How to Promote a Loyalty Program Using Push Notifications

Looking for a quick and easy guide on how to promote a loyalty program?

By now, you know most of the tried and tested tricks such as putting it up on your website, having your cashiers promote it at checkout, and asking your sales representative and affiliates to promote it. So, I’ll give you something new to think about – you can use push notification campaigns to promote a loyalty program.

With 52% of smartphone users having push notifications enabled on their devices, any business can use this powerful marketing tool to drive traffic, engagement, and sales. But how can you harness the potential of push notifications to promote a loyalty program?

Do you need a developer to get started? How do you pick a push notifications service? How do you track if your push campaigns are profitable?

In this article, I’ll walk you through how to promote a loyalty program and help grow your business. And we promise that it’ll be helpful even if you’ve never tried push campaigns before

Sounds good? Let’s dive in.

Why Promote Your Loyalty Program Using Push Notifications

Push notifications are a valuable tool for your businesses to connect with your audience.

And they’re a great way to promote your loyalty program as well. Push campaigns are not just about driving sales and promoting products; they also help build trust and boost brand reputation.

You can promote your loyalty program using web push notifications, mobile app push notifications, and even web app push notifications.

Here are some of the benefits of using push notifications to promote your loyalty program:

1. Increased click-through rates: Push notifications have been shown to have higher click-through rates than other forms of digital marketing. This means that users are more likely to engage with your content and take action.
2. Higher conversion rates: Push notifications can be highly effective at driving conversions, especially when they are personalized and targeted. This means that users are more likely to make a purchase or sign up for a service.
3. Improved customer and reader engagement: Push notifications can help businesses stay top of mind with their audience and improve customer engagement. By delivering valuable content through push notifications, businesses can build trust and brand reputation with their audience, leading to increased customer loyalty and repeat business.
4. Cost-effective: Push notifications are a cost-effective way to reach your audience and drive sales. Unlike other forms of digital marketing, push notifications do not require a large budget or extensive resources to be effective.
5. Personalization: Push notifications can be highly personalized based on user behavior, preferences, and demographics. By delivering personalized messages to your audience, you can increase the likelihood of a conversion and improve customer engagement.

When folks choose to get those push notifications, it’s like a virtual tap on the shoulder that says, “Hey, come back to our site or mobile app!” And you know what? It really works.

People who subscribe to your push notifications tend to swing back to your website or app more often and hang around longer.

But here’s the secret sauce: you’ve got to make those messages catchy and personal. Think of it like sending a friendly message to an old pal.

Crafting messages that hit the right notes can bring back your previous customers, make them feel all warm and fuzzy about your brand, and, of course, give your long-term profits a nice little boost.

So, get creative, be engaging, and watch the magic happen!

How to Promote a Loyalty Program Using Push Notifications

Let’s talk about how to promote a loyalty program using push notifications. Before you get started, you need to make sure that promoting your loyalty program is part of your push notification strategy.

Here are some key considerations:

1. Set clear goals: Define your objectives and what you aim to achieve with your push notification campaigns. Whether it’s increasing website traffic, driving conversions, or promoting specific offers, having clear goals will guide your strategy.
2. Determine your target audience: Identify your target audience and understand their preferences, interests, and behaviors. This will help you tailor your push notifications to resonate with them and increase engagement.
3. Craft compelling messages: Create concise and compelling content for your push notifications. Use clear and crisp language to convey your message effectively and entice users to take action.
4. Optimize timing: Timing is crucial when it comes to push notifications. Consider the best times to send notifications based on your audience’s habits and preferences. Avoid sending notifications too frequently or at inconvenient times to prevent user annoyance.
5. Personalize your notifications: Personalization is key to capturing your audience’s attention. Use data and segmentation to deliver targeted and relevant push notifications that align with the user’s interests and behaviors.
6. Test and analyze: Continuously test and analyze your push notification campaigns to optimize their performance. A/B testing different variations of messages, timing, and targeting can help you identify what resonates best with your audience and improve your overall strategy.

By following these steps, you can effectively prepare for push notifications in your loyalty campaigns. Remember to align your goals, understand your audience, craft compelling messages, optimize timing, personalize your notifications, and continuously test and analyze to drive better results.

There are other considerations as well. So, let’s take a closer look at what you need to do.

Step #1: Selecting a Push Notification Service

If you’re not collecting push subscribers already, you need to stop missing out right now. We recommend that you use PushEngage to start collecting push subscribers right now.

PushEngage is the #1 push notifications plugin in the world. If you compare it to the other best push notification services, you’ll see that it clearly comes out on top.

Push notifications help you grow your website traffic and engagement on autopilot. And if you’re running an online store, PushEngage also helps you grow your sales by helping you create automated eCommerce push notifications.

With the PushEngage Android and iOS SDKs, you can send mobile app push using the same reliable software for great delivery rates. But we’ve built several layers on top that make it super easy to build custom integrations with your app. And PushEngage manages the entire SDK. So, you don’t even have to spend a ton of time and money to manage your integrations.

All you have to do is build!

You can send broadcast notifications directly from your PushEngage dashboard once you’ve set up your app to send mobile app push notifications using PushEngage’s SDK. Yes, you still have to add code to your app and develop the connectors between your app and the PushEngage API. But once that’s done, you can easily create mobile app push campaigns from a pre-built software interface that also comes with:

• Highly engaging push campaign types
• Proven campaign templates with high conversion rates
• Web and app push campaigns
• Increased audience retention using data-based personalization
• High-converting automated campaigns to promote your content whenever you publish
• Multiple targeting and campaign scheduling options
• Goal tracking and advanced analytics
• Intelligent A/B testing
• A Dedicated Success Manager

You can get started for free, but if you’re serious about growing your business, you should buy a paid plan. Also, before buying any push notification service, you should check out this guide to push notification costs.

You’ll see that PushEngage is hands down the best bet if you want to build traffic, engagement, and sales for your business. And if you’re on a budget, you can always get a little bit creative with your push notifications.

Step #2: Integrating Push Notifications with Other Marketing Channels

Before we get into how to promote a loyalty program, we should check out how to integrate with other marketing channels as well.

Using push notifications doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to abandon other marketing channels. In fact, you can happily use send push campaigns along with:

• Email campaigns
• Social media campaigns
• SMS campaigns

And if you’re looking to quickly grow your push subscribers, you should use your other marketing channels to ask people to subscribe to your push campaigns. One very cool way to pull this off is to use a blog subscription widget on your site that collects push subscribers:

You can even create popups to collect push subscribers on your site like this one:

Or, you can even create landing pages with a click-to-subscribe button that collects push subscribers.

Step #3: Configuring Push Notification Settings

Before you get into how to promote a loyalty program using push notifications, you need to set up a few small things. The most high-converting push notifications are personalized and targeted. So, let’s get into how you can do that.

How to Promote a Loyalty Program Using Subscriber Segments

Segments are a really great way to send targeted push campaigns. And it should be a big part of your push notification marketing strategy. One of the coolest things about push notifications is that you can create dynamic segments for higher engagement rates.

You can easily get started with Geographic segmentation:

In the PushEngage dashboard, you can see the countries where your subscribers are located under Demographic Overview.

You can use this list of countries to create geographic segments. Geographic segmentation allows you to:

• Send push campaigns in your subscribers’ timezones for better engagement
• Run local offers that are only relevant to that customer segment for higher conversion rates
• Create campaigns in local languages for higher click rates

Or, you can try demographic segmentation:

You can use this data to create demographic segments based on the browser and device that your subscribers are using. Whenever you send a push broadcast or a campaign, simply scroll down to Send to Custom Audience and add the targeting rules.

As with geographic segmentation, you don’t need to create a new segment to target audience demographics. These are all default segments. You can even create behavioral segments. Head over to Audience » Segments and click on Create a New Segment:

Create a rule that segments your subscribers automatically based on the URLs they’re browsing:

In the example, we created a segment called “Sample Segment” that segments subscribers automatically when they visit URLs on your site with the word “examples” in it. You can pretty much use any keyword you like here.

And that’s not all. You can create multiple segments automatically to send targeted push campaigns. Check out our article on how to segment your subscribers automatically.

How to Promote a Loyalty Program By Crafting Engaging Push Notification Content

For any push campaign, you should remember:

Personalized Recommendations + Story-Driven Copy = High Engagement.

We have an entire list of push notification copy examples you can use. Go ahead and check that out. If you need some help creating push campaigns, you should check out our templates.

Go to Campaigns » Push Broadcasts and click on the Choose From Templates button:

And you can select a push notification template from our library of proven campaigns:

And if you need more inspiration, you should check out this list of push notification examples.

Retargeting Strategies to Promote Loyalty Programs

An easy way to boost your conversions is to set up retargeting push campaigns.

If you’re not sending the notification to all subscribers, you’ll need to create an Audience Group. For instance, if you want to target the subscribers who didn’t click on the broadcast to everyone, you’ll need to create a new Audience Group.

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Audience » Audience Groups and click Create New Audience Group:

If you want to target subscribers who clicked on your last notification, you can create another Audience Group. 

Filter your subscribers by Last click date after the date you sent your previous notification AND before the date you want to send your next notification:

You can add AND criteria to your filter by clicking on Add filter rules. A filter like this is great for sending cross-selling push notifications. The outcome of these Audience Groups is more granular targeting. So, each time, you can send different offers to improve your conversion rates.

How to Promote a Loyalty Program With Targeted Push Notifications

By now, you’ve already created the right customer segments and audience groups. You even have epic push notification examples and templates that are proven to work. So, all you have to do now is put all these components together.

Do a simple exercise where you map the right loyalty programs to the right segments and audience groups. Then, all you have to do is set up a campaign for each targeting option for high-converting campaigns.

You can even set up drip push campaigns to build a narrative around your promotion. Start by installing a web notifications WordPress plugin.

Log into your PushEngage plugin and head over to Campaign » Drip Autoresponders and click on Create Drip Autoresponder:

One really cool drip idea to get you started is a welcome push campaign. You can set up different welcome drips for different audience segments and groups. If you need help getting started, you should check out our article on website welcome message examples.

You can even customize your drip campaigns using attributes. That’s a more advanced option, though, and we recommend using a developer to set it up for you.

Pro Tip: Set up form abandonment push campaigns to recover lost leads on autopilot.

How to Resolve Compliance Issues

According to GDPR, you must obtain explicit consent before collecting or processing any personal information of an EU resident or citizen.

Now, push notifications are a lot like emails but even more constrained. You can ONLY send out push notifications to your subscribers. Unlike emails, you can’t send a single push notification randomly to someone who’s not subscribed.

Where GDPR meets push notification software is that you’re collecting subscribers. So, in a sense, you are collecting consumer data.

Of course, it’s not the same as an email opt-in. With an email opt-in, you have to capture the email address, but you can capture a LOT of additional data. Take a look at this one by HubSpot:

But with push notifications, you capture the combination of the device and the IP address to generate a key that is unique to the customer’s device. That’s what happens when people opt for your push notifications by clicking ‘Allow’:

Additionally, PushEngage can store the geolocation of your subscribers so that you can create personalized push notification campaigns. This includes the country, state, and city at the time of subscription.

But as you can probably understand, this is entirely based on consent. When someone opts for push notifications, they give you consent to send them marketing notifications. So, push notifications are already compliant with GDPR by definition because they operate on a consent-first paradigm.

Step #4: Testing and Optimization Push Notification Campaigns

Push notification A/B testing is a method of optimizing your conversions from push notification campaigns. You can choose to optimize different parts of your push notifications based on what kind of results you want to improve.

It’s time to answer the bigger question with push notification A/B testing. What can you split test in a push notification?

The most common performance metrics for push notifications are:

• Click rate: The click rate on a push notification is how often your subscribers saw your push notification and then clicked on it.
• View rate: The view rate of a push notification is how often a subscriber received your push notification and saw it before it expired.
• Goal conversions: You can set goals for your campaign and set up goal tracking for your campaigns. The goal conversions is a measure of how many times you achieved your goal.

To increase your view rates, you want to use a large image in your push notifications. Using images in your notifications instantly makes it more appealing.

Add a Push Notification Broadcast

Head over to your PushEngage dashboard and go to Campaign » Push Broadcasts and click on the Create a New Push Broadcast button:

Under the Content tab, add your push notification content:

How to Add a Push Notification A/B Test to Promote a Loyalty Program

Click on the Add A/B Test link to create an A/B test for your push notification instantly:

And then, you can simply create two versions of you push notification:

And you can change anything you like in your version B. If you scroll down, you can even split test your push notification action buttons. Once you’re done setting up the content in the two versions, click the Save and Select Segments button.

You can select a custom audience here:

Or, you can send it to all your push notification subscribers. When you’re done, click the Send/Schedule button.

How to Promote a Loyalty Program By Setting Up an Intelligent A/B Test

In Intelligent A/B Testing, you run the test on a part of your total audience. We recommend running a Intelligent A/B Test on 30% of your audience. This way, you send version A to 15% of your audience, and version B to another 15%. Whichever push notification performs better automatically gets sent to the rest of your audience.

So, in Intelligent A/B Testing, you can send the winning push notification to 85% of your audience instead of sending it to 50%. This improves your overall campaign performance instantly and it’s super simple to set up.

Here, you can enable Intelligent A/B Testing:

Turn the Intelligent A/B test on and set the sample size for the test.

And just schedule or send your push notification. You’re done!

Step #5: Analyzing Push Notification Performance with Data and Metrics

Every push notification campaign or single broadcast has its own analytics data. What you want to look at are:

• Click through rate (CTR): The CTR is the percentage of people who saw your push notification and then clicked on it.
• Goal count: Your goal count is the number of people who took the action you wanted after clicking on your notification.
• Revenue: We highly recommend having a revenue goal for your push campaigns, especially is you’re running an eCommerce store.

There are some other metrics you can look at:

Push notification opt-ins have very specific analytics as well.

What you want to focus on is your subscription rate. The rest of the numbers can be a distraction if you’re a complete startup. Let’s break this down in simpler terms.

With Goal Tracking, you can track the ROI of your campaigns. For instance, if we set a revenue goal for purchases made on your site, goal-tracking with push notifications can track:

• The number of conversions
• And the dollar value

For every sale made from a push notification campaign!

Based on this report, you can calculate the return on investment (ROI) of your campaigns.

Pro Tip: You can filter and sort your push notifications to find winning campaigns. It’s an easy way to understand what’s working for your audience.

Step #6: How to Promote a Loyalty Program Push Notification Campaign

All that’s left is to schedule your loyalty marketing push notifications. Every time you create a new push notification on PushEngage, you get the option to schedule it by date and time:

You can even set up recurring push notifications for repeat events such as weekly sales:

If you’d like to select for how long the repeat schedule will work, click on the calendar next to Schedule Between to set the dates. And that’s all there is to it!

Common Mistakes to Avoid with Push Notifications

Before you start, we thought that you should know about some of the most common pitfalls with loyalty marketing push notifications. We have thousands of customers sending 15+ billion push notifications every month. So, you should absolutely check out our push notifications best practices.

Also, try to avoid the following:

• Sending too many notifications
• Using generic messaging
• Not segmenting your audience properly

We can talk about how you can navigate these issues in a later part of this article. For now, just keep these issues in mind. These are very common mistakes and they can undermine the effectiveness of your push campaigns.

What to Do Now That You Know How to Promote a Loyalty Program

Now that you know how to promote a loyalty program, it’s time to launch your push notification campaigns.

Getting started with targeted push notifications can seem intimidating. But if you keep an eye on goal tracking and analytics, you should be fine. More importantly, you’ll make a lot more profit with the help of push notification campaigns. Here are a few cool resources to get you started:

• How to Use Retargeting Push Notifications to 2x Your Revenue
• How to Sort Your Push Notifications and Find Winning Campaigns
• How to Clean Up Push Notifications Subscriber Lists (Easy)
• How to Automatically Send RSS Push Notifications
• How to Use Push Notifications to Promote a News Site
• How to Use Cross Selling Push Notifications to 2x Your Sales
• How to Use Browse Abandonment Push Notifications (4 Steps)

If you’re new to push notifications, you should try out PushEngage. PushEngage is the #1 push notification software in the market. And your campaigns will be in safe hands.

So, if you haven’t already, get started with PushEngage today!