5 Powerful Push Notifications Every Ecommerce Website Should Use

UPDATED Mar 26, 2021

You’ve fought hard to drive visitors to your website. Encouraging them in every way possible to make a purchase or at least sign up for your newsletter.

But what do you do about those people who stop engaging with your business?

What do you do about those who maybe signed up for your newsletter but haven’t returned to your website to make that purchase? Or perhaps they engage with you on social media, but that’s it?

Simple. You re-engage them with web push notifications.

In this article, we’re going to cover 5 powerful ways you can use web push notifications to drive visitors back to your site in order to ultimately boost sales. No matter what ecommerce industry you happen to be in, you can (and should) make use of these 5 unique campaigns.

1. Retarget Abandoned Carts

It might be a hard stat to swallow, but it’s the reality – abandoned carts are going to happen.

Fortunately, there are several ecommerce platforms that allow you to automatically send emails to re-engage customers who filled out their contact information but did not complete the order.

But what if the email gets sent to spam? Or what if the visitor abandoned their cart before they even filled out their contact information? You would typically be out of luck, but thankfully, web push can come to the rescue.

With triggered notifications, you can create custom campaigns to send notifications to any individual who has subscribed to your website, began the checkout process, but then left your website. The notification will automatically go out to this individual after a predetermined amount of time, perhaps with a promo or discount, driving them back to your site.

What is great about this type of campaign is that it is automatic. Once you set up the custom event and enable the triggered notification, it will trigger automatically going forward when any subscriber meets the given criteria.

Simply put, if you don’t engage in any type of cart abandonment campaign, you are leaving money on the table. How much? A recent study found that each year, ecommerce brands lose $18 billion due to cart abandonment. While you won’t recover every cart, it is estimated that on average about 26% will return to your site.

2. Encourage Referral/Rewards Programs

Another powerful push campaign you should be sending has to do with your referral or rewards program. Don’t have one? We highly recommend you make one. They are so effective for driving sales and overall engagement. Studies show that 70% of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand if it has a good loyalty program.

Depending on your particular brand and your products, you can determine what the right loyalty program looks like. Once you’ve got your program set up, a great way to encourage users to sign up, make purchases, and earn points or refer friends is to remind them about the program via a series of persuasive push campaigns!

Referral programs in particular are excellent because they allow you to bring in new customers for cheaper (vs. other customer acquisition methods) and they tap into the power of word of mouth marketing. Have your customers do the work for you and talk about how great your brand is instead of you having to do it yourself! Your most loyal customers can easily translate into your best brand advocates. And as we all know, people trust recommendations from friends and family the most.

For these campaigns, be sure to remind your customers what they have to gain from your loyalty program. Is it bonus points they can use to shop at your store? Exclusive perks like free shipping? Early access to new products? Shine a light on these benefits to help encourage your users to not just click your notification, but stay active at your site and within your loyalty program.

3. Advertise Sales

Think of your favorite ecommerce website that you shop from. When are you most likely to head back to their website and make a purchase? If you’re like the majority of online shoppers, it’s because you can get items for a great price. In fact, 80% of shoppers say that price is somewhat or very important when deciding when to shop.

Even for your most loyal customers, there’s a great chance that they have their eye on some of your products, but are waiting for a sale to encourage them to shop. When you do decide to run a sale, be sure to alert your audience!

Utilizing web push, as compared to other platforms such as email or social media, tends to give brands better results because of the increased visibility and real-time delivery. No more hoping that a user opens your email or that they happen to scroll past your social media post. The result? More awareness and more sales.

A web push campaign is especially important if you run a short-term or flash sale where timing is a major component. Also, consider setting a custom notification expiration time so that people don’t see your notification once your sale has already ended.

4. Send Personalized Product Recommendations

We can’t say this enough: the more personalized your push campaigns are, the better your results are going to be. With that in mind, personalized product recommendations are some of the most powerful push notifications you can send.

The above example would be perfect to send to a segment of users who have engaged with other tech items at your website. By segmenting individuals based on their actual activity at your website, you are able to create campaigns that are far more relevant to them.

Best of all, segmenting your users is much easier than it sounds because, with web push, you automatically get visitor activity tracked for you. This includes things like geo-location and visit date, as well as things such as page views and items purchased. All of these “insights” can then be used by you to help create a more specific target for your next push.

5. Recapture Users Who Haven’t Visited Recently

Finally, another excellent method of using push notifications to drive back visitors to your website is by combining those actionable insights with the power of automation.

As an example, you could create a push notification campaign that is scheduled to run once a week that targets anyone who has not been to your website in more than 10 days.

If the individual receives the notification and clicks it, they are automatically removed from that segment since they’ve visited your website during the past 10 days. If the individual ignores your notification, they will receive it again next time your automated campaign runs.

Just because a customer hasn’t visited your site in a while doesn’t mean that they are no longer interested. Sometimes all it takes is a simple reminder (and maybe a sweet incentive) to win them back.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it! Five great ways to use web push notifications to drive back visitors and boost sales. By personalizing your campaigns as much as possible and sending relevant information, such as product recommendations or abandoned cart notices, your messages are sure to inspire more clicks, and more importantly, more action at your website.

If you are new to web push and want to give it a try, you can get started for free with Aimtell. Still need more information? No problem. You can always check out our Beginner’s Guide to learn more.

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