“There’s no one size fits all solution,” Andrew Nixon further says “The key is the commitment to the community, long term. It’s not a ‘simple’ option – and it needs careful consideration and due diligence in terms of the game title you are aligning to and the reach the brand’s engagement will likely achieve.”
Push notifications are an amazing way to communicate with your mobile-app users which in return leads to an increase in engagement, retention and users satisfaction. It is likely that your mobile-app already uses push notifications and you must have already seen the benefits of it.
What is Audience Segmentation?
Segmentation is one of marketing’s most fundamental tactics. It divides a single market into several subgroups of customers who are defined by their common characteristics and behaviors. This allows marketers to speak more specifically to the interests of each group.
By segmenting your app users, even at the simplest levels, you acknowledge their individualism in a way most businesses sadly don’t. And with every new detail, you associate to a segment, you’ll be able to add another layer of personalization to each push notification.
Given all the available criteria you can use to create customer segments, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Beginning at the broadest level, though, is often the best place to start.
Why you should Segment your Subscriber List?
Audience Segmentation is completely about understanding your audience. By dissecting your audience in various groups, you can build a stronger relationship with your users and ultimately drive the desired revenue. In a huge sector like eCommerce and marketing, this is a compulsory task that should not be ignored.
At this point, you may ask why it’s necessary to make sense of all this data. Here are a few reasons why you should.
- Segmentation of audience ensures that your messages reach to the appropriate audience.
- Through Audience Segmentation you can acknowledge that your audiences are in different levels of purchases. That means you will send the required message to the audiences, for example, to some you will send messages for offers, to some for completing the purchase and to some for re-stocking of some product.
- Audience Segmentation makes your Push Notification more intelligent and intuitive about the needs and preferences of your audiences.
- Segmentation is an additional advantage for Personalisation.
How to do Audience Segmentation for Sending Out Push Notifications?
Often times, marketers do not take the smaller and finer differences among their audiences into their account while developing their strategy for digital marketing. Obviously, we can’t run down to all the specifics of the people but that doesn’t mean audience and customer segmentation can’t be done and done well.
Segmentation helps you deliver messages to the right people. Almost every mobile marketing platform that delivers push notifications will support some form of segmentation. Here are some tips to ensure you get the most from this powerful targeting technique:
1. Focus On Demographics First
Initial segmentation can begin even before users take their first actions inside your app. The user acquisition and registration processes create all kinds of clues about who your users are and what messages they’re inclined to embrace. Simple demographics like age, gender, and location are small-but-valuable seeds for a savvy mobile marketer.
Segmenting users by location, for example, is an easy way to ensure you are sending push notifications at a time of day when the audience is actually awake to read it. Location segmentation has the added bonus of helping you develop hyper-relevant geo-fencing campaigns as well.
You can even get users to layer on additional details themselves by crafting an app onboarding process that encourages them to create rich profiles. If you’re running an event app, for example, getting attendees to volunteer their job titles and interests allows you to proactively recommend scheduled activities that may be a match.
Lastly, one subtle advantage of user demographic data is that it rarely changes. As a result, the segmentation effort spent at this early stage of the relationship can continue to reap rewards for both sides well into the future.
2. Personalization
Personalization is more than just adding a user’s name to your message. Segmentation determines whether a message is relevant to the user, but personalization is all about communicating the message’s relevance. In an e-commerce mobile app, a user might look at a particular product and you might use a push notification to offer a discount code if they do not purchase within X hours. You can personalize this message by including the product name or a picture of the product in the message.
Tailor messages using a range of user data. For a content-based mobile app, using the content that a user has viewed to tailor a push notification is very sensible. But it is worthwhile considering how you could use other user data to personalize your message. Location, demographics, device, and behavioral data can all be used to craft a personalized message that yields a higher open rate.
3.Opt-Ins
Opt-in means asking for permission by the push notification. It is a very crucial and essential step. When Opt-ins pops up on the screen of the user, you get only a single chance on that. The user can either click on Allow or Don’t Allow. If they select Don’t Allow, your hope ends there.
Simply tag any event that’s relevant.
By doing so, you will able to store your users’ actions, what will then give you the possibility to target them based on their in-app or on-site behavior.
Another important step is to prompt the user at the correct point of time. Do not start sending prompt as soon as they install your app. Allow them to get engaged and use to it. So, wait for the third or fourth session to send it.
Example: Would you like to increase your app registration rate?
Just tag the event “has registered” into your app. You will then be able to target all the users who have not registered via push notifications and in-app messages.
4. Build Up to Behavior
Once you’ve seen some initial movement in your engagement rates and are feeling more confident in your segmentation skills, you can consider raising the stakes with some more proactive moves.
The longer your user relationship continues, the more behavioral footprints they’ll leave behind in your analytics. The exact behaviors you choose to monitor will vary based on your unique goals, but some of the more common candidates include:
- Links Clicked
- Pages Viewed
- Audio/Video Files Streamed
- Comments Submitted
- Content Shared
Segmenting for the Types of Messages
1. Social Interactions:
When your mobile app has a social dimension, push notifications about other people can be extremely useful for your users. Whatsapp, for example, sends push notifications for incoming messages, group chats updates etc. These kinds of extremely relevant, social concentrated messages have hugely high open rates.
2. Completing a certain purchase:
3. On-going Offers and Promotions:
Finally
At this level of segmentation, the user groups and messages you create are limited only by your creativity. But you still need to remember the golden rules of marketing with push notifications. Novelty and surprise are always encouraged, but never at the expense of common sense and courtesy.