Best Practices for Your Subscription App Push Marketing Strategy

Push notifications are short messages or alerts that are sent to a user's device, such as a smartphone or tablet, by an app or website. 

These notifications are "pushed" to the user's device, typically appearing in the form of banners, pop-ups, or badges, even if the user is not actively using the app or website at that moment. The purpose of push notifications is to deliver:

• Timely and relevant information,
• Updates to users, such as reminders, news updates, promotions, or
• Personalized recommendations. 

They serve as a way for apps to engage with users, drive user interactions, and increase retention by keeping users informed and engaged. When used strategically, push notifications can be a powerful tool for enhancing user engagement, retention, and overall revenue growth.

Consider push notifications as the most direct way you can communicate with your app’s users. Now there are 3 main benefits of using this strategy for your app’s overall success:

1. Increased User Engagement

Push notifications are an effective way to grab users' attention and drive them back to your app or website. You can keep them engaged and encourage them to take specific actions by delivering timely and relevant messages directly to users' devices, such as making a purchase, completing a task, or exploring new features. 

2. Improved Retention Rates

Push notifications play a crucial role in retaining users and preventing churn. By staying top-of-mind and reminding users about the value of your app or website, push notifications help keep users engaged over time. 

Timely reminders, personalized recommendations, and special offers can encourage users to return to your platform regularly, reducing the likelihood of them abandoning your app or website in favor of competitors. 

3. Enhanced Conversion Opportunities

Push notifications are a powerful tool for driving conversions and increasing revenue. Whether it's promoting a new product, announcing a flash sale, or offering a personalized discount, push notifications enable you to deliver targeted messages that encourage users to take action. 

With a little strategic timing, you can create a sense of urgency or excitement that motivates users to make a purchase or complete a desired action. 

Push notifications have multiple categories and each category serves a different purpose. Here is a quick overview of the 5 types of push notifications your app can offer: 

• Informational notifications: updates and news, event reminders with timed notifications, location-based information, or offers. 
• Transactional notifications: order updates, payment confirmations, or security alerts.
• Promotional notifications: offering discounts to entice users with special promotions, announcements of restocks or new product launches as well as a content recommendation based on user behavior and preferences. 
• Engagement and retention: daily or weekly notifications to re-engage inactive users, congratulate important in-app milestones, or behavioral cues to prompt completion of the process. 

Without further ado, let’s talk about the best practices and golden tips for making your push marketing strategy the best one there is. Here are the 8 best practices to keep in mind:

1. Understanding Your Audience

Before you can do anything else, you should know who your app’s audience is. Who will be reading these push notifications? Only when you have this insight can you create perfectly targeting content in your notifications! 

And so, this involves more than just surface-level demographics; it requires a nuanced understanding of their preferences, behaviors, and pain points. 

Conduct comprehensive research into your target audience to uncover insights that can inform your messaging strategy. Through a researched segmentation, you can deliver personalized messages that resonate with each group on a deeper level. 

Additionally, you should analyze user behavior and preferences through data and analytics for invaluable insights into what content and messaging styles are most effective. This continuous feedback loop helps refine your approach over time, ensuring that your push notifications remain relevant and engaging.

2. Setting Clear Goals

Regardless of industry, actions backed by clear and SMART goals will be more successful. And in terms of marketing, this is truer than ever!

It's not enough to simply send notifications and hope for the best; you need to define what success looks like and how you'll measure it. This starts with defining your overarching goals, whether it's increasing user engagement, driving conversions, or improving retention rates. 

Once you've established your objectives, it's important to break them down into actionable KPIs that you can track over time. These might include metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and churn rates.

Plus, you can track performance based on industry benchmarks only if you set goals in the beginning. 

3. Creating Compelling Content

Crafting compelling push notifications is key to capturing users' attention and driving interaction. In today's crowded digital landscape, users are bombarded with notifications from countless apps competing for their attention. 

To stand out from the crowd, your messages need to be concise, attention-grabbing, and highly relevant to each user. This requires a deep understanding of their preferences and behaviors, as well as the ability to tailor your messaging accordingly. 

Personalization is key here— users are much more likely to engage with messages that feel like they were designed just for them. Include a clear call-to-action to encourage users into the desired next step, whether it's visiting your app, making a purchase, or sharing content with friends.

4. Timing and Frequency

Determining the optimal timing for sending push notifications can significantly impact engagement rates. Users are more likely to engage with messages when they're received at a time that's convenient for them and when they're most likely to be receptive. 

You can identify the times when users are most active and engaged with your app by analyzing data on user activity and behavior patterns. This might vary depending on factors such as the:

• Time zone, 
• Daily routine, and 
• Device usage patterns. 

It's also important to strike a balance and avoid over-saturating users with too many notifications, as this can lead to annoyance and disengagement. Test different timing strategies and refine your approach to find the sweet spot that maximizes engagement without overwhelming your users.

5. Using Data and Analytics

Numbers are your best friends when it comes to push marketing strategies for your apps. And so, you should actively utilize every piece of available data offered by your analytics tool. For starters, data analytics can help you gain insight into what strategies are most effective as well as track KPIs. 

Experiment with A/B testing of different messaging strategies and identify what resonates best with your audience. This iterative approach allows you to refine your messaging, test new ideas, and adapt to changing user preferences, keeping your strategy aligned with your goals and objectives.

6. Leveraging Automation

One of the best ways you can improve your app’s performance is to leave most of the functions up to automation. And in terms of a push notification marketing strategy, the rule isn’t any different. Let me tell you how: 

Implementing automated push campaigns streamlines the process of delivering relevant messages to users at the right time. Set up triggers based on user behavior or lifecycle events, so you can send personalized messages without manual intervention. 

Not only does this save time and resources but also ensures that your messages are timely and relevant to each user. Leveraging predictive analytics enables you to anticipate user needs and proactively deliver relevant content, further enhancing user engagement. 

You can also optimize your push marketing strategy and deliver a seamless experience by automating repetitive tasks and leveraging data-driven insights.

7. Optimize for User Experience

Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the technicals of push marketing strategies. But don’t forget who you’re doing it for!

No matter what, optimize your push notifications to be relevant and valuable to users so they maintain a positive user experience. Users are much more likely to engage with messages that add value to their lives and align with their interests and preferences. 

Provide easy opt-in and opt-out options, so users have full control over their notification preferences. After all, you don’t want a frustrated user throwing your app into the uninstall hole. 

Furthermore, we highly recommend testing different message formats, visuals, and tones to see which resonate best with your audience and stick to it. This can foster a strong brand identity and positive loyalty, ultimately driving long-term engagement with your app!

8. Monitoring and Iterating

Last but not least, you want to ensure you’re keeping up with your efforts. And how do you do that? By regularly monitoring performance metrics and collecting user feedback of course!

This allows you to identify what's working well and what areas need improvement, so you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your approach. Continuously iterate and optimize based on these insights so that your push marketing strategy remains aligned with user preferences and business objectives. 

By staying agile and responsive to feedback, you can adapt to changing market conditions and emerging trends, keeping your strategy fresh and effective over time.

Apphud offers a powerful feature called Rules to win back lapsed subscribers, reduce churn rates, gain insights into cancellations, and more. Rules combine automated push notifications with in-app interactions like surveys and discount offerings to engage and re-engage subscribers. With these tools, developers can:

• Win back lapsed subscribers

• Reduce churn rates

• Gain cancellation insights

• Address subscription renewal billing issues

• Attract non-paying users

All these benefits can be achieved through an easy-to-use web editor, requiring zero coding.

Sign up for free!

Push notifications are a high-potential tool for any app marketer, offering a direct way of communication with both active and inactive users. Instead of just grabbing attention, push notifications can provide value, and insight and provoke curiosity for users to stay engaged in your app. 

However, push notifications can only be successful when executed with the right strategy. In this blog, we’ve uncovered the 8 hacks on making the best out of your subscription app push marketing strategy!

Nataly

Head of Marketing at Apphud

7+ years in product marketing. Nataly is responsible for marketing strategy development and execution. Committed adherent of the agile methodology.