An Uncomplicated Guide To Push Notifications For Job Portals
Finding the right market while building a website can be difficult. But the intelligent few who saw the growing number of job opportunities and the alarming unemployment rates (a massive 5.7% worldwide in 2017 alone), came up with the idea of job portals. However, the tribe has now grown and multiplied. And with this, growing and retaining users on your job portal has become a very challenging task. This is also probably why you’re reading this article in the first place.
For starters, it’s important to differentiate yourself in the way you communicate with your users. Emails have become spammy and increasingly neglected, and the ability to reach your customer on time has become the need of the hour. But fret not. We have a solution for you.
Push Notifications! As simplistic as it may sound, practicing a good push notification strategy can help you bring in twice the amount of traffic to your website. But that does not mean you just spray and pray that it would bring you results. We’ll make it easy for you. Here are some of the best practices for sending push notifications to your job seekers.
1. The Strategy
A good strategy can help you win wars. Strategy here is essentially, figuring out where and how push notifications fit into your overall marketing communication plan.
To come up with an effective strategy, you must first understand your audience: the number of people coming to your website, their age, interests, what they are looking for etc.
Why should you do this?
Once you have all these data, you can segment your members according to how you want to send notifications to them. For example, if you want to send notifications to a group of 25–30 year olds about a vacancy in an advertising agency, you can easily pull data about the age and interests of your members, thus making it much easier for you to segment your users.
Another key aspect of a push notification strategy is timing. In a job selection, time is of the essence. A difference of a minute can decide whether a person gets a job or not. In such a scenario, relying on emails, may not be the best of ideas. Emails tend to lie in an inbox, and go unnoticed due to the thousands of spam and important ones that a user receives everyday. Push notifications are more of an instant channel of communication. By sending out a notification, you can be sure that your user sees and clicks on it. This makes them, a must have communication tool.
2. The Opt-in Trigger
The opt-in message is the point where a website visitor can choose to allow or block push notifications. The more subscribers you have, the more number of people your notifications get delivered to. So, it is crucial to have a sound opt-in strategy.
It is not wise to trigger the opt-in as soon as someone lands on your page. Try to analyze the activity of users on your website and identify actions that provide some form of value. The idea here is to trigger the opt-in during or after these actions. In the case of job portals, you could trigger the opt-in when a candidate has successfully filled out an application form or when a candidate has received a reply in their inbox. These places are where the visitors have received some form of benefit.
3. First impressions are always the best impressions
It is always nice to let your subscribers know that you are glad to have them on board. Let them know that you care about them by sending out a welcome message as soon as they subscribe. A welcome gift like a promo code or a premium membership trial is always a good way to keep them on your subscriber base.
4. The Notification Message
This is the part that makes the user decide whether to click on your notifications or not. Push Notifications are brief. The trick here is to be as clear and action oriented as possible using the least number of characters. Convince the reader of the benefit they will gain by clicking the notification.
5. The Visual Approach
It is very hard to grab the attention of someone with just plain old text. A great alternative is to use images. You could use the good old thumbnail image to draw the attention of the reader from whatever he is doing, to your push notification. But what if you have something important to convey through an image? The thumbnail would not be enough. Fear not, we’ve got you covered. PushCrew offers a feature called Big Image. This lets you attach a bigger image to your push notification.
6. Let them know that you care!
One of the best things you could do to increase member engagement on your website is to let your customers know that you care about each and every one of them. So go that extra mile to customize and personalize your push notificationsaccording to their activities on your website.
7. Timing and frequency is key
This is a point that cannot be emphasized enough. The time of the day that you choose to send the notification and the number of notifications you send are a huge factor for getting more clicks. According to our study, 5–7 pm local time is the best time to send out a web push notification. As for the frequency, it was found that with each extra push notification sent on the same day, CTR declines steadily. The basic idea in terms of frequency is to not irritate your subscribers. So test different timings and numbers. But make sure you don’t send push notifications about vacancies in the middle of the night.
8. Call to Action Buttons
If you are on a PushCrew Business or Enterprise Plan, you might have noticed a new option that enables you to add CTA buttons to your Chrome push notifications.
So when you are sending out a push notification about a recruiter looking for candidates, you could add a button that takes the user to the recruiter’s website and another button that takes the user directly to the application form.
Following everything exactly as I’ve just written is not going to bring you more results. No my friend, life is not that easy. You have to test it out, find out what works for you and your job portal. Make sure you understand your audience and keep in mind these guidelines. And before you know it, you’ll be the best there is!
Originally published on The Marketer’s Last Mile — the PushCrew Blog.
