a user is near a store (based on hyper-local segments), the chances of the user visiting the store is more likely.
9) Getting positive rating with a contextual message
- It’s the perfect time to ask for an app review when the user has completed a positive experience with your app
- Ask users who have reviewed a product highly, to also rate your app in the App Store
- Small loyalty / reward / CEO-letter / badge to recent customers who’ve purchased AND also rated your product high
10) Create feel-good experiences
One of the best use of campaigns is to use them to extend your brand & product experience
- Notification on the day of product delivery, informing the customer of delivery
- Personalized in-app message welcoming first time users with something relevant based on the city/time of first app launch
Ultimately, the job of every push notification is to make your user’s job easier. I read this somewhere and I quote “ Can you walk up to a customer in a store and say that message without being embarrassed?” If your answer is ‘Yes, you’re off to a good start.
Last updated on October 1, 2024
