It's one thing to develop an app with a great design and another for your customers to keep using it. Many businesses, including the bakery business, have low retention rates that affect their sales turnover and profit margins. One way to improve engagement with your audience and customers is through push notifications. 

Sending a single mobile push notification per day can boost your app's retention rate by 10x over a three-month period, but don't forget to create a strategy and personalize your messages! In the article below, we give you ten bakery-selling ideas and personalized push notifications that can help you boost your app's retention rate.

1.  Set a Plan for Push Notifications for the Customers’ Lifecycle

Your customers need to be guided by you. Before any customer of yours decides to download your app and opt-in for push notifications, you need to create a plan that will keep them loyal to your bakery app. A welcome value proposition is one way to whet the appetite of your bakery app users. 

You can obtain the individual preference of each user from the app sign-up stage to send them a personalized welcome message. Also, knowing personal preferences will help to pivot the direction of your push notifications to a particular prospect or customer. 

A typical push notification example for your first interaction with an app user could be something like this:

'Welcome to ABC bakery, and we are so excited to have you onboard this app. We noticed you love bagels and croissants. We would like to introduce you to our different recipes…'.

The information you receive during sign-up can help you have personalized engagements with your customers that can increase orders compared to when you send them generalized messages.

2. Sending Push Notifications as Per Their Interest

You should know now that most people rarely check push notifications that keep popping up on apps, except when those messages speak to them directly. You must maintain engagement with all your app users with interest-based push notifications. 

As mentioned above, knowing the confectionery preferences of your audience goes a long way in developing a push notification plan that will be tailor-made to their needs. But you also need to maintain your engagement with them by sending useful push notifications. Some examples of good push notifications to maintain engagement with your customers may include:

• A special discount on indicated confectioneries. For example, you can offer the customer on the previous example a 20% discount for their order of bagels and croissants. 
• Complimentary delivery or added time-based discounts on pickup deliveries.
• Send them free home recipes for bagels or croissants, downloadable in PDF format.
• A special time-sensitive coupon to order any confectionery on offer.

3. Understand the Psychology of Your App Users 

You can pick the brains of your bakery app users with clever push notifications. That is where referral requests, surveys, or ratings can be very handy. But note that before you start pushing out referral requests, you must have first built a rapport with your customer. Send push notifications encouraging your customers to share their ratings on social media. 

Surveys help you to get more information about your customer that you may not be able to obtain during their sign-up with your app. Find out about their experience using your app and their preferred features or improvements. A simple survey can change how you do business and boost app retention rates.

4. Creative Push Notification Ideas For Rewarding App Users

You have to reward your loyal customers; that is a given. But you can have better app retention rates while boosting your bakery online selling goals by offering rewards to your loyal app users. You can create a point-based loyalty program designed to motivate your bakery app users (new and old) to keep using the app by promising them freebies. You can send messages that inform them of their present status in the program. Push notification examples for your loyalty program may include:

• You are XYZ points away from achieving a new loyalty milestone
• New loyalty milestone achieved
• Loyalty points utilized
• Loyalty points expiration fast approaching
• Claim loyalty reward now
• Loyalty reward expiration is fast approaching

5. Push Notification Marketing Examples 

Lovely giveaways and contests further enhance your small business app promotion. You should send push notifications for different stages of the contest, such as;

• A contest and giveaway kickoff push notification: For example, 'Buy 2 Bagels to Win a Special Prize' - giveaway begins today.
• Contest entry validation push notification: For example, 'We can confirm that you have entered our contest - good luck in advance.'
• Push notification to share the contest with friends: For example, 'Tell a friend about our contest to earn loyalty points.’
• Push notification for contest and giveaway reminder: For example, 'Have you bought a bagel today? Buy now to win a special prize; the offer ends in 3-days’.
• Push notification to announce winners: Announcing winners is one way to motivate other app users to join a contest and giveaway promo. You can send a push notification to notify winners and their prizes.

Finally, you should also follow up on your contest and giveaway push notifications with an appreciation message to all participants. For example,' Thank you for participating; we always cherish your presence.’

6. Integrate Push Notifications In Your Marketing Campaigns on Special Occasions

Whether you run seasonal marketing campaigns on Halloween, Easter, Christmas, New year, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, or Valentine's day, you should always incorporate push notifications to promote the campaign. You should send messages sometime before the D-day with follow-up notifications made right up to the proposed day stating the offer and rewards. 

7. Customer Milestone Push Notifications

Getting as much information as possible about your bakery app users is important to send them push notifications on their birthdays and wedding anniversaries. By having a personal connection with your customers, you will be able to endear them to stay loyal to your business, and in effect, your bakery app retention rate will soar. 

8. Order Confirmation Push Notification 

Order confirmation and delivery tracking messages are perhaps the most underrated examples of good push notifications that can improve your bakery app retention rate. Every customer wants to feel important and likes to know that business owners take their orders seriously. 

To this end, you should always send push notifications to confirm an order and provide delivery tracking or pickup station information messages to all your customers. Also, a push notification message stating the order status will go a long way in boosting your app retention rate.

9. Push Notification Reminders

Many users are finicky, so you should always keep them up-to-date on every activity or event regarding your bakery. While not everyone likes receiving messages this way, there are a fair few who do. Your job is to identify those customers that want to be kept in the loop at all times and provide them with enough messages to keep them happy. You should send push notifications on app maintenance, customer support status, new bakery products, etc. 

10. Send Value-Added Push Notifications Only

To avoid overdoing your push notifications, you should send user-specific value-added messages. For example, some users look forward to daily, weekly, or monthly newsletters; you need to find out which users prefer newsletters and send these only to them rather than everyone. You can also introduce weekly product picks and offer a promo discount on the product throughout the week in question. Send push notifications to users you have identified as frequent buyers of such confectioneries to boost sales, margins, and of course, retention rates.

In Conclusion

The ten personalized push notifications and bakery selling ideas mentioned in this post are designed to help increase your app retention rate, sales turnover, and profit margins. The bakery business, like most businesses, is highly competitive, and by perfecting your push notifications, you may just give your business the edge over your competitors.

Enable push notifications on OrderEm to reach out to your customers and nudge them into taking action - to buy more from you!