Product and marketing teams often have a set of goals for their users to accomplish as they move through the customer lifecycle. However, users rarely meet these goals in a single step.
More often than not, users must take multiple steps in a sequential order. To ensure users continue to make progress toward these goals, your team needs to deliver a steady stream of messages at precisely the right moments and assist your users to take action.
Drip campaigns are one of the most effective ways to move users toward a final conversion point. When coupled with push notifications, they form a highly effective engagement solution. In this blogpost, we explore how to leverage the powerful combination of drip campaigns and push notifications to enhance your business.
So, what is a Drip Marketing Campaign for Push Notifications?
Simply put, a drip campaign is a set of automated messages sent to subscribers. These messages can be sent on a specified schedule or when pre-defined triggers are met.
Drip campaigns provide ongoing value to subscribers by slowly “dripping” helpful information, updates, products, notifications, over time. These campaigns are incredibly versatile and can be used to help users navigate your website better, nudge them down a specific user journey on your app, or encourage them to take advantage of a sale.
Traditionally, drip campaigns have fallen within the realm of email marketing but push is quickly becoming one of the best channels to run such campaigns. With the average mobile push opt-in rate of 67.5% across the two largest mobile operating systems and the average web push opt-in rate around 15%, push notifications can help to extend the reach of your messages to a broader audience. Furthermore, users would be receiving messages they signed up for and this lowers the risk of users unsubscribing.
Benefits of using Drip Push Notifications
Let’s say you’re a mobile gaming app. Once a player downloads your app, you’ll want to ensure they learn the basic gameplay and how to navigate the app’s interface. After they’ve been onboarded, you’ll need to find a way to retain players and ultimately, entice them to make in-game purchases or register for a monthly subscription.
You could use drip marketing via push notifications to establish the ideal player journey and guide them along its various stages as they meet pre-defined triggers. Read on to learn about the benefits of drip push notifications in the real world example of a mobile gaming app.
Build trust with your subscribers
Effective drip campaigns can help to build trust with your audience as opposed to the traditional batch-and-blast approach to marketing. With precise segmentation and personalization of the message and the timing, you can ensure that you’ll be delivering impactful messages to audiences that will appreciate them the most. In fact, marketers report that personalization can reduce customer acquisition costs by up to 50%!
Segment players based on how often they return to your app, their average session duration, or the level they’ve achieved in the game. Then tailor your messages to each group to make each message feel as relevant and customized as possible to build trust that the messages you send will be relevant.
Drive customers toward conversion
One of the biggest benefits of drip campaigns is that they help users progress along the customer lifecycle and bring them closer to conversion events. When used in tandem with specific triggers, these drip messages can reach your users at precisely the right time and stage in the customer lifecycle to get them to take a desired action. This degree of precision is difficult to achieve with generic batch and blast campaigns where all users receive the same message regardless of where they are in their unique lifecycle stage.
Utilize behavioural triggers to amplify the impact of your drip messages. For example, if a player has visited the in-game store a certain number of times, establish that behavior as a trigger and target players with a drip campaign to explain why these in-game purchases can enhance their experience in the game.
Keep in touch and stay top of mind
Communication is key to fostering a lasting relationship with your subscribers or customers. It’s not enough to woo users once and leave them be. Like any relationship, it must be cared for and nurtured on every occasion. Drip campaigns are the perfect solution to provide a consistent stream of meaningful information that is specifically catered to each user.
Running a special in-game event with limited edition collectibles? Offering a discount on in-game purchases? Make sure your players know before, during, and after these unique events with drip campaigns.
More engagement, less effort
What do drip campaigns and crockpots have in common? Once you’ve gathered all the necessary ingredients (e.g. your messages) and prepared them accordingly (e.g. establish a messaging schedule and define your triggers), you can set it and forget it.
Now, we’re not advocating that you neglect these campaigns entirely, but they require much less monitoring and maintenance because you’ve already invested the time to develop the customer journey. Drip campaigns help to automate the time-consuming task of creating and launching individual messages. This leaves your team with more time and capacity to focus on other pressing priorities.
Need an easy way to onboard your players? Simply develop a drip campaign that will guide them through the basics of using your app. For example, the first message might guide them through the character creation stage, and the next might introduce them to the game's mechanics.
Set Up Drip Campaigns with OneSignal’s Push Notifications
Setting up drip campaigns may seem daunting at first but here at OneSignal, we’ve cracked the code for you. Take advantage of these OneSignal features to deliver your most impactful drip campaigns:
Define Your Customer Journey with Automated Messages
Automated Messages are the basis of Drip campaigns. With OneSignal, you can easily set up your message templates, define the segments to target, and establish the delivery schedule. Automated messages can be sent with Intelligent Delivery, which optimizes when a message is sent based on the time of the user’s last session. These messages can also be optimized by a user time zone.
You can track the message's lifetime performance from Templates. The Delivery page tracks individual Automated Message stats and are only saved for around 30 days.
Create Targeted Audiences with Segments
Segments give you the ability to group and target devices with more personalized and engaging messages. You can divide your subscribers into specific audiences based on categories of data automatically tracked by the OneSignal SDK along with custom data sent to OneSignal via Data Tags.
Segments are updated automatically once created. As users interact with your app or website, devices may be added-to or removed-from segments without any additional setup or tracking on your end.
Refine Your Audience with Personalization with Data Tags
Data Tags are one of OneSignal’s most powerful features, allowing you to store arbitrary data attributes on each user. Tags can be used to personalize messages with variable substitution. For example, you can send a welcome message that includes your subscriber’s first name, rather than a more generic message. This is made possible by sending OneSignal the user’s name as a data tag.
Connect with your Audience with Language and Localization
Speak in your audience’s native language for a stronger connection with OneSignal’s language and localization tools. The OneSignal dashboard and API makes English the default language for all new messages, but you can use any language you desire in this field. If you want to send a single message in more than one language, you can add languages.
Validate Your Messaging with A/B Testing
Go one step further and validate your campaign’s messaging through A/B Testing to compare two notifications to determine which performs better. Marketers often use A/B testing to test different variations of the same message, or whether a notification with an image performs better than a text-only notification. This message validation is especially valuable for ongoing campaigns like drip campaigns.
Track Custom Conversions with Outcomes
Outcomes lets you define conversion actions important to you and monitor them with ease. Track specific results or actions taken by users, such as a purchase or subscription. Easily view and export metrics from the OneSignal dashboard.
If you’re new to push and want to see why over one million marketers and developers love OneSignal, create an account for free, or if you’d rather talk to our team live, feel free to book a demo here.
