Customer engagement is not a one-time investment. You need to continuously drive sales and engagement from your existing customer base to be able to lift your profitability. We don’t need to establish the benefits of retention over customer acquisition. It’s simply hard to beat the fact that even a five percent increase in your retention rate can boost your profits by 25% to 95%.
Most merchants think that retention is a tough battlefield because of increasing competition and declining attention spans of customers. However, Shopify has great news.
The Shopify State of Commerce report points out that customers prefer staying loyal to brands over individual purchases. However, this is only if brands provide the right experience and take the right approach to re-engagement as well as repeat sales.
Using web push notifications to drive repeat sales
Individual store owners running their online businesses have multiple options and ways of staying in touch with their existing customer base. Utilizing newly emerged channels such as Facebook messenger marketing, Whatsapp marketing, etc. these store owners can send instant messages to their customers.
Web push notification is one such channel that has gained a lot of love from online businesses and their customers. These bite-sized alerts have, in a very short time, become everyone’s favorite because of a number of reasons, some of which are as follows:
Notifications can be sent in real-time
It’s easy for businesses to run push notification campaigns. All they need is to download a plugin or tool
You can personalize and customize push notifications without hassle
You can run behavior-based campaigns and increase conversions on your campaign with notifications
Geo-location based notifications are one of the favorite types of campaigns for a number of merchants who want to increase in-store footfall
Stores like Headphone Zone use web push notifications for not just recovering their abandoned carts, but also keeping their customers engaged. The store boosted its customer retention rate and made 126X ROI using PushOwl.
Web push notification campaigns that drive repeat sales
If you are thinking about starting some interesting re-engagement campaigns with web push to drive repeat sales, this section of the article requires all your attention. Let’s walk through some campaigns that you can kickstart your web push re-engagement campaigns using smart Shopify apps like Carti Cart Abandonment Recovery and PushOwl.
Notifying existing customers about ongoing discounts
This is the most basic strategy used by every online store owner irrespective of the channel. You must have used email marketing to inform your existing users about discounts running in your store. The same can be done using web push notifications.
The advantage of using notifications, in this case, is that you can send out information in real-time. Email has the disadvantage of getting lost in the clutter or not being read right in time. Notifications have a clear-cut advantage in this case.
Pro-tip: To spice up your repeat sales a bit, add a ‘limited edition’ lure to your campaign. The advantage here is that you’ll be able to increase the demand and sell your limited edition items as long as the stock last and up the chances of getting them sold out. Here’s an example that you can take a cue or two from:
Back in stock alerts
You might have existing users visiting a certain product page every now and then but leaving without making any purchase. These users might be highly interested in a particular ‘out of stock’ product. You don’t want to miss out on these people as they guarantee a conversion. In such a case, push notifications are an easy and smart way of re-engaging this existing user base.
Pro-tip: Use web push notification tools that integrate easily with apps such as Now-back-in-stock or plugins that allow users to receive alerts as soon as products are back in stock. The following is an example of ‘back in stock’ notifications.
Price drop
A slash in price is an unfailing strategy. Add to it the effectiveness of web push notifications and you have a winning combination. Online merchants can pre-decide which products they want to slash their prices on or pick products that users have added to their wishlist to quicken conversions. Bonus tips here on how to get wishlisted items added to cart.
Pro tip: Automation has made running campaigns with such special requirements like price drops easily doable. For example, you can use the Price Drop feature inside PushOwl’s dashboard for running these campaigns.
Product Launch
Keep your existing customers informed about anything new that’s happening in your online store. For example, if you are a regular size clothing store and might be planning to launch a new line of fashion clothing for plus size women, you need to keep your existing customers informed so that they can spread the word around. Push notifications can be used to send out crisp and catchy notifications.
Pro-tip: Create a series of notifications for your entire launch campaign. Before the launch, you can send out teasers. During the launch, you can send out early bird discounts, reveal styles, etc.
Rewarding loyalty
Customers who buy often or with order value generally higher than the average need your special thanks. Acknowledging and showing them a bit of gratitude is a small gesture that can go a long way. Reward their loyalty by giving them discounts on their favorited or wishlisted items. You can make use of user behavioral targeting to run these campaigns.
Pro tip: Keep a watch on what product section users visit the most. Use this information to increase sales from this section by sending out discount coupons in your loyalty campaigns.
Conclusion
Repeat sales aren’t as tough to drive as most merchants perceive it to be. All you need to do is understand who your shoppers are and then there are smart Shopify apps that help you reach them at the right time, with the right message. And a channel that is becoming popular for just that, is web push notifications.
Have you leveraged the power of web push notifications on your Shopify store yet?
About the author
Vanhishikha Bhargava is the Content Marketer at PushOwl, a Shopify app that enables stores to send web push notifications to shoppers for driving more sales. You can follow her posts, here.