Are you curious about how to engage your users directly through your website in real time, even when they’re not actively browsing it? That’s the power of web push notifications, a game-changing communication tool for interacting your users online. First introduced by Google in 2013, web push notifications have quickly become a popular method to drive user engagement, despite their relative newness.
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In this definitive guide, we’ll unpack the secrets of web push notifications. You’ll discover their benefits, functionalities, and best practices to help you leverage this technology to its fullest potential.
Ready to see how web push notifications can transform the way you communicate with your audience? Let’s get started.
What are web push notifications?
As a type of push notification, web push notifications, aka website notifications or browser notifications, are messages that websites (including web apps) can directly send to users through their web browsers, even when the website isn't open. They allow websites to engage users with timely, relevant content and prompts in real time. For example, e-commerce sites can provide users with cart abandonment reminders, social networks can notify users about new messages, and news sites can alert users to breaking stories.
Unlike app push notifications, another type of push notification that requires users to install an app, web push notifications work across browsers and platforms. These notifications can appear on a user’s desktop, smartphone, or tablet, providing a native-app-like push experience conveniently with browsers.
How do web push notifications work?
Web push notifications use push technology, aka server push, where communication starts from a web server (your side) rather than a client (the user side). The components involved in sending website notifications are: the user, the user’s browser, the web server, and a third-party web push service tool.
User:
The user must first grant permission for your website to push notifications. This opt-in is the key.
Browser:
The user’s browser acts as the gatekeeper to require the user's permission before allowing your websites to send notifications through it. Popular browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge support web push.
Web Server:
This is your backend server that composes and sends the push messages. When you want to send a notification, your web server transmits it to the web push service.
Web Push Service:
A third-party web push service provider handles the delivery of notifications from your web server to the user’s browser. The push service maintains constant connections with browsers.
Here’s the journey of a typical web push notification:
The user visits your website and opts in to allow notifications.
The user’s browser registers the permission and gets a unique push subscription from the web push service.
When you have something to deliver to your users, your web server sends a message request to the web push service.
The web push service identifies the target browser and sends the notification.
The user’s browser displays the message in real-time without needing the user to open your website.
So in summary, web push notifications use an indirect system to deliver timely content to users even when they aren’t actively browsing your website. The users can receive your messages and respond promptly when needed, ensuring your communication is always within reach.
What are the types of web push notifications?
You can leverage web push notifications to deliver different types of messages to your users for different purposes. Here’re the common types of web push notifications:
What benefits do web push notifications offer to you?
Exploring the variety of web push notifications, let’s examine their advantages for both your business and your customers.
Instantly interact with your users
You can reach users via web push notifications in real time, no matter if they are actively browsing your website. This gives you another touchpoint to engage users and keep your brand top of mind.
Re-engage inactive users
Web push notifications are a great way to re-engage users who have gone inactive. Divide your subscriber by activity level, then target less active users with notifications aimed at bringing them back. This helps recapture lost opportunities.
Enhance user experience
Web push notifications can greatly enhance the user experience when used thoughtfully. Welcome messages, booking confirmations, and meeting reminders all make interactions more seamless. Users appreciate these notifications that simplify tasks or save time.
Improve conversion rates
Well-timed, relevant notifications can motivate users to take actions like making a purchase or returning to an abandoned cart. SaaS web apps can also drive conversions with upgrade prompts, renewal reminders, etc.
Save money and gain a high return on your investment
Web push notifications allow you to reach users easily without breaking the bank. All you need to pay for is a budget-friendly service tool. Additionally, sending web notifications is quite scalable, adapting to your needs as they grow. They ensure that every marketing effort counts, offering a high return on your marketing investment.
Gain insights into user preferences to refine your strategies
The analytics, a common feature provided by the web push service, offer you crucial insights to grasp users’ behaviors and preferences. You can track opens, clicks, conversions and more. This enables you optimize future campaigns for improved performance and engagement, sending messages that truly resonate with your users.
How do you send a web push notification?
Here comes the crucial part you’re most interested in—how to send a web push notification. Simply follow these key steps:
1. Choose a web push service provider
You’ll need to choose a web push service provider to push notifications between your website and the users. Evaluate different providers based on key factors like delivery channels, successful rates, features, pricing, and geographic coverage. If you’re swamped and need a shortcut to a trustworthy web push service tool, our advice is EngageLab Web Push. You can move on to the next part to explore its popular features and see why it’s worth trying.
2. Obtain permission from your users
You need users’ acceptance to receive notifications from your website. This is a native request sent by the browser.
3. Categorize your users
Divide the subscribed users into different groups based on their behaviors, preferences, location or other relevant factors, so that you can push customized messages for different users.
4. Create engaging notifications
Create customized notifications that resonate with users of different groups. Personalized notifications can increase open and click-through rates.
5. Schedule and send notifications to users
Send your notifications instantly or set triggers to schedule for a future time.
6. Refine your strategies based on analytics
Access the statistics shown on the service platform. You can focus on open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. These insights will help you improve notification content and pinpoint the optimal time to push notifications.
Why is EngageLab Web Push worth trying out?
EngageLab Web Push is not only easy to use but also includes great features such as powerful segmentation, multi-channel delivery, diverse notification bar styles, and deep analytics.
Follow along to explore its key features, and you’ll soon discover why it deserves a try.
a. Seamlessly integrate with your website
It’s straightforward to integrate your website with EngageLab Web Push—just a quick domain configuration and SDK integration. The whole process will be completed in just three minutes.
b. Boost user acceptance rate via the customized authorization notification
Through EngageLab Web Push, you can send your customized notification request to users with personalized content at a scheduled time. This helps motivate users to accept receiving your website notifications.
If the user gives permission to receive notifications on your customized request, the native browser request will then appear. If the user refuses on your customized request, the native browser request will not appear. When the user visits your website the next time, you can still send your customized request to them. Compared to the native browser request notification, the custom EngageLab authorization notification helps improve the user acceptance rate to 70%.
c. Improve your user reach with higher delivery rates
EngageLab Web Push offers stable and secure messaging through high-concurrency and a multi-point backup system. It manages to extend user reach by adapting to all mainstream browsers, like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Opera.
d. Reach out to the right audience at the perfect time
EngageLab Web Push helps you pinpoint the ideal audience based on user aliases, tags, devices, and location, ensuring your messages reach the right audience. It can also guide you in determining optimal times for sending website notifications, helping you identify when your users are most likely to engage.
e. Offer comprehensive statistics
EngageLab provides complete data analysis across your message lifecycle:
✓ message funnel analysis
✓ loss analysis for platforms and channels
✓ statistics on new users, active users, delivery rates, notification acceptance, etc.
✓ other after-effect analysis
It’s time to unlock the unparalleled user engagement strategies of EngageLab Web Push yourself. Take the first step today with the FREE version. You’ll see how it can boost user engagement.
How do you create effective website notifications?
The better your notifications are, the more user engagement you will have. Here’re some best practices for web push notifications to help you create effective messages.
💡 Tailor notifications for different users
Send tailored notifications for users of different groups. Tailored notifications have higher open and click-through rates. The users will more likely respond to messages that resonate with them.
💡 Make your notifications actionable
Include a strong call-to-action (CTA) that encourages a specific behavior. For example, “30% off sale on all subscriptions today - Shop now”. Make sure the CTA button or link works properly.
💡 Use images and buttons
Images can drive higher engagement as they convey more information visually. Action buttons can also boost clicks.
💡 Choose push frequency carefully
To avoid having it backfire, don’t deliver too many notifications to your users. Send notifications only if you have valuable content to share with your users. You can start with one or two notification per week and then adjust based on performance.
💡 Test and optimize your notifications
Continuously take A/B tests on your notification content, timing, frequency, and targeting. Analyze performance data and double down on what works. Refine and optimize your notifications over time.
What is the future of web push notifications?
As technologies evolve rapidly in today’s digital world, you may wonder about the future of web push notifications before getting onboard. Let's now examine what lies ahead for this technology and determine whether it merits your investment.
Web push notifications have seen rapid growth and adoption over the past few years, and that momentum is expected to continue steadily. More websites will integrate web push as it proves effective at driving engagement.
With growing adoption, the major browsers will continue to improve web push capabilities and convenience. More operating systems may directly integrate web notifications. Consequently, the reliability and performance of web notifications improve, which in turn, encourages more businesses to adopt this tool.
Additionally, as machine learning improves, web push may become more predictive by recognizing patterns and anticipating user needs before they search. Personalization and segmentation will allow for more tailored, relevant notifications aligned to users interests and habits. This likely drives web push to evolve into a popular, full-fledged conversational platform through two-way messaging between users and brands.
We hope this guide has demystified web push notifications and shown you how to harness their potential effectively. We encourage you to start using the technology today. The more you practice, the more proficient you are. Get started and transform your push notifications with EngageLab Web Push.
Push notifications are clickable pop-up messages that appear on your users’ browsers irrespective of the device they’re using or the browser they’re on. They serve as a quick communication channel enabling companies to convey messages, offers, or other information to their customers. Subscribers can be anywhere on the browser and still receive these messages as long as they’re online or have their browsers running on their devices.
Introduced in 2009, this digital marketing channel is newer than most existing ones. Even though it has gained significant momentum over the past few years, there is still a wide gap between the strategic implementation of this newer method and others. Marketers are still discovering use cases for push notifications, but they’ve observed that push notifications do increase repeat visits, user retention, and re-engagement. This guide will tell you all that you need to know about push notifications.
Push notifications are made up of several elements. They typically consist of a title, a message, an image, and a URL. Choose an image that adds context, and emojis that communicate your message in fewer words. Below is a pictorial representation of what push notifications comprise:
Write a crisp title and copy within the recommended character limit, add images or emojis to convey more with fewer words, provide the correct URL and CTA, and hit send. Your first push notification will be on its way to your subscribers.
Here’s an example of what a push notification looks like.
Push notifications are simple and attractive messages that are easy to respond to. This makes them an effective medium for companies to keep their audience engaged, even when they’re not on their site.
The opt-in message is the first notification you ever send to your potential subscribers. It determines the conversion of a visitor to a subscriber. Hence, it’s essential to communicate what value your push notifications offer.
Once you set up push notifications on your website, your visitors will begin seeing a small opt-in box on their browsers. This box asks them if they want to receive notifications from your website. As soon as they give their permission, they’re added as subscribers to your subscriber base, and you can start sending notifications to engage and target them to return to your website for more offers and actions.
Customize the opt-in message to add more context to your communication.
Ideally, there are four types of push notifications – Web push notifications, Desktop push notifications, Mobile app push notifications, and push notifications for wearables Let’s learn about them in some detail:
Web push notifications are communication messages sent to a user through desktop web or mobile web. These alert messages simply slide in at the top or bottom right-hand side of the desktop screen, depending upon the operating system being used by a user. Meanwhile, they appear on a mobile device that’s quite identical to how push notifications are delivered from an app. Web push notifications are usually delivered on a user’s desktop or mobile screen anytime they’re active on their browser, irrespective of whether or not they’re on your website.
These notifications are mainly used by marketers to increase website engagement and encourage visitors to keep coming back to their website, thereby increasing conversions. It’s fairly easy to build web push notifications for your website, and this can be done even by those with little or no technical background. This is what makes web push notifications such a handy tool for marketers.
Unlike web push notifications, desktop push notifications appear only on your users’ desktops. These notifications are driven mainly by the products that you have installed on your desktop, with the aim of driving customer engagement. Desktop push notifications are fairly difficult to build as compared to web push notifications and require a developer’s help as well.
Image Source: Gadgets360Similar to desktop push notifications, mobile app push notifications are also triggered by an existing/downloaded application on your device. When a user opens the app, unique identifiers are registered for both the app and the device with the OS push notification service. These IDs are also shared with the app publishers, who then manually craft and send push notifications with the aim to increase customer engagement.
Push notification alerts can be displayed in three locations on your phone—lock screen, banner, and notification center, when the app user opts-in for messages. While Android has a default setting of opt-in and manual opt-out users, iOS does not allow apps to send notifications to users until they agree to receive messages. Mobile app push notifications, like desktop push notifications, are fairly difficult to create when compared to web push notifications and require developer help to be built.
Push notifications can now be sent on wearable devices as well. If you’ve noticed, people wearing Smart Watches are able to receive notifications on their wearables. These devices are ideally synchronized with their smartphones allowing the wearables to display notifications directly from their mobile apps. Both mobile and wearables give you the leverage to adjust notification settings. You can opt-in to receive notifications from some apps while disabling the feature for the rest.
Since the screen size of wearables is smaller than smartphones, push notifications look quite different on the former than the latter. Notifications on wearables are shorter and more crispier than mobile notifications.
Everyone loves hand-crafted notes made especially for them. Push notifications are the closest any tech can come to that. Customers are more likely to click on messages that pique their interest and emotions. This means that there are certain kinds of push notifications that customers like receiving. These notifications keep your users interested, entertained, or even feel loved:
Use rich push notifications and add images, emojis and up to 2 CTAs in your notification.
At times, a customer adds something to their cart and leaves it there for varied reasons like unexpected shipping fees, long delivery time, or payment failures. Retarget lost customers that failed to complete their purchases through cart abandonment notifications through the following ways:
Want to nudge users to purchase product/s they left in their cart? Try sending them something like, “You left a few items you love. We are holding on to them, but not for long!” Action-based push notifications give users an extra push and create a sense of urgency to complete the desired action.
Want to let your users know about trending news on travel? Then send them this travel news alert! Similarly, you can send messages on the latest weather report, stock update, brand level changes, updates about their field of interest, and much more. If this type fits your business goals, start pushing!
Enhance your buyer’s journey through triggered push notification campaigns. With triggered campaigns, you can use push notifications as a proactive medium to follow your buyer’s journey. It enables you to push a series of automated messages based on predefined rules and real-time data collected after subscribers enter the campaign funnel.
Are you interested in learning more about Voice Batch Notification Service? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!
Create different types of campaigns based on your push notification marketing strategy – open-ended campaigns or closed campaigns. An open-ended campaign enables you to send a series of notifications without an exit trigger. Once the subscriber receives all the notifications in the series you’ve planned, the campaign ends. A closed campaign is where you lay out a predefined goal, and once your subscriber completes the action, they exit the campaign. They no longer receive the remaining notifications in the series.
Track each campaign with in-depth reporting: Keep a tab on the number of subscribers converted and the conversion rate. Deep-dive into each notification delivered, clicks they received, and their click rate.
Is a user profile incomplete on your job hunt portal? Did a user add products to your store’s cart and leave your site without making a purchase? Send them a reminder so that you as well as they do not miss out on exciting opportunities. This delights users, and they would want to remain loyal. This type of push notification is perfect for fitness enthusiasts, job portals, educational portals, nutrition sites, eCommerce stores, and many more.
These types of notifications are great for date match alerts, stores nearby, and lots more. For example, if you want to send your users deals on fine dining restaurants in their current location, then send them updates based on their preferences in their vicinity. Another good example where interest-based geological notifications play a critical role is dating apps like Tinder and Bumble.
Are your users mostly engaged on their mobile phones? Then send them mobile-friendly push notifications. Mobile-friendly push notifications allow you to send push messages right to the users’ mobile browsers without having to invest in building an app!
Send time-bound push notifications to create a sense of urgency among users. You can send them notifications about a limited-period offer, a soon approaching expiry date, limited-period flash sales, and so on. Your users will be eager to grab the opportunity and utilize the offer.
For time-bound notifications, you have to set a notification expiry once the offer period lapses so that users who come online after its expiry do not click through to find an expired deal.
Transactional notifications are a way to update your users about the latest status of their transactions. These could be subscription statuses, details of their order or product shipments, payments made, and so on.
Such messages help report the necessary and relevant information to specific users and increase the chances of planning a retargeting campaign. Transactional push notifications serve as the best examples of tailored and personalized communications with your target users.
Conservative estimates have pegged the click rate from push notifications at 4-8X times that of email. It is a strictly permission-based medium. Subscribers will receive notifications if and only if they have opted-in. These characteristics make push notifications an extremely powerful communication channel for marketing:
Conservative estimates have pegged the click rate from push notifications at 4-8X times that of email. It is a strictly permission-based medium. Subscribers will receive notifications if and only if they have opted-in. These characteristics make push notifications an extremely powerful communication channel for marketing:
With push notifications, you can increase your brand’s visibility among its audience by adding subscribers with a single click to ‘allow’. Give users the choice to access or deny the permission for your website to send them notifications and ensure the opt-in message conveys what type of messages they should expect. If users click on the message without knowing its end purpose, most of them will opt-out without adding much value to your entire push notification exercise.
Many businesses suffer from low lead count as well as low lead quality because visitors are often reluctant to provide personal information or one or some of the form fields make them think twice before filling the lead generation form. With push notifications, you don’t have to rely on capturing lead information as you can add subscribers with single-click permission and engage them without asking for any personal data.
Additionally, push notifications require opt-in permission, which means whenever a message is delivered, it is guaranteed to reach a real subscriber’s active browser. And since browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox are used by a majority of internet users, rest assured that you will reach a wide base of interested audiences as well.
You’ve managed to get customers to your website for the first time, but how do you retain them? Compelling messages can grab your audience’s interest and engage them right away. Send proactive clickable messages directing them back to your website from anywhere on their browsers. This helps you increase return visitors through targeted notifications and personalized messages. You can keep them hooked with different promotional offers, articles, and much more to increase visitor interaction with your website. Push notification gets delivered right on the users’ browser, and enjoys a 4x CTR than emails.
If you’re a marketer, you realize the time and effort it takes to craft a newsletter or an email. It isn’t easy to write compelling copy, articles, offers, and illustrations on the go, but this isn’t the case with push messages as these are concise and less time-consuming to compose. Mind you; they still need to be on point with a title that acts as a hook, and a resonating message.
Eliminating dependence on mobile apps: Stay connected to your mobile audience without investing in building a mobile app. They receive notifications, just like in-app, right on their Android device. They just need to have a mobile device that supports either Chrome, Firefox, or Opera browser.
As a web marketer, you should know where to invest your resources while designing your communication strategy. Web push notifications can save you money as compared to mobile app push notifications, where designing is an expensive process. Therefore, it’s imperative to know the measure of your ROI from different channels to invest wisely.
Web push ROI is the measure of performance of an investment made in web push notifications to retarget site visitors. You can calculate the ROI of your Web Push Notification investment based on the below-mentioned metrics:
At the core of push notifications services like Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) and Apple’s Push Notification Service enable notifications on Safari and Windows Notification Service for Microsoft Edge.
To further illustrate how these services work, let’s take the example of FCM. It’s a messaging solution that makes it possible for both mobile applications and websites to send notifications to subscribers. The application servers send the content of the notification along with subscriber information to FCM. FCM verifies the information and then sends the notification to the end-users’ devices. Upon receiving the notification, the devices send Click and Delivery data back to the application. This data helps websites and apps track the performance of these notifications.
Although FCM falls under Google’s umbrella, it also works with other browsers that support Push API like Mozilla Firefox and Opera. This enables the sending of push notifications to a web app via a push service. It also helps web applications receive notifications sent by a server.
Image Source: FirebaseAs of now, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari support push notification services. Please note that supported browsers widely vary by vendor. Further, the appearance of notifications also varies from one browser and operating system to another. Some notifications make use of traditional notification centers, whereas many others don’t. This distinction also varies from one browser and operating system to another.
Image Source: PushAlertAlthough all major browsers support push notifications today, there are still a couple of things that you must know:
After setting up your push notification system, you’d want to know if your push notification campaign is working or not. For this, you need to track more than just one metric to assess its impact across the funnel.
Listed below are some of the metrics that you cannot, and should not ignore when analyzing your campaign’s performance:
The first step to ensuring the success of your push notification metric is the opt-in process. If your target audience does not opt-in to your push notifications, you will fail to build a healthy subscriber base. Track your opt-in rate to see how your audience is responding to it, and configure your push opt-in message in such a way that it resonates with your users. Give them a sneak peek into what benefits they will reap by opting-in to your push messages.
Identify if your audience accesses your notifications either on their desktops or on their mobile devices. Not just that, have an informed understanding of the browsers that work best for your push notification campaigns.
A pie-chart illustrating percentage of users receiving notifications on desktop and mobile platforms.Your goal isn’t simply to send push notifications but to ensure that it gets delivered to a larger subscriber base. Analyze the performance of your latest notification by tracking the delivery rate and click rate of your notifications. These stats tell you how many subscribers opened the notification from the number of successfully delivered campaigns and is also a good metric to gauge the content quality of the notifications. You’ll see an increase in the number of clicks when you send notifications that interest specific user segments. It also denotes how many users have opened your messages and reached the landing page.
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who engaged with your website and performed the desired action. It can be anything from making a purchase or referring a friend to signing up or reading a blog post. Your conversion rate gives you a clearly painted picture of how your push notification campaigns are performing.
When tracking the conversion rate, it is important to figure out which source is bringing the most traffic to your website, and which segment of traffic is converting the most. This can be done by setting certain UTM parameters to your push notification campaigns.
This will enable you to identify sources that are performing well, those that are performing below par, and figure out ways to improve each of their performance with in-depth analysis.
This science of optimizing conversion rate is known as conversion rate optimization(CRO).
Yes, push notification is newer than most existing channels of digital marketing. Yes, it has gained significant momentum over the last few years. And yes, it enjoys 4X the CTR of emails. But this doesn’t mean that by simply leveraging push notifications, you can shoot up your core business metrics. For push notifications to work, the entire journey starting from crafting the messages to sending them should be carefully planned and embarked on. Let’s look at some of the most common elements that make your push notification strategy a good one:
Make sure you write the content according to your target audience. Know what questions your ideal audience is asking, and put out content that answers them. You can also use visuals to make your content more comprehensible. Any amount of advertising won’t help much if the content is not good itself. So make sure you write persuasive copies for your push notifications to get noticed, keeping the following points in mind:
If you have a good number of email subscribers, you can even embed a link of your triggered webpage in your email newsletters and redirect your email subscribers to a page where they can opt-in to receive push notifications.
Represent your brand on multiple social media platforms, and build an engaged audience. You can then provide a link to your page with the opt-in trigger in your profile’s bio, as well as run other marketing campaigns and advertisements. You can also add a statement mentioning your products or services’ performance and satisfaction level attained by existing users.
You can send a notification that is informative, time-bound, or simply a reminder. With A/B testing, find out which type of push notifications engage your target audiences more, and best suit your business and user needs. This is important because you should send messages that your specific users prefer. Also, consider the type of products or services you have to offer. Make sure your message depicts the right emotion(s). Spread out your notifications according to the nature of your content.
It has been found that common messages broadcasted to all the subscribers result in lower engagement. Adding a personal touch to your marketing plan always takes you the extra mile. Identify the parameters that would help you segment customers and then send specific pushes to the right segment, thereby increasing engagement.
Push notifications are a strictly permission-based medium, and the opt-in acts as the first touchpoint with a new visitor. Similarly, these notifications ensure that it isn’t difficult to opt-out either. This way, the subscriber feels empowered to have the choice of receiving or avoiding messages, and you get to target only the interested prospects.
Experiment with the timing of your opt-in message – it could be after 10 seconds of engaging with your website, or it could be immediately upon landing on your webpage. Integrate with an A/B testing tool to test and identify what kind of push notification works best with your target audience.
The opt-in message is the most important of all the notifications you will ever send. It determines the conversion of a first-time visitor to a subscriber. Hence, it’s important to communicate what value your push notifications offer.
Once you set up push notifications on your website, your visitors will begin seeing a small opt-in box on their browsers. This box will ask them if they want to receive notifications from your website. Once they give their permission, they are added as subscribers, and you can begin sending them notifications to engage and target them to return to your landing page.
Customize the opt-in message to add more context to the messages. Based on what your business is and who your target audience is, time your opt-in message. Decide if you want the permission message to appear when visitors land on your website or when they have engaged with the website for a certain time. Also, state explicitly that it is easy to opt-out as well. This helps in building their trust in your brand. Learn how to create your push notification opt-in strategy.
Push notifications are an exceptionally handy tool to engage your audience in real-time, and in a very personalized manner. A robust push notification campaign helps increase repeat visits and direct traffic to best-performing content. Sounds exciting, right? It surely is!
However, many websites are not able to reap all the potential benefits of push notifications due to certain easily fixable mistakes. Here’s a list of few mistakes you should avoid while setting up push notifications for your campaign:
The most common mistake, and the most damaging one from a long-term point of view, that you can make while sending push notifications is inundating your subscribers with notifications. This might look beneficial in the short-term, where you see an overall increase in the numbers. But, using push notifications like this will prompt more and more subscribers to opt-out.
Push notifications are a great way to talk to your audience directly and in real-time. The downside of this is that too many direct conversations with subscribers may lead to “notification overkill” and may result in subscribers either tuning out mentally or opting-out altogether.
The flip-side to this is sending too few notifications. This can result in subscribers failing to engage with your brand properly or may have trouble remembering why they subscribed to your notifications. As a business, you need to understand your audience, their lifestyles, and their needs to figure out the frequency of your push notifications.
Note, push notification frequency varies from case-to-case, which is why you need to be more selective with what messages you are sending via push notifications.
If you do not plan and automate your push notifications, chances are that your subscribers will receive them at odd hours, and this may cause friction between your users and your campaign.
Schedule your notifications for a certain date and time, or based on the time-zone of your audience segment. Plan it in a manner that users don’t receive them at odd hours or disrupt their productivity. Test out the best time of the day to achieve maximum engagement. Your strategy differs based on your business offers. Poorly timed push notifications are a sure-fire way to exasperate your subscribers, leading to fewer clicks and a higher opt-out rate.
A well-timed push can lead to a user’s delight. Imagine getting a notification that reads “10 Amazingly Inspirational Songs To Start Your Day” as you are preparing to go out for a run at 7 AM. A small change in the schedule can significantly impact your overall push notification strategy.
Scheduled notifications are time-savers for sure, and have a plethora of benefits too:
Familiarize new subscribers and customers with your website with your welcome drip push notifications. Onboard them with a series of notifications sent at different time intervals to let them explore different sections of your website. Create an onboarding funnel to keep them engaged, setting up a welcome journey that works as part of your goal.
Every person is different. Seeing your audience and subscribers as a homogeneous mass is a classic mistake that most marketers have been guilty of committing at one time or another. However, users expect and demand high levels of personalization. Not catering to users’ preferences will only lead to notification blindness.
Segment your audience based on different interests and actions, and also create a target audience persona to segment them accordingly. Send only relevant messages to your subscribers based on their behavior or attributes. Offer them value-based messaging to entice them into clicking and engaging with your website. If some segments of subscribers do not find your messaging appealing enough, this will affect your entire roadmap of using push notifications. Therefore, it is absolutely important that you segment your audience and deliver personalized notifications for each segment.
If you’re only tracking click rates, you’re missing out on the actual conversions and value created by your push notification campaigns. As marketers, we tend to focus too strongly on immediate numbers. However, we need to be wary of vanity metrics that do not help us in making business decisions.
Decide on the website actions that you consider most important – purchases, free trials, form fills, ad clicks, and so on. Carefully sift through the data in Google Analytics or other analytics tools to find out how many of your website visitors, arriving via push notifications, are actually performing those actions. Evaluating your campaigns like this is the only way you can truly determine whether push messaging is working for you or not.
If you have a mobile app, complement your mobile push notifications with website or browser push notifications. If you don’t have an app, don’t invest in building an app just to send push notifications. Rather, use your visitors’ browser to send notifications.
In fact, some reports say for small and medium-sized businesses, mobile websites reach more people than apps do.
Do’s of push notification
Don’ts of push notification
Schedule notifications according to time zone based on geography and industry
Test various types of notifications and message frequencies
Segment your audience and send personalized and relevant notifications
Track user website behavior and understand their interest in your site
Write crisp notifications that convey the meaning in as few words as possible
Use rich push notifications to add more context and improve communication
Spam your subscribers with too many notifications
Bombard them with messages at odd hours
Indulge in click-baiting
Flood subscribers with generic messages that have nothing to offer
Repeat send the messages to the same audience
Send notifications without defining the end goal or CTA
Segmenting your audience plays a significant role in your marketing strategy. Categorize your subscribers and send relevant content based on user actions or attributes. To reap the maximum benefit out of your push notification campaign, choose a tool that allows you to segment based on:
The easiest way to find out your user’s intent is through their site behavior. Categorize them based on various actions performed during a page visit, to deliver personalized messages. Segment them based on the page URL they visit, the referring URL, search keywords, referral types, query parameters, and much more.
Curious to know how your subscribers are interacting with your landing pages? Just segment them based on the clicked element. This helps in categorizing them based on different click events, especially for instances like cart abandonment or engagement with specific CTA buttons.
Segment your subscribers based on different user properties. Target them based on their Operating System, Platform, Browser, or User-Agent. This makes it easier to identify the correct fit for your business goals.
Planning a special campaign for specific geo-location? Make your task easier by segmenting your audience based on specific countries, and even further by region. It’s easy to include or exclude any country or region, based on your business requirements. Start creating segments and trigger notifications according to your business time-zone and region, just the way you desire.
Good push notification tools give you the option of creating your own customized segmentation. If you are a developer, you can segment your subscribers based on the JS/ API variables in your code. Not just that, you can also manage it based on the Cookie key and value pair stored by your website on the user’s browser.
Push Notifications are mainly used for re-engagement, retention, and promotions. This makes them the most preferred marketing automation channel for media publishers, bloggers, and eCommerce industries. They aren’t, however, restricted only to these domains, and have been found to yield positive results across many different industries. It is possible to see how various industries have managed to gain a foothold using push marketing over time.
For any given industry, there is an uncomplicated way to plan successful push notification campaigns:
More than 22% of push notification users are in the eCommerce industry. Notifications are commonly used to promote sales and time-sensitive deals, announce new products, and deliver personalized promotions. They are also used to remind the user about an abandoned cart or to upsell or cross-sell in various situations.
Buy Whole Foods Online, a leading seller of whole foods, health foods, and superfoods in the UK and the rest of Europe decided to give push notifications a try to bring customers back to the website and to guide them to correct product pages. This is their most popular push notification:
This particular notification recorded a click rate of 15.2%, and 71 out of the 97 people who landed on the product page after clicking on the push notification actually converted and made a purchase. This tiny box of push notification helped Buy Whole Foods Online clock a 3-digit revenue.
A huge proportion of the world’s population uses their computers, mobile phones, and tablets to play games on a regular basis. So, how can you tap into this audience to increase traffic on your gaming website? A few years back, an email would have been the answer, but not anymore. Now, we have a much better alternative – Push Notifications.
So you have this cool new online gaming community page that you know will be a game-changer. But, no matter how many promo offers and gift packs you send, you are not getting enough traffic. The prognosis could be devastating if not taken seriously, and your website could slowly fade into oblivion. To prevent such blows, you need to keep your readers and customers engaged, and make them return to your website.
Ubisoft, a renowned name in interactive entertainment and services with a grand portfolio of world-renowned brands in gaming, turned to push notifications for help with their digital marketing strategy. The team at Ubisoft wanted to find smarter ways to give quicker updates about various games to its subscribers. This was because visitors primarily came to their website to find more information on particular games that the company offered. After much research, the team decided to go ahead with push notifications. This is what Ubisoft’s push notification opt-in looked like:
After using push notifications, Ubisoft’s website registered an average click rate of 7%. The team then went on to use push notifications for game announcements and witnessed an astonishing click rate of 31%.
Education and training websites can use push notifications to connect with their subscribers online, send updates to existing students in real-time, or you can nudge potential users to learn and engage.
With push notifications, online learning website can:
Encourage a revisit to your page with mock tests or interesting facts
Re-engage with online learners by giving them valuable information and course updates
You can enhance their experience by delivering information like key strategies, tips, interviews, etc.
Once someone has completed a course, they won’t visit again. You could promote other courses to get them back
Within the character limit, you need to learn how to craft a persuasive push notification. In doing this, personalization is key. Yes, and you could also re-engage your users by asking questions.
MyEnglishTeacher.eu, a website that offers one-to-one English lessons through various mediums like skype and live chat rooms, and resources like quizzes and videos to their students, got started with push notifications with the single aim to reduce the time spent on writing and designing marketing communications.
MyEnglishTeacher.eu aims to help people from all over the world gain fluency in English. Here, take a look at what they did to win 160 subscribers in one day:
The subscriber list for your makeup and beauty website is growing, and you are publishing new content often or adding new products and have discounts for some. You are also sending email newsletters about the same. But, think about how many of them open their inboxes and read those posts, among all the other emails lying unread in their inboxes. It is a daunting task. This is why push notifications, as a channel of communication, effectively help you bring your subscribers to visit your site instantly.
Inform your audience about new products or other such information using push notifications.
Another way Cosmetics websites can use push notifications to increase engagement and grab users’ attention is by welcoming the subscribers with a welcome notification that warms up their hearts and makes them proud for choosing to go for products that are cruelty-free. Use a personal tone that will help you build a good rapport with your new subscribers.
The travel and hospitality industry has seen a recent boom in the usage of notifications, both mobile and web – whether they be reminders to check-in or announcements about scheduling changes, push notifications allow businesses to keep customers updated with timely, crucial information. Triggered campaigns can be set up to help customers by reminding them about deals and booking offers, or to upsell or cross-sell based on their recent transactions.
LA Tourism, the official tourism marketing organization promoting Los Angeles as the premier destination for meetings, leisure travel, and conventions, started using push notifications to grow their website traffic, and increase customer engagement and retention. By segmenting the audience, LA Tourism managed to increase click-rate by 8% and reduced the bounce rate by 43%.
In another instance, if a user is looking for cheap flights to Prague on your website, send them a personalized push message about the top 10 backpackers hostel in the city. It’s a way of telling them that you foresee and understand their needs.
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 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.
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.
Make sure you segment your users and send notifications that entice them to perform the desired action. For instance, when you are sending out a push notification about a recruiter looking for candidates, you could add a button that takes users to the recruiter’s website and another button that takes them directly to the application form.
You can also go that extra mile to customize and personalize your push notifications according to your users’ browsing activities:
The global fitness and health club industry generates more than 80 billion U.S. dollars in revenue per year. From adopting healthy lifestyles, which include eating healthy to working out, people are ready to shell out more money to look after themselves and their loved ones.
If you have a website related to health and fitness with a growing subscriber base, you’re also aware of the rising competition, trying to lure your subscriber base to their product or service.
The best way to cushion this blow is by keeping your subscribers engaged with your website. But the stage of technological progress that we are at, people neither have the time nor the intention to read promotional emails. This is where web push notifications are a gem – as an effective channel of communication. Have a new post on swimming styles for achieving toned arms? Then send your subscribers a push notification like the one shown below:
Image Source: Rebecca LouiseCreate a sense of excitement among your users by sending welcome push notifications with exciting offers. Here’s an example for your reference:
Push notifications send direct messages to your visitor’s browser, widen your online reach without straining to capture details through lead forms, and let you connect with your subscribers easily through a single click opt-in. We hope that the stats above and this guide help you create an effective push notification strategy, build apt messages, and choose the right kind of push notification tool for your business.
If you find this guide useful, share the word with your friends and colleagues and bring them a step closer to achieving their business goals by using push notifications.
Push notifications are used for multiple reasons. They are commonly used for increasing return traffic, capturing good quality leads, and improving outreach campaigns.
Are push notifications effective?Yes! Push Notifications can be a very effective channel of communication. Push Notifications get delivered directly on the users’ browser. If done right, they can have a CTR as high as 4X than emails.
What does it mean to enable push notifications?Enabling Push Notifications means that customers who have opted-in to become part of campaigns, and business owners would be able to reach out to these customers through push notifications.
What is the difference between push and text notification?Push Notifications is an example of sending content that appears in the form of a pop-up on your screen.
Text Notifications is an example of sending a piece of content that appears in messages inbox in mobile because of your connectivity with the cellular network provider.
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Shanaz KhanHailing from a humanities background, I stumbled into the world of products that scream innovation and the world of marketing. A Product Marketer on the weekdays, on weekends, I'm a curious kid who wants to learn and do everything from painting to carpentry and cooking. A travel enthusiast to the core, I often find myself escaping to the hills, looking for the quietest spots with breathtaking views.