How to Boost Customer Retention With Web Push Notifications

Do you find new friends and forget the old ones as you move through life? Or do you maintain a loyal squad that sticks with you?

Just like in life, businesses have different approaches to relationship building and customer acquisition. Some businesses focus all of their effort and resources on finding new customers, and some prefer to lean towards customer retention.

The balancing act between customer acquisition and customer retention is an interesting dilemma that any marketer needs to confront as they are identifying new marketing channels or attempting to optimize old ones.

In this article, I’d like to talk more about customer retention and how you can use web push notifications to keep customers hanging around for longer, and spending more money with your business.

But first, why is customer retention so important?

Why focus on customer retention?

Currently, only 8.5% of decision-makers in marketing consider customer retention as their top priority. Yet, returning customers not only bring in twice as much revenue as new customers but are also more likely to recommend you to others.

They also spend more time on your website and give a higher conversion rate. It is old news that marketers who work on retention marketing see an ROI of up to 15x, compared to the 4 to 6x ROI for new customer acquisition campaigns.

So how do you up your retention game without investing too many resources in setting up a new channel, and then spending some more time on artfully crafting communications like emails or social media posts? This is where Web Push Notifications come in.

Web or browser push notifications are instant not only to set up but also in composition as well as delivery. Set up is usually a five to ten-minute process if you sign up with any of the numerous notification service providers. Composing a notification also doesn’t eat into your time because there’s only so much copy you can fit into one. Once you hit send, it gets instantly delivered to your subscribers if they’re online.

Do they help you bring back visitors to your website? Oh yes, they do. But first, let me give you a brief introduction to this medium.

What are Web Push Notifications?

Web push notifications, for the uninitiated, are notifications sent by websites instead of mobile applications. When you click on them, they take you to a landing page as opposed to opening an app. They work on desktops as well as mobile web browsers.

At first, they used to be just clickable messages with a thumbnail image, a title, and the notification copy, along with the URL of the sending website. They would be linked to a single landing page.

Anatomy of a web push notification

Now, notifications also come in several rich formats that support CTA buttons and banner images. The CTA buttons allow the notification to be linked to as many as three landing pages. The banner images jazz it up and help in setting the context of the message with ease. All these elements contribute towards making web push notifications a very crisp and functional retention marketing channel.

How are they different from your other channels?

App users on Android usually get opted in to receive push notifications as soon they download and install an app. But users must explicitly opt-in to receive notifications from a website on both desktop and mobile. This makes it a permission-based medium right from the first touch point. It doesn’t stop there. Web push notifications also require very little commitment from the subscriber.

The opt-in does not ask website visitors for an email id, a phone number, or a login unlike newsletters, SMS, or social media. All they need to do is click a button to subscribe to it or block it.

Anatomy of an opt-in request

However, what truly sets apart this channel is the way it solves the problem of inertia. Normally, people who are busy doing other things continue being busy when an email gets delivered to their inbox, stays unopened, becomes outdated, and joins hundreds of other unread emails. Web push, on the other hand, appears on their screens or browsers, in front of their eyes even when that particular website isn’t open.

It comes with a brief message that tells users the gist of all they need to know and fades away into oblivion in a few seconds if they don’t click on the Close button. This attribute has another benefit. If you send multiple emails about the same matter, be it a discount offer or a recent…