The modern consumer is omnipresent, wants instant gratification, and cannot be easily lured to purchase. Technology has greatly altered the way users look for information and make purchase decisions. With a range of options available to them at just the click of a mouse, consumers rarely make any impulse purchases.
To solve these and many more customer behavior challenges effectively, marketers must realize that consumers will find newer ways and channels to solve their problems as technology evolves. For marketers, there is a huge opportunity in leveraging those ways that their users show affinity towards brands and products.
Neither the sales funnel nor customer journeys are linear anymore. Therefore, it’s necessary to go omnichannel, especially for ecommerce businesses. It’s also important for marketers to outline consumer behavior challenges that impact their businesses the most. Listed below are a few of these challenges related to ecommerce and ways push notifications can address them.
1. Purchase Drop-Offs
Also commonly referred to as cart abandonments, purchase drop-offs are one of the major challenges in the ecommerce industry. Users tend to browse, read, and search about products on various devices — smartphones, tablets, laptops/desktops, etc. However, for making the final purchase, several people still prefer the desktop. Therefore, while they might add products to a cart from any device, they’ll still complete the final transaction from their laptops or desktop computers.
Cart abandonment happens when an on-the-go consumer randomly adds products that he is considering buying to the cart and then completely forgets about them. As a marketer, if you’re not reminding your users about the products that they were so close to buying, you’re losing out on high-intent sales.
Getting those users back who have abandoned their carts is a tough task made simpler by using web notifications. Behavior-driven push notifications prove to be the best way to solve this challenge. Set your time-based trigger to notify users and gently remind them about items that they have pending in their carts. For example, if a user has added items to a cart and hasn’t purchased them after two days pass, a web push notification can be sent out as a reminder to revisit items added to the cart and make a purchase.
Another interesting way push notifications can be used to address the abandoned cart challenge is by using the urgency principle in your push notification strategy. A number of users will just add items to their cart and forget about them. They’re in no hurry to make a purchase. You can target these users by running a time-bound sale or get them to convert faster by notifying them about when the item is about to run out of stock.
2. Reactivating Inactive Users
SmartInsights has curated and listed 38 indispensable ecommerce stats for 2017, one of which talks about the average order value (AOV) of repeat customers. According to the source (McKinsey), AOV for repeat customers is twice as high as for first-time customers. That said, for ecommerce players, building and nurturing long-term relations with users is a huge challenge.
As a marketer, if you’re not creating prolonged relationships with your users and not leveraging re-engagement, you are losing out on high-value customers. Bringing dormant users back to life is much easier if you understand their motivations and interests. Use web push notifications and push content that can invite an action from these users. Recommended products work very well with inactive users.
You could also notify them about offers and discounts on items previously browsed. For example, if a user purchased a plus size denim skirt two months ago and has been inactive since then, notify them about the new items in your skirt collection. This might get them back to browsing and buying on your website.
3. Low Transaction Volume
In its simplest, average transaction volume is the average dollar amount that a user spends within a single transaction. Owing to the options available to consumers online, this volume has been showing a downward trend. To fix this, ecommerce websites try and leverage promotional offers, discounts, etc.
As a marketer, if you are unable to increase transaction value from your users, it means you are losing them out to competitors. With web notifications, you can reach a wider audience and also target your current users effectively with promotional offers, seasonal discounts, and rewards. One of the best use cases for increasing transaction volume is getting users to add more items to their carts in order to get free-shipping.
Browser notifications, when triggered real-time on the website as a user is browsing and adding items to cart, can be used to increase transaction value from users. You can also use onsite notifications to address this challenge.
4. Losing Sales to Spam
Users are easily put off by any content or communication that they see or hear which is not relevant to them — doesn’t address their problems and doesn’t take their interests into account. Irrelevant information can make your users unsubscribe or quit their purchase with you. If you go by the numbers, there are about one trillion messages and emails sent out globally in a single day globally. 740 billion of these messages and emails are spam. Targeting your users with relevant messages can help you convert 75%-80% of them.
As a marketer, if you’re sending out irrelevant messages to your consumers, you’re losing out on a large chunk of conversions and not effectively leveraging personalization. Web push notifications are not just about keeping your users posted. In fact, that’s just 20% of what they are. Web notifications are 80% about segmentation and personalization. Therefore, when you use web notifications, you don’t have to worry about losing customers due to spam.
For example, if you’re running a blog, your recommended articles and posts need to be highly personalized and relevant for each user. Ecommerce websites can use personalized web notifications in a number of ways. They could, for example, show a person who browsed a certain product the number of other people who purchased that particular item that he or she was considering buying.
Conclusion
There are a number of user behavior challenges that push notifications can solve. However, for web notifications to be effective, they should be done the right way. When your push notification strategy is right, they can be the key to winning new sales and recovering lost ones.
About the Author
Umair is the founder and CEO of Wigzo. This product ninja is passionate about anything eCommerce. He has just started exploring writing as a skill.
