Mobile CRM: Wooing Your Users with Push Notifications

Imagine you have a user who is, in terms of your target audience, your ideal user. She is your app soulmate. But she’s not using your app as often as you’d like (or at all). She is, however, committed enough to have not purged it from her mobile during her latest Great Phone Memory Clearance. Or maybe she really does love your app, but a busy life and/or a limited data plan is stopping her from coming back as frequently as you, as a business, would like.

Certainly, research by Google says that the average app user has 36 apps installed on her mobile but only a quarter of these are used every day, and one quarter are not used at all.

This is why your user needs your app to have put in place a great mCRM strategy: she needs to receive little reminders to let her know the potential this app has to become an important part of her life. But how can you do this?

mCRM all the way

Since a study by British psychologists found that young people spend up to five hours a day on their phone, it really has never been a better time for mobile marketers. And even when we’re not actually holding our mobiles in our hands, we’ve been conditioned to glance at them almost constantly. (Indeed I’ve lost count of the amount times I’ve been disappointed by the realisation that what I thought was my phone lighting up with a new message was actually just a ray of sunshine reflecting off my black screen.)

So how do you make the most of this trigger-happiness in order to increase your app’s retention and a user’s lifetime value (LTV)?

You need to use mCRM – namely push notifications (and, depending on the nature of your app, email) – to lend a helping hand, pre-empt their thoughts and desires, and become an integral part of their life. It’s the only way to make yourself stand out among the noise of all the other apps in the marketplace.

The best part is: you don’t even need a user’s email address in order to send them push notifications. They just need to have your app installed and to have given permission to receive notifications from you. This is absolutely essential, but it can be easy to get it wrong.

Permission Priming

It’s a familiar scene: a user downloads a new app, barely knowing what it’s about, and immediately she is greeted by this –

Who are you and why should I let you into my life? she asks, as she presses “Don’t Allow” without a moment’s hesitation. Indeed, data from Kahuna suggests that up to 60% of app users opt out of push notifications, likely for this reason: essentially, the user doesn’t know if she likes you yet, so she won’t give you her number. Leanplum say only 42% of users opt in to push notifications: it’ll be a challenge.

The answer is to become indispensable.

As part of crafting your onboarding process, Yodel Mobile looks at permission priming. In other words, we give your user enough strong reasons to accept notifications from you that she’d think herself an idiot if she didn’t.

An example we love is from Grabble. Their permission priming would make many users itch with desire to hear from them, even when they’re at work or with friends:

By using the seizing-the-day double affirmative of “Yes, Please!” alongside the slightly standoffish, pleasure-denying “No, Thanks!” (as well as the striking positive colour-coding of the “Yes” option), Grabble makes the user think they’d be an idiot to not accept push notifications, because they seem such an integral part of the function of the app.

This is what we mean by making your app seem like an essential life partner. Fancy buying some new shoes? Oh look, a notification about a shoe sale! Bad day at work? Here’s an unexpected, humorous push notification that makes you smile. A perfectly-timed notification can turn an unloved app into an indispensable lifesaver.