When you’re using push notifications for your app to promote and invoke more engagement on your products and services, you need to make sure you’re using them correctly and creating the best opportunities for yourself and your business. Sounds simple, but in reality, it’s not.

With phones, websites, and tablets being bombarded with push notifications daily, you need to do something special to stand out from the crowd. There are plenty of ways to do this, one of the best being personalizing your push notifications to suit your users.

Today, we’ll explore everything you need to know to make this happen and how you can get the best results with this kind of technology.

1. Gathering Data

The first thing you’ll need to do is gather all the information you can regarding your customers and target markets. You need to know as much demographic data as possible to define who you’re working with easily.

You could do this by referring to sales reports, looking at your customers in a physical location, conducting questionnaires, and using social media analytics. By clearly defining who your customers are, you’ll be able to customize and personalize your notifications without guessing the approach you want.

With this information, only then can you start creating push notifications that will have an impact rather than trying to guess what results in you’re trying to achieve.

2. Start Segmenting Your Users

Now you have a baseline of who your customers and service users are, it’s time to start dividing them up, a process known as segmentation. This is important because your service probably isn’t used by just one target market but for many different reasons.

Consider this; you wouldn’t sell a product to a 50-year-old male in the US the same way you would to a 19-year-old female from Europe, even though both might use your service. This is why it’s important to segment and create different content that others will respond to.

You can also do this easily by taking data from the people signing up and using your app, but there is the downside where people will opt out of the policies that allow you to use people’s data in this way. If this is the case, try nicely explaining why opting into using data to create personalized notifications will benefit them in the long run.

After all, they are already using your service, so why would they not be interested in making their already good experience even better?

Some of the key demographic data you’ll want to look at include;

• Gender
• Age
• Geographical Location
• Job or career type
• Income band
• Type of user
• Personal or business user

3. Start Creating Personalised Content

Now you have your target markets in mind; it’s time to start creating content that will resonate with the users who read them. For this, you’ll want to think about what kind of language you’re using that will best connect to your readers on an emotional level that suits them.

You can also follow a few basic rules to help boost engagement and your return on the notification. Adding a sense of urgency is one of the best approaches because it makes people want to be interested in what you’re offering while suggesting it will not be around forever.

This could come in the form of an expiring offer or sales event, or a limited-time deal they’re not going to want to miss. Using other data points you have can be a great way to create fantastic personalized content.

For example, if you sell music event tickets, you can base the notifications you send people on the activity they have used your app for in the past, in this case, what bands or artists they’ve already seen and visited, and then suggest similar artists or genres.

4. Using Other Data Points

You can use many other data points to create personalized content that gets even more results. One of the most popular of these is geographically triggered notifications. If someone enters a certain area or city, you can set up notifications to sell services.

For example, if you’re a chain restaurant and someone comes into your city from another city, you could send them a notification with a welcome deal or say something like, ‘Welcome! Visiting for the day? Treat yourself to something amazing to eat while you’re here!”.

The simpler your push notification is and the more concise, the better you’ll send across your message and the more impact your notifications will have.

5. Always A/B Test Notifications

You’re never guaranteed to get things right the first time when it comes to marketing, and even if you think you have an amazing idea, it might not be as effective as you believe it will be. This is why it’s so important to ensure you’re creating multiple types of content with the same outcome and then A/B testing to see which has the best results.

Keep testing this way, and you’ll be able to define what works and what doesn’t work for your business, ensuring you can create more powerful content faster in the future.

Some of the key points you can try adjusting include changing the copy, the emojis, and the images you’re using, and if you do this across the board with all segmentations, you’re going to be left with some highly targeted, highly personalized notifications that work.

6. Never Stop Tracking

Even when you’re A/B testing and beyond, you never stop looking at your notifications' effectiveness and tweaking them so they can be improved. The times are changing all the time, and your marketing content needs to reflect that. Always look back and see what you can adjust and what you can do better to ensure you keep up with the times.

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