What Are Web Push Notifications?
Web push notifications are rich, engaging messages that make your user want to engage with your brand when on your website or return to your website when a notification is sent to them. They intrigue your audience in meaningful, non-intrusive ways that provide real value, elevate loyalty, and boost retention.
The content of the web push notification messages needs to be actionable, and if you’re correctly segmenting and targeting the notification – it should be relevant to the user who receives it. Web push campaigns can be personalized to yield better results by using customer data and insights.
Web push notifications are a key marketing channel. Let’s dive deeper.
Guide to Advanced Customer Segmentation
Introduction to Web Push Notifications
We are all familiar with how easily we can be persuaded to switch off Mobile Push Notifications from the many apps we have on our smartphones. One notification too often or too irrelevant, and we go straight to the settings to sever ties with that brand and opt out for good. Maybe we don’t receive them quite often, but Web Push Notifications are no different when disengaging users. Making sure your brand uses messaging effectively is the key to driving more conversions on your website using your engagement strategy.
But before you even send your first push or think about how you want your message to look, you need to consider why you should be doing this. What is it about web push notifications that make them so crucial to your overall messaging strategy?
It’s not just one reason; it’s the perfect method of engaging with users when they’re not on your website or Progressive Web App (PWA) in ways that are far less intrusive and involve a far more straightforward opt-in process than adding a user to your email or SMS marketing lists.
Benefits of Web Push Notifications
Web Push Notifications have an average click-through rate (CTR) of around 15%, which is impressive if you realize that it’s almost unheard of for the CTR of email marketing campaigns to reach this figure. Web push opt-in is a straightforward process, too – just a few clicks, no download or email address required, and you’re set to send.
More benefits:
1. Always reach the right users in the right place at the right time
Location-based and geo-triggered campaigns are one of the most effective ways to get your audience’s attention with the perfect personalized message that adds real value and not irritation. Want to catch the attention of your website users with an offer that suits the upcoming warm weather in their location?
2. Encourage engagement
When it comes to marketing, there’s nothing quite like a healthy hyper-engaged user base to boost the bottom line. And with the right strategy, web push notifications can engage your audience in meaningful non-intrusive ways that provide real value, elevate loyalty, and boost retention.
3. Boost conversions
Effective, successful marketing messages are key to boosting these conversion figures that your boss is keen to see first thing every Monday morning. From triggering an instant purchase via a single click to completing abandoned purchases, boosting conversions nearly always depends on the ability to successfully engage your customers through push messages to take the desired action. Get it right, and both you and your customers can look forward to a long and happy relationship.
Achieving Opt-Ins
There have been recent changes to how browsers handle web notifications, with Safari and Firefox requiring a user to interact with a page before a prompt can be shown. The chrome update detects if users are likely to reject notifications based on previous choices and decides whether to show the user the prompt or not. Optimizing your opt-in process is now even more critical to gaining subscriptions.
Before you can send the user any push notification, permission must be granted by accepting notifications via an on-screen prompt through desktop, or PWA. The user must accept the hard prompt to allow you to send the notifications to their device. There’s no way around this; unfortunately, the hard prompts are browser-specific, uncustomizable, and (when on their own) very forgettable. They look the same from one website to another, which isn’t what we want. We want our prompts to get noticed.
So, what are ways to help you stand out at this first point of contact and obtain the sometimes-elusive opt-in?
Getting Users to Accept the Hard Prompt
1. Soft Prompt Before Hard Prompt
Create your own engaging prompt representing your brand with a message that pops up before the mandatory browser prompt. Use brand colors and fonts, and word it in a way that will offer the user value to click ‘Yes.’
This is the ‘soft prompt.’ While this won’t count as a subscription to web push notifications (we still need a second click on that hard prompt), it does give you more power over the process. It’s like a mind trick; once you appeal to the user with your own brand message, the hard prompt triggered from the browser isn’t so scary anymore. These soft prompts are fully customizable, meaning you can change them anytime to represent your current campaign.
Another benefit is that if the user rejects your soft prompt, this can be used to postpone the trigger of the hard prompt. A second soft prompt can be used at a later stage and if accepted at this point, can automate the trigger of the hard prompt, maximizing the chances of acquiring a subscription.
2. Subscription Overlays
A Subscription Overlay is an effective tool to emphasize the prompt. To further use the website, the prompt must be actioned. An overlay gives weight to the process of answering the prompt, letting your users know this isn’t just some random pop-up that you and your brand want them to opt in.
3. Time Your Prompts
As a first-time website user, you’re not entirely sure this is the right place for what you’re looking for. A quick browse around the website is a pretty good indication if you need to look elsewhere. If you enter a site and you’re going to check through a couple of things to see if the site is going to offer what you need… are you likely to accept receiving notifications from this website you know very little about?
Time your prompts and give the user some breathing space. Some brands might use a button onsite that triggers the prompt when clicked so that the timing is at the user’s discretion. Others may find this can go unnoticed, and it’s better to try to find the optimum moment to engage the users and test both methods! It’s all about preference.
The Guide to Advanced Customer Segmentation
Go in depth on advanced segmentation with this guide which was written based on analyzing tens of thousands of segments across Optimove’s customer base.
The Key to Success? Intelligent Delivery.
Intelligent Delivery is all about personalizing web push campaigns using customer data. Using predictive technology and algorithms that work with a user’s historical and real-time app activity or platforms that offer Intelligent Delivery are a marketing team’s dream. It enables the automated scheduling of messages to push at the time that a particular user is most likely to engage with it.
The Intelligent Delivery strategy is such a big hit because it works – taking the guesswork out of campaign planning and leaving it to technology to look for the best ways to optimize engagement, retention – and results. Onboarding new customers? Re-engaging lost ones? Advising on flight changes? Promoting new products? They’ll all need a different timing strategy – and intelligent Delivery can figure it out for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Optimove perform customer segmentation?
Optimove uses advanced algorithms developed from the domains of cluster analysis and decision theory. Every piece of available information with potential marketing value is incorporated into the segmentation process, within a hierarchical data structure, including lifecycle stages (e.g., new, active, risk of churn), behavior patterns, previous campaign response history, predicted lifetime value, predilection to churn, demographics and even realtime customer behavior.
Is Optimove a rule-based system?
No. The software dynamically segments customers into micro-segments (personas) based on their behavior patterns, product preferences, responses to previous marketing communications, realtime activities/scenarios and demographics — not on any preconceived rules or assumptions. This segmentation process is ongoing, with a complete refresh generated daily. In addition, marketers can create customer segments for targeting and/or analysis using any field in the customer database, with out without Optimove’s micro-segmentation and predictive analytics capabilities.
How Optimove Can Help You Get Started
Now that you have all the basics laid out in front of you; you can choose which of these tactics will work for your brand and find a formula to boost opt-ins and engage your web users. If you’re doing it right, you will retain these users and create loyal customers through your web push savvy!
Web Push Notifications are a great way to reach and connect to your audience – but they’re also a super-fast way to lose your fans if you’re not working with the insights and best practices that will give you the best chance of success.
Timely, relevant, and valuable, finding the right balance between engaging and spamming is an art that can be mastered! This guide will help you get started – if you’d like more inspiration – we’d be happy to help if you get in contact.
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