Many Occasions for Notifications

Web Push Notifications are super easy to create and send with the click of a button. They, however, require a well thought out plan to achieve maximum success. The design and continuity of the appropriate sending frequency is just as important as the relevance and attractiveness of the individual notifications.

From audit to plan

Start your planning by considering what your exact goals are with push notifications and how push marketing should tie into your overall communications and content strategy. This includes an audit of existing as well as planned content from all other marketing channels, such as newsletters and blogs. Have you already created a content production and marketing action plan? Then use your theme plan and action calendar as a basis to promote the content and actions it contains even more strongly with push notifications.

Be experimental and creative

Your subscribers can expect useful, relevant notifications like educational tips, hot news or attractive deals. At the same time, you should appeal to your recipients emotions. Score points with your customers with varied notifications that are easy to grasp, helpful, curiosity arousing and refreshing to read. Humor is also (almost) always well received. Have a little courage and draw from the extensive pool of occasions and notification types.

An abundance of types

Whether B2B or B2C, for every industry and every company, there are numerous notification occasions and hooks to be found. Here are a few ideas to take full advantage of push notifications:

News

Source of ideas for the content of the notifications are activities from marketing or product management:

Notices of new content such as blog articles, whitepapers, videos, etc.
Invitations to participate in events such as webinars or store openings
Product and assortment news: In the case of software and cloud services, information about new releases; in eCommerce, notifications about new, reavailable, currently trending items or top sellers.
Promotion of special offers and discount campaigns

Lifecycle

The sending of the notification is based on reaching a certain level or duration of the customer relationship:

Welcome message e.g. when opting in to web push notifications
Sequence of notifications with tips and tricks as part of the onboarding process
Congratulations on customer relationship anniversaries

Follow-up

Follow-up notifications are sent following transactions or other conversions:

Ask customer to rate or give feedback after delivery of a product
Submitting up-selling and cross-selling offers to match previously ordered items

Behavior-based

Triggers for notifications are certain behaviors of subscribers when visiting the website or application:

Abandoned shopping cart, exit in internal search (search results page), products viewed without shopping cart event, abandonment in checkout
Longer period of inactivity (no visit to the website)
Use or non-use of certain functions

Special Events

Some event occasions for which notifications are appropriate are obvious because they are directly related to the sender’s core business: e.g., the upcoming Mother’s Day for florists or the impending onset of winter for tire dealers. With a little imagination and ingenuity, however, many other occasions can be used as a hook for notifications: from birthdays to the time change to the lunar eclipse. Get inspired here from quirky as well as special occasions. But be careful: The occasion and notification must always match the product or offer and its users.