Push Notifications for Loyalty – Best Practices
Push notifications are one of the most effective forms of consumer engagement. Unlike email, push notifications are hardly ever ignored and often read quickly. However, the downside is that overusing push notifications can lead to consumers dropping or muting the loyalty program and thus have a negative effective on a business’ ability to engage with their consumers.
Let’s look at some important considerations regarding push notifications:
How often should I send push notifications?
This is a difficult, but critical question. Being annoying will cause your loyalty members to either drop the program completely or at least turn off notifications – either way, your ability to engage them is reduced. On the other hand, you do want to leverage this effective form of communication with your customers.
This will vary from business to business and you’ll know your customers better than anyone – in terms of acceptance, reaction to encouragement, tolerance from annoyances, etc. At LoyaltyDog, we suggest that you send out weekly messages and only on a rare basis (e.g. near a large event) send out a second weekly message. Anything more than that can put the program at risk.
What time of day is best to send push notifications?
The best time of day is not necessarily the times you expect your consumers to be engaging with your business. Statistics show that best response rates come during the middle of the work day (when we should be working). So it’s best to send messages between 11:00AM and 3:00PM during weekdays even if your customers typically come to your business during evening hours (such as bars & restaurants).
How can I message all loyalty users?
Sending messages to your customers is simply done via the Manager’s Portal of LoyaltyDog. Just login to the portal and go to the customer tab and then click on the red bullhorn to get to the broadcast screen (shown below). Simply type in your message, click the “I’m sure” box and then click the Send button to send out the broadcast immediately.
Sending Push Notifications is Easy
We’ll cover more in future articles on the best ways to compose effective push notifications. This is a valuable feature that must be used carefully to be most effective.
“…overusing push notifications can lead to consumers dropping or muting the loyalty program and thus have a negative effective on a business’ ability to engage with their consumers.”
Push notifications are not the only means of engaging with consumers, but it is one of the most effective. We’ll also cover beacons in a future article that will provide a business with even more flexibility and accuracy to engage with customers while they are on-premise.