Believe it or not. In-app marketing is what is helping you sell your products or services. With the projection that 2 years down the line, more than 7 billion people would-be smartphone owners, it is high time that businesses embrace Mobile Marketing. One of the most effective and commonly used mobile marketing techniques is Mobile In-App Notifications. These In-App Notifications have a retention rate that is 3.5X higher than the apps that do not believe in sending out these notifications. Don’t worry, this blog today will help you guide in learning everything you need to know about In-App Notifications in 2021.
What are In-App Notifications?
To put it simply, these are the messages sent to users while they are active on your mobile app. These messages deliver rich content at the right time to ensure maximum engagement from the user’s end. These are messages that turn your points of interruption into moments of value. Let us now get you to understand the working behind.
How do In-App Notifications Work?
In-App Notifications work quite similarly to push notifications in many ways. They appear as a popup notification and invite your users to engage with it without disrupting or slowing down the app’s interface. These notifications, unlike push notifications, do not require any sort of opt-in. The major feature is that these pop-ups are only confined to the app – which ultimately only drives up your engagement and increases your user’s retention as well.
Some of the common use cases for these in-app notifications are :
- Acting as alerts for informational content,
- These can also be used for Onboarding newcomers,
- Informing the users of any new features introduced in the app,
- Or even getting the user’s feedback at times.
Why Should App Owners take to In-App Notifications?
You Cater to an Audience that is Quite Receptive
Gone are the days when you want to be marketing your product to everyone. Now is the time to make yourself heard by the people who want to hear you out. The best part about these notifications are – they talk to your user when they are interested in you and not when they’re physically and mentally present elsewhere. Imagine, sending out a notification to your user regarding the latest feature in your app while your user is busy driving or attending a meeting. You will not get the expected engagement from his end and give your user a bad User experience for all the disturbance. These in-app notifications are a product of time, relevancy, and receptivity, which promise a positive user engagement.
You can Make Your Audience Into Taking Action There and Then
You are the leader here and can make your users follow as you say. Sounds wonderful, right? Works wonderfully as well. If you use these notifications wisely and factor in time and relevancy, you can open up a new range of marketing campaigns for your brand yourself. You can ask your users to ‘opt-in’ to your push notifications as well. You can then send them notifications based on their behavioral engagement and even bring them to be active on your app if they have not engaged with you for a while. Not just that, you can even glean more consumer’s experience insights by asking your consumer to rate your app on the app store. This way, you can go on to improving your features and thereby get more app downloads. This will ultimately give you a better return on your investment.
Top 5 Ways You Can Increase Your User’s Engagement Through In-App Notifications
Layout The Guide For Your App
To be the best, everyone today tries to offer thousands of features to the users through their app, making the app’s interface complex and troublesome. Instead of solving the user’s problem, it only confuses them, increasing the number of your app uninstalls. One way you can aim to increase your user’s engagement with your app and reduce the number of uninstalls at the same time can be – Walking your users through the app’s interface and by being their guide at all stages. You can tell them about the essential features that would help them settle in and get started. This not only would reduce your uninstalls but would also build a long-term customer relationship.
Incentivize Them For More Conversions
You can not make someone buy from you unless they feel that they’re getting a steal deal from you or feel it’s worth it. So, make it worth it through your in-app notifications. Give them a reason to be with you and buy from you. You can incentivize them into buying from you by offering them some discounts – such as a First-Time User Discount, a Referral Code Discount, or even a Promo Offer. Through your notifications, convey the value you are offering them. This would get you a transacting customer who would have a pleasant first-time user experience with your app and want to continue with your relationship.
Smartly Market Yourself
When a user is active on your mobile app, you have the power to make yourself heard. This is the time to smartly market yourself through pitching new launches, discount offers, making upsell/cross-sell deals, cracking time-sensitive flash deals, etc. Be as creative as you can be in presenting these promotional messages to them. This would boost your user engagement, increase your sales immensely, and increase the customer life-cycle.
Reward Them For Using Your App
Users often get excited if they are rewarded for being active on your app. This motivates them to continuously interact with your application. You can reward them with points, currency, discount offers, etc. for taking some action through your notifications. For example, if they reach a certain expense limit, rewarding them with bonus points that can be redeemed in their next purchase, can be a good offer. You need to ensure that your notifications provide them with value and be in it for long.
Educate the Users
Not all of your app features are utilized fully. Running in-app mobile notifications for underutilized, unknown or newly added features would ultimately enable them to use your platform completely and increase the monetization opportunities for you. Through this, your users would intake more content, engage more and be more actively involved. So, you must educate, inform and continuously empower your users through relevant in-app notifications.
3 Best Practices That You Should Know and Follow For Perfect In-App Messages
To fully reap this powerful tool’s benefits and witness favorable changes, you need to follow the 3 practices mentioned below.
Do not step away from Investing.
Take it as an investment for your future. It is a lot of work, and these simple notifications are a product of deep analytics of multiple things running in the background. You should be opt-in for an in-app messaging tool. That would help you with its full support and creatively design the notifications for you. An ideal marketing automation software would have strong analytical tools, support for various platforms, easy integration of features, monitoring tools, and scheduling and customized triggering.
Make Sure to Be In Line With Your Brand
Ensure good and strong branding. Do not be inconsistent with the presentation of your brand. Your messages need to be exactly in line with your brand. You must pay attention to the colors, the fonts, the tone, and other elements representing you. Make sure that your messages are short, sharp, and crisp as users prefer it that way. This will let your user associate your app with your brand and is symbolic of good branding.
Strengthen the Content in Your In-App Notifications
Nothing will do the work if you don’t get the content right. Continuously experiment and see what works for your audience and what gets them to engage with you. Some of the ways you can enhance your content are:
- Personalize your notifications – Mention their names, consider their needs, etc.
- Strengthen the Call to action (CTA) – Use CTA’s like “Try for Free”, “Get Started”, “Join Today”, etc.
- Use Creative Media – Use Emojis, GIFs, etc.
- Get the designing right and timing right too.
Conclusion
In-App notifications can be a real game-changer for you if done right. You can integrate it with other communication channels such as email marketing and push notifications for even better results. That way, you can have a 360-degree approach in communicating with your customers at all times – when they are active on your platform and even when they are not. To sum it up, in-app notifications can get you started on making your customers listen to what your brand has to offer and engage with you more often. Now that you have complete knowledge about what in-app notifications are and are even familiar with the best practices get started.