Over 90% of consumers choose to buy from brands that recognize and remember their preferences by sending them relevant offers and recommendations, an Accenture study reveals.
Lead generation and conversion rate aside, this figure highlights that businesses must pay heed to personalized messaging. Not only does it boost customer engagement but it also improves retention and loyalty.
If you want to drive business growth in 2024, then pay attention to what our guest, Max Konev, CEO of Pushwoosh shares, exclusively for DesignRush readers.
Who Is Max Konev?
A developer turned business leader Max is the founder of Pushwoosh, an omnichannel customer engagement platform, since 2014. He advocates for intelligent solutions that reduce the development workload and empower non-tech teams, helping businesses achieve measurable results and growth through relevant communications.
Let’s face it, customer engagement and retention are not the easiest to improve.
Max thinks that one big challenge is that many teams are short on resources and expertise.
“To work on user engagement and retention flows, it takes a dedicated marketing manager and a developer available to help them. Finding this human and time capital is already a challenge for many companies, regardless of the size,” he says.
Additionally, he suggests that technical processes can be very complex, highlighting that even updating a tiny button in the application can take up to a few days of development.
“It stops marketers from experimenting, and without that, how are they going to improve anything?” he doubles down.
A practical solution, according to Max, is to set up a customer engagement platform to help streamline processes and empower marketers to independently experiment. This independence allows for quicker adjustments and improvements without lengthy development times.
Should You Leverage All Channels to Reach Your Audience?
While exhausting all possible channels to reach users can potentially maximize engagement and conversions, it also risks overwhelming them and diluting the impact of individual messages.
So, what’s the right way to go?
“The problem is not exactly in the number of messages — it’s their irrelevance that drives recipients crazy, and not in a good way.
Some apps can send 10 messages per day, and their users will be eager to receive more content. The key is to find out what interests each particular user and what their preferred communication format is,” he explains.
To do this, he advises that brands segment the market by preferences, in-app behavior, and RFM values, and then, track down their interactions with the messages on different channels.
Corresponding actions also need to be taken depending on customer behavior:
- Did they click on your in-app message? Then, there’s no need to deliver them a push notification with the same offer.
- Did they ignore your push? An email may be a better channel, especially if you see they’ve opened emails from you in the past.
“Anyway, you need to set a limit on the overall number of messages you send to an individual customer. There is always a risk of losing a subscriber or even a paying customer if you overwhelm them with communications,” he concludes.
Essentially, as a business leader, you must ensure that your brand focuses on relevance and personalization to engage your audience.
Determining the Most Relevant Channels for Your Brand
Pinpointing the most relevant channels for your business is vital as it can ensure that you’re reaching the right audience.
Max shares tips on how to select these channels:
- Segmentation is key! Tag your users based on the zero- and first-party data you can access and track which channels they use to open your messages.
- Determine your best-performing channel and make it your default one, then move on to the second best, and so on.
- Create segments based on interest in specific products or offers (e.g., promotional or entertaining) and match these segments with the customer’s preferred channel.
To maximize click-through rates (CTRs), he recommends finding the optimal time to send parameters and scheduling message delivery accordingly, adapting to customers’ personal rhythms and time zones.
“In addition to tracking clicks and opens, you surely want to track conversions. The ultimate goal of any push notification or email is closely tied to revenue, and with a customer engagement platform, it’s easy to track.
This way, you can ensure that your messages not only reach your audience but also drive the desired actions,” he adds.
If you are looking for a partner to help reach and engage your customers across various channels, our DesignRush's listing of top digital marketing agencies is a great place to start.
Avoid Broadcast Messaging, Focus on Personalized Campaigns
Given that nearly 90% of online businesses actively invest in personalization, broadcast messaging is rapidly becoming obsolete.
“The worst strategy is to blast the same message to your entire user base day in and day out. This is the fastest way to lose your audience's attention and receive complaints.
Simple segmentation could nip the issue in the bud. When you target smaller groups of users, you can send them more specific and timely messages tailored to their preferences and behaviors,” Max points out.
He believes that a more customized approach, like content personalization, helps businesses enhance customer engagement and reduce the risk of unsubscribes and spam reports.
“Personalization is not about embedding a customer’s name in the message copy or mentioning the product they’ve viewed — it’s about fitting into the user’s context,” he notes.
When strategizing brand messaging, Max considers the following questions:
- What interactions have they had with your brand in the past, both inside and outside your app or website?
- What ad campaign led them to install your app?
- What motivation did they pick in your onboarding survey?
“Personalized communication shouldn’t be a one-off message — aim for a series of messages, each emphasizing what matters most to this particular recipient,” he says.
Additionally, Max explains that insights transforming a broadcast message into a personalized offer can significantly boost CTRs. In fact, at Pushwoosh, they've observed real progress with their customers, with CTRs increasing from 5% to 25%.
He shares that Pushwoosh's most successful cases are based on a personalized approach, highlighting their fintech customer AvaTrade as an example of one-to-one communication in transactional messaging.
“AvaTrade includes seven to 10 personalized variables in each message, resulting in CTRs 9.4 times higher than the industry average.
They also excel in marketing messaging, achieving a 12% conversion to the target action through behavior-based personalization, effectively pushing customers further down the funnel,” he adds.
Track User Behavior to Craft Effective Engagement Strategies
Another valuable tip? Understanding and leveraging user behavior, as well as making data-driven decisions, can help your brand develop effective and personalized engagement strategies.
“Customers will react differently to your messaging: some will respond with purchases or increase in-app activity, while others may remain indifferent.
Every reaction, whether positive or negative, can contribute to your engagement and retention strategies — provided you use new data and insights to refine your segments and offers,” Max says.
Repeating the same message won't work, so he advises continuously monitoring campaign metrics to pause those that are ineffective and optimize successful ones.
“Besides such bird’s-eye view analytics, you may want to stay abreast of individual users’ interactions with your messaging. It’s too competitive on the lock screen to ignore them. So stay attuned to user insights to ensure that your messaging remains relevant, engaging, and effective,” he adds.
Finally, Max shares how businesses can improve their customer engagement strategies using these three tips:
- Use various messaging channels to reach users efficiently: For example, combine emails and push notifications for transactional messages or replace SMS with push notifications to save on promo distribution costs.
- Automate everything you can: This includes scheduled communications, reminders, and user lifecycle journeys.
- Experiment and constantly optimize your communication: Customer engagement is key to your app's growth, so dedicate time to testing messages and exploring new channels.
Whether your brand decides to leverage one or more digital marketing channels to reach your audience in 2024, make sure to consistently track and analyze user behavior to be able to craft effective engagement strategies.
Only then will you meet customer expectations and ensure long-term loyalty, which ultimately leads to business growth.
