4 Businesses That Sent Great Push Notifications This Independence Day!

Find out how brands from various business verticals gained traction via push notifications this Indian Independence Day ??
Whether it is the flag-hoisting ceremony in one’s neighbourhood or the Prime Minister’s inspiring speech early in the morning; 15th August certainly awakens that dormant patriotism residing in every Indian. It was a proud day this year for all Indians as India celebrated her 70th anniversary of being an independent nation.
Mobile app businesses joined this spirit of freedom and designed their outreach campaigns with contextual push notifications to their users.
[bctt tweet=”11.7 million notifications sent via CleverTap in the run up to Independence Day this year! ?”]
We studied the campaign strategy of different business verticals and were surprised to see the variation in each. Here is what we found:

Travel ?

The travel industry is always active around such events with flash sales on flights, flat discounts on hotel bookings and various one-time offers.
People generally combine a public holiday with a weekend, so travel companies start communicating with their users a few days in advance. The target window for such campaigns, with attractive offers to travel to exotic locations is mostly in the evenings, towards the end of an average user’s hectic working day.
In complete contrast, on the actual day of the event, the most beneficial time to get the user’s attention via push notifications is around late afternoon. At this point, the holiday mood has just set in, and the user is open to planning an outing.
This year, our client, RailYatri (premier portal for train travellers) creatively designed a push notification campaign to users travelling on the day of Independence Day. Keeping user experience in mind, they sent a food coupon to this segment of users, ensuring extremely high click through rates!

Takeaways:

• Start your campaign a few days before the main event
• Golden window for targeting:

-Before the event day: Evening
-On the event day: Afternoon

E-Commerce ?

Insane offers and crazy discounts set apart e-commerce push notifications from others. With such generous offers and discounts, e-commerce businesses like to segment and nudge their shy users to convert into paying customers. Sending a discount offer to users, who have added items to a wishlist but haven’t charged in the past 30 days, is a good example of such a segment. Relaxed and lazy afternoons on holidays like these are the perfect time for such notifications.
Our client Overcart (a marketplace for refurbished, unboxed, excess stock and pre-owned gadgets) sent push notifications to their set of shy users and got higher conversion this Independence Day 🙂

Takeaways:

• Target users who have shown intent, but haven’t converted
• Golden window for targeting: Afternoon; on the day of the event

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Content and Media ?

News channels publish a lot of content around Independence Day and the best strategy is to target users with content early in the morning. However, there isn’t much that video streaming companies can do for events like these. However, we’ve often seen such businesses sending relevant & contextual messages and prompting users with one-time subscription offers via push notifications.
Our client, SonyLiv (a leading global online streaming app) used geo-based targeting to send push notifications to their users in India only. The notification was contextual, offering 70% off on subscription rates, on the anniversary of India’s 70th Independence Day.

Takeaways:

• Always keep the content relevant to the context
• Golden window for targeting: Early in the day

Food-Tech ?

Food is always an important part of any holiday or celebration, and food-tech businesses in the country were sure to be a part of this annual celebration!
Our client, Faasos (an Indian “food-on-demand” company) sent out a notification to all their loyal users on the last evening of the long weekend; addressing the ‘end of celebration’ sentiment with a contextual & appealing image. The CTR of this campaign was 3 times the average CTR of other Faasos campaigns! ?

Takeaways:

• Use visually compelling images
• Golden window for targeting: Before lunch and dinner time

Closing Thoughts

There is a high chance that your users will be bombarded with a lot of notifications on holidays like Independence Day, not just by your competitors but also by other brands. Here are some general best practices you should keep in mind when creating your push notifications strategy around events:

• Do not mass blast. Create segments of your users and target each one separately
• Let user experience be your focus. Personalise your notifications to make them stand out. Add relevant deeplinks to improve user interaction
• Use relevant emojis to improve your CTRs
• Add attractive images to your notifications. You can also add GIFs, videos and sound media
• Manage the number of touchpoints you want to have with your users, and also strategize the timing for relevant communication