Offering your online store’s customers a personalized brand experience is crucial to the success of your business. Data from some of the latest studies on the subject suggests that a whopping 80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from brands that offer them personalized shopping experiences.

There are several reasons customers strongly prefer personalized experiences. But one of the main ones is that web users enjoy using websites tailored to their personal likes, needs and demands. Content that is specifically designed to address the needs of a brand’s target audience is usually far better received than content that feels robotic, generic, and ultimately meaningless to consumers.

The Power of Custom Push Notifications

Customized push notifications are just one of many ways that you can personalize the user experience offered by your online store. You can ensure that you are connecting with your customer base on a deeper, more meaningful level by taking the time to create push notifications that will resonate with them. 

There are several ways to determine how best to personalize a push notification, most of which are based on data. Check your store users’ data and analytics to gain more insight into the pages they visit, the items they click on most, their past purchases, their past comments and reviews, and the time they spend on your store page. 

You can glean all of this valuable information from your Google Analytics account, or any other eCommerce analytics service you use, and use it to track your customers’ browsing and spending activities. Using this information to personalize your push notifications will create a welcoming, enjoyable experience for your customers and increase the chances of them making purchases in your online store. Personalization makes these customers more likely to return in the future.

Why Customers Want Personalized Push Notifications

Marketing tools are becoming more intuitive and data-driven than ever before, and generic, one-size-fits-all marketing strategies are quickly becoming redundant as a result. Modern customers now expect quick, responsive online shopping experiences built around their interests and demands. This is no different when it comes to push notifications.

Thankfully, it’s simple to engage your customer base with personalized notifications if you take the right approach. Automated platforms like PushPushGo can automatically and instantly send your customers fully personalized push notifications, helping you collect new sign-ups and increasing your customer return rates.

The Importance of Providing a Positive eCommerce User Experience

Personalized push notifications have the power to improve the eCommerce user experience your store offers to customers. There are few marketing tools that are more powerful than satisfied customers, and when they are happy, they are more likely to spread the word about your brand and become loyal clients.

Creating a seamless, enjoyable customer journey from browsing to selection to checkout tells your customers that you take your brand and their satisfaction seriously. This gives you a chance to earn their recommendations and their continuous loyalty to your store.

Your eCommerce store’s CX should also convey your brand’s ethics, beliefs and values, which is essential in an age of increasing awareness about sustainability, supply chain ethics, and social justice issues. These topics should all form part of your CX strategy in order to engage your users.

These are the key elements of any successful customer experience strategy:

• Seamless flow of touchpoints. CX is composed of several touchpoints throughout the customer journey. This includes marketing and adverts, social media, proposals, promotions, invoices, project status reports and customer service, all of which should work optimally together.

• An emotional connection. It isn’t enough to offer your customers the best products at reasonable prices. You also need to provide a CX that makes it enjoyable for them to interact with you. Businesses that are liked and respected by their customers attract more loyalty in the long run.

• Embodying purpose. You can probably easily explain what your store sells, and how it does so. But what are the reasons behind your enterprise? What are your goals, your values, and your mission? Customers are more willing to put their trust in brands that can explain why they operate the way they do in a way that allows these customers to value their perspectives.

• Personalization. Personalizing your CX is essential to customer engagement. Recommending products that are in line with your customers’ interests and expectations will allow you to increase their engagement with your brand and meet your supporters’ needs.

Personalization Tags Explained

Arguably the easiest way to personalize your online store’s push notifications is to use placeholder tags to get the job done. These digital tags enable you to replace placeholders with your customers’ first names and other personal information in each notification that gets sent out. 

Embedding these tags in your messages allows your system to collect data from your customer database and fill in user-specific details in your messages. These personalized notifications are fully automated, and can elicit a drastic increase in user engagement. You can grab customers’ attention and prompt them to engage with your site just by using their first name in your introductory notification.

Another notable benefit of using tag placeholders in your notifications is that you will only need to set them up once. All future notifications sent out will have their placeholders replaced with personal user data. 

You can expand your personalization strategy beyond first names too. Include tags for your customers’ last purchases, regularly purchased items, or accrued loyalty points and rewards to encourage them to make a purchase.

How to Optimize Your User Experience with Push Notifications

The key to properly personalizing your online store’s user experience is to provide engagement without making any errors that could upset your supporters.

Here are a few tips to ensure that you execute your push notification strategies effectively.

1. Implement Catch-All Default Values

You might not always have all the data you need to personalize the user experience of every one of your customers. It’s essential that you have a catch-all default value for each tag you use, just in case. 

This means that if you don’t have a customer’s first name, for example, you can set the default value to ‘there’ or ‘friend’ so your notification would start with ‘Hello there’ or ‘Hi there friend’ instead of remaining blank.

2. Test-Drive Your Notifications Before Sending Them to Customers

Set up a few devices belonging to your business with dummy user information. You can use these to test your personalized push notification templates before you send them out to real customers. 

This way, if you pick up any errors or inconsistencies, you’ll have time to adjust your notification templates before you engage with your online store users.

3. Prioritize Your Customers’ Privacy

Most online stores and digitally based businesses collect data from their users in this day and age. It is standard practice, but boundaries need to be in place, especially considering new internet privacy regulations like GDPR coming into force.

Tools like PushPushGo provide personalization features without using cookies or collecting your subscribers’ personal data. Our app is 100% GDPR friendly and will only track user behavior based on their online store activities, including clicking on certain buttons, visiting subdomains, and adding products to their baskets. 

The only data PushPushGo processes are the anonymous IP addresses of your subscribers, which are used to send custom notifications. We never process your subscribers’ personal data and do not sell it to third parties either.

This ethical approach enables highly effective personalization without collecting personal or sensitive customer data, such as their browsing histories and data about purchases made at other eCommerce stores.

Many people are hesitant to hand out their email addresses, names and phone numbers to brands, but you can still provide an engaging and authentic online shopping experience with a GDPR-friendly tool. Make sure that your customers know you prioritize their privacy and will not share their details with any third parties without their consent.

The Bottom Line

Push notifications can form a valuable part of an effective digital marketing strategy, and can truly take your online store to a new level when used correctly. Personalized marketing strategies allow you to interact with your audience instantly and personally. This increases your chances of making sales and earning repeat customers.

Using a push notification automation platform is an excellent way to customize your B2C communications according to your customers’ identities, likes, and demands. Be sure to prioritize their privacy and test your push notifications before sending them to clients, and you will already be well on your way to success.