How To Boost Customer Retention With Push Notifications

web push notifications customer retention

boost customer retention web push notifications mobile marketing bootstrap business blog website

Research suggests that an average customer spends 67% more in their 3rd year as a customer than their first year on your eCommerce store. In addition, there is a 60% chance that your old customer will make a re-purchase, whereas a new visitor is only 20% likely to do the same. In all this, the average global value of a lost customer is $243, which makes the businesses to lose around $1.6 trillion in a year. 

The worst part is, only one-third of these businesses consider this a problem, and customer retention is hardly a priority for them. Not everyone is the same. Some selected businesses know the importance and implement numerous methods to keep their customers engaged. As a result, they make the desired profits and run smoothly on the track. 

Out of numerous ways for customer retention, businesses consider push notifications as the best option with better ROI. This article will cover some tried and tested push notification ideas utilized by businesses worldwide to retain their customers. 

Understanding Web Push Notifications 

Web push notifications are the timed, relevant, and precise messages that are sent to a user on desktop, mobile, or tablet web browsers. Regardless of whether or not the user is active on the website, you can send a web push notification successfully when users have their web browsers open. 

Compared to app-based notifications, web push notifications have shown a more direct influence on sales and conversions. These browser notifications have been known to crusade an extra 30% repeat visits, and possess an average click-through rate of not less than 50%. 

Thus, let us see how to power up your customer retention strategy with web push notifications. 

Push Notification Ideas To Boost Customer Retention 

1. Plan Your Actions 

Planning is the best strategy. Before setting your feet in web push marketing, you should analyze, plan, and then start pushing. 

• Get customers to opt-in: There is a disadvantage that you cannot push notifications until the user opts-in for them. Web-based pushing explicitly ask for user’s permission, something like this image below: 


push notification marketing opt-in screen blog digital marketing bootstrap business pushmaze

Therefore, your first priority should focus on getting the users to subscribe to your push notifications. You can set your web push notification tool to ask for permission as soon as the visitors land on your website. 

• Create Relevant Landing Pages 

Maintaining relevancy is the best way to keep users from blocking or opting out of your notifications. In other words, sending irrelevant notifications might induce opt-out from your push messages. The best option would be to create separate landing pages for your push notification campaigns, or direct the users on the most relevant pages that correspond to your goal in the notification. 

 Segment Users 

It is imperative to categorize your subscribers according to their interests, availability, and requirements. To understand these behaviors, you should have a track on their purchase history, browsing behavior, professional background, and geolocation. Moreover, considering their time zones, browser type, and device type would keep you from being irrelevant with your messages. These segmentations can instantly assist you in launching even the micro-personalized campaigns. 

There are push notification tools that come with in-built audience-segmentation on all the mentioned grounds. I recommend using tools like these to save some extra work on the go. 

  Maintain Time Gap And Frequency: 

Bombardment of frequent notifications one after another is not a good idea. You must keep a considerable time-gap so that users would get enough time to think about and react to your previous messages. Trust me, you do not want to irritate them and encourage opt-outs. 

2. Conducting Marketing Communications 

Now that we are aware of the cautions, it is a right time to start creating and pushing notifications to the website customers. Here are few ideas for sending some highly productive and conversion friendly notifications to your present and old customers. 

  Promote New Product Arrival 

The current customers would not mind shopping again from you, provided, they have had a pleasant experience previously. How to make that sure? You can do that by pushing your current customers with useful information like new and popular product arrivals on the store. Obviously, you need to be relevant with your products selection and customer demographics. Customer segmentation would do a great help here. 

  Send Price Drop Alert 

There are instances when users bounce back after seeing unexpected prices of their desired products. In such a situation, some customers wait for the price to drop, while others prefer looking out for an alternative product or website. Sending price drop alerts would help you get back the former category of customers. As they were already interested, there is a high chance of getting a click through on such notifications. 

  Send Back In Stock Alert 

According to IBM, retailers lose around $93 billion a year in sales due to out of stock products. Customers instantly bounce back when they cannot find their desired products on your site. You can use Google Analytics’ Shopping Behavior Analysis to find out what they were looking for. Later, you can set back in stock notifications once you have these products replenished in the stock. Send a well-crafted notification stating something like “Hey! XYZ cell phone is back in stock, and it’s 10% cheaper now”-- just in case you were thinking about giving a discount to attract attention. 

 Send Flash Sale Or Lightning Deal Alerts 

Push notifications represent an excellent way of announcing sales and driving traffic to sales campaigns. As they get some real-time attention, you can implement direct push notifications to send alerts regarding surprise sales, discount coupons, exclusive deals, and limited time offers. Do not miss the appealing taglines to convey a personalized feeling and increase the response chance. 

 Recommend Best Products 

In addition to new products, deals, and stock alerts, you can use push notifications for communicating about some trending products on your store too. Let your customers know what other shoppers are buying most. You never know, even a random product suggestion might get converted. Of course, you will be tracking their shopping behavior for guessing the products that might interest them. Relevancy is still a paramount concern. 

3. Improve Customer Engagement 

The whole phenomena of customer retention revolve around the concept of user engagement. As old customers already know about your business, keeping them engaged is the best way of getting sales from them. Following suggestions can help in increasing the engagement factor through Web push notifications: 

 Re-Engage The Inactive

These are the ones who have bought from you at some point of time, but have not been active for a while now. As they are already your customers, there is a high chance of them still possessing an interest in your business. Creating some personalized push notifications will give a fair chance of fetching them back to your site. You can push coupons, vouchers, trending products, or exclusive deals. Anything that can induce their interest will be useful. 

 Send Abandoned Cart Notifications 

In 2016, 59.8% of shoppers abandoned their carts on different eCommerce sites. This number reached to 69.23% in 2017. They come, browse, add products to cart, and just leave without purchasing them. Why? There could be numerous reasons. High product price, missing payment method, high shipping cost, hidden taxes etc. are some of the popular reasons discovered through research. 

By following up such customers, you can receive a comeback using various encouraging factors. Let us undertake a user is checking out one product and then leaves the cart right before making the payment. 

You can send him a customized notification with an encouraging factor like 10% discount. Something like this browser push message: 


“We are sorry to see you go! Was it overpriced?” 

“We've got a 10% discount coupon; grab it before it’s gone!” 

 Reward Loyalty 

Customer loyalty is hard to get. Once acquired, it can bring sales like never before. Experts say that the best way to build customer loyalty is to reward them. You can integrate your customer loyalty program with push marketing and send occasional and exclusive offers to your frequent shoppers. Sending web push on joyful events like birthdays can be very effective. 

For example, you can push something like this one: 

“Wish you a very happy birthday, John Doe! Don’t forget to check out your birthday gift” 

“Use ‘HAPPYJOHN’ code to get 30% discount on any item today” 

Apart from these, you can also reward the most loyal customers from time to time through exclusive discounts, combo deals, latest product information, movie tickets, or invitation to special events. 

 Order Delivery Alert 

There is nothing like the experience of eagerly waiting for a product delivery. This is one of the best pleasures customers enjoy in the whole buying process. To make that more joyful, start sending delivery tracking notifications to the customers. It will not only inform them about the expected delivery schedule, but will also let them know that you care about their eagerness. 

 Customer Feedback On Product Delivery 

Feedback followed by continuous improvement is some of the intrinsic ways to retain your customers over a long period. Almost all online stores ask and utilize customers’ feedback for product education. Sending web push notifications and asking for feedback on product delivery is one such idea that would excel your customer retention plan by letting them know how valuable their feedback is for you. 

Web Push Notification Conclusion

Online businesses need continuous growth in their customer engagement levels to stay ahead of the rivals. By wisely deploying web push notifications, you can efficiently achieve the same. Since web push notifications have a way higher engagement rate than traditional modes, they can reach out to new users and help in reconnecting with disconnected customers as well. So, adopt this website push notification marketing tool for your business’s good now. 


I hope you enjoyed this blog post about how to boost customer retention and acquisition with website push notifications.

Interested in more articles about mobile marketing?

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