Guest post by Christina Alex:

Forcing your users to download an application just so that you can send a notification to promote your brand is becoming a thing of the past. The current E-commerce marketing craze is to send a browser-enabled web push notification. Why is it currently trending?

Well, mainly because these are sent from websites and are not dependent on an application to send messages to your user.  Unlike app push, these are notifications that visitors of your website enable or ask to send. In other words, they want to have a virtual conversation with you and are genuinely interested in the brand.

While brands are able to send personalised messages to target markets, some of them misuse its power and end up permanently damaging their image and revenue. Here we list certain situations where you should definitely be sending a push so that customers stay engaged with your brand.

• Welcome Notes: Once a website visitor has opted to receive notifications from you, send a personalised welcome note, acknowledging the request and establishing a relationship with the customer. This particular visitor has the potential, with future interactions, to become a loyal brand follower. You can also include special discounts like 5% off their next purchase. This encourages customers to visit your website again, gaining you the desired traffic. An amazing feature of push is the fact that it can help retain your lost customers too; cart abandonment is secondary in this situation. For example, if the visitor does not make the purchase but does subscribe, then you can prompt them to become a user by providing discounts like 30% off on their first purchase after the first week of subscribing. The biggest example of this is LimeRoads’ first purchase offer- Buy 1 Get 1 free.
• Sale Sale Sale: Let your entire subscriber base know if there is a sale happening; however, do not be too pushy about it. Make sure you have general as well as customised notifications. Let’s say you have a sale exclusively happening for phone covers and cases. Send a general notification like “Exclusive sale on phone covers and cases. Click and see for yourself!” In addition to this general note, send a different one to regular viewers of that particular page or lost customers with a personalised message like “Grab your favourite phone case before it disappears.”
• Latest updates: Grab your customer’s attention by updating them about the latest products, trends, restaurants and blogs on your site. Be creative by using images and emotions to convey messages. Create urgency among your audience through the written content.
• Flash Sale: Segment your audience on their behaviour patterns using web push notification analysis, like the one provided by NotifyVisitors. Based on this, send flash sale notifications. If you wish to do a late night sale, make sure you have the desired market segmented and send a notification to them.  Do not bombard your daytime visitors with the same, or they will lose complete interest in your brand.
• In-Stock: Let your visitors know what they were looking for is available. A click on the particular notification should land them on that page. Understand that the users who enable web push are tech savvy and taking them through ten pages before landing them on the appropriate one will make them lose interest. Also, reminders of products left abandoned in the cart or similar products will encourage visitors to buy.

Web push acts as a window to your website. Engagement with customers using this feature is important to gain a competitive advantage. Currently, users visit 4X more websites than they use applications on their phone. Adding web push notifications to your websites will instantly grant you an increase of up to 20% in your sales, especially when supported with other mediums of digital marketing.

About the Author: Christina Alex is a web push marketing advocate and blogger for Notify Visitors.