When it comes to intelligent marketing strategy, push notifications make a powerful tool of choice for businesses to level up your marketing game. Have you got some smartly crafted push notifications to send to your audience, but not sure which one to use? This is where the A/B testing of push messages comes handy. 

The last thing you want to do is to leave anything to chance. Make sure you embrace a data-driven strategy to test what push message campaign works on which user segments to ensure that you scale user engagement and retention effectively. 

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing or split testing is a process of analyzing and comparing more push message variants to find which is the best performing variant based on key performance metrics like CTRs, open rates, and conversions. 

Each variable can be targeted at a percentage of your complete audience base and the performing variant would be sent to the relevant audience base. By considering the audience engagement and conversion rates, you will be able to finalize a winning push notification campaign. 

Why is A/B testing significantly?

Let’s say you have push notification A and B. Do you want to know how your audience will react to each of your push messages? Which push notifications out of the two will bring in the most engagement and therefore more sales and leads? As we already discussed, only A/B testing can clear all your doubts. 

How to set up the A/B test for push notifications?

Instead of working on assumptions, it is recommended to follow a proper strategy to produce effective results on each push notification campaign. 

Establish a hypothesis

Based on the type of your push message campaign you want to run (informational, promotional, sales-oriented) you can decide what type of messaging will work for certain user segments. Do you want to run a plain text message or compliment your messages with rich elements like images, interactive videos, or GIFs? You also need to plan the conversion event you want to accomplish through the push notification campaign you are running. 

Are you targeting new users who are placing the order for the first time or nudging your existing users to transact more? Or are you planning to cross-sell a similar product? Set a hypothesis to answer all these questions and get clarity about your push notification campaign testing. 

Test the hypothesis

Once you have established your hypothesis, start creating different variants to the test the same message. And, target different user segments based on relevance to find a winning variant. Additionally, you can set a time limit within which you want to run the testing based on your campaign objectives. 

When testing your hypothesis, you have to test for only one factor at a time so that you will have more clarity on what modifications to make. For example, if you are testing the level of customization along with the use of emojis simultaneously, you will not be able to easily identify which variable performed better. 

Embrace the power of data-driven insights

If you are using any push notification service that offers smart data insights, you can leverage it to proceed with or reject the hypothesis you have set based on the performance reports of your test variants. For example, Pushmaze is a self-hosted web and mobile push notifications that help you to send trackable push messages.

The power of data-driven insights will help you trigger the best performing variant automatically. Test whether your push notification campaign with personalization performs better, in term of conversions. 

Understand user behavior to optimize future campaigns

When you perform testing on your push notification campaigns, the performance of the campaign teaches you something about different audience segments. You can get a better understanding of the user’s click and in-app behavior so that you can optimize your future push motivation campaigns. 

What factors can you run push notifications A/B tests for?

Now that you know about A/B testing and its importance, let’s look into the different factors that you can test in your push message campaigns to find the better performing variant. 

Degree of personalization

Personalizing your push messages is critical to improving leads and conversions. Customizing the content of your messages based on your target users can increase open rates by 4 times when compared to a normal copy. Including user names in your push messages will help to catch the instant attention of your users 

However, you can take personalization beyond the first name as well. Show your customers that you care about their requirements by offering them push notifications with personalized information like location or their previous website activity etc. 

To measure the impact, test personalized messages against impersonalized one. You will see the personalized push notifications coming on top of and help you increase engagement and thereby conversions. 

Push message content

The content of your push notifications can have a great impact on your campaign success, whether it is positive or negative. Perform A/B testing to know whether your customers respond the best to short or long formats, rich elements, or no fancy elements. Do your users respond better when you send personal and emotional tone in your messages? 

You will be surprised to see how small changes can bring in big changes in the results the tests you can run with push notification content are limitless and gives you immense flexibility to understand the psychology of your users. Laying a good foundation for user segmentation and engagement. 

Rich elements

Push messages when enriched with rich elements like GIFs, large images, audios, videos, etc. the open rate will be increased by over 55%. You have the complete freedom to choose what to include in your push messages to target specific audience groups. 

Test whether your users respond to videos than images. Keep in mind that while these rich elements make your push messages more visually appealing, these elements should be used in the content only when it is essential. 

Emoji’s

You might be wondering whether the use of emojis can have a positive influence on user action. You will be surprised to learn about the role played by emojis in immediately grabbing user attention. Emojis are actually known for boosting push message open rates by 85%. 

This is exactly why you need to test your push notifications with emojis. Play around with relevant emojis to find the ones that work for specific campaigns. This will help you recreate a winning template for your push messages in the future.

Timing

Timing is another factor that you can test as certain user groups are more likely to engage with your message during certain times of the day. Make it a practice to target your user group according to their time zone, so you don’t frustrate anyone with your notifications. You can even go a level further to try out intelligent delivery. 

With intelligent delivery, you can understand the best times of the day to send messages to your users by analyzing their website browsing and in-app behaviors. A/B testing on timing can drive better engagement and retention rates for your site or app as you continue to learn what type of content resonates with your users. 

In Conclusion

So now you know how important experimenting push notifications with A/B testing is to your marketing efforts. You can plan a strategy and perform the A/B testing to craft and deliver personalized, high conversion push message campaigns at scale. 

Hope this blog helped you gain more knowledge and insights into A/B testing and how it can help make your push marketing campaigns more effective and successful.

Author Bio

Marry Ann

I’m the Marketing consultant, Self-driven budding entrepreneur, Work together with the clients by implementing different marketing strategies in their businesses.

https://twitter.com/MarryAnn854

Currently marketing consultant at https://www.pushmaze.com/