Website Push Notifications: A New Way to Follow Up with Website Visitors
We all know that open rates in email marketing are low, social media is not scalable and for retargeting you have to pay. So, following up with users is not an easy task.
Fortunately a new why rise up. The push notifications!
What are Website Push Notifications?
Website push notifications are clickable messages that a website can send to their subscribers, directly on their desktop or mobile device. Subscribers that click on a push notification can be sent to (among other things):
- Content – Send them to a new blog post, podcast or video.
- Offers – Announce a new offer or sale.
- Shopping Cart – Bring them back to an abandoned shopping cart.
- Survey/Poll – Solicit feedback from subscribers.
They work in a very similar fashion to mobile app push notifications, except they work on websites instead of apps, and can be pushed to both desktop and mobile devices.
Push notifications are know hot. Hence, some interesting players are offering their solutions:
They all offer similar features, such as a/b testing and segmentation.
I could only tried PushCrew, with nice results.
How push notification works?
There are two steps to website push notifications:
Step 1: Triggered Opt-In Box
As soon as someone arrives on a website, an opt-in box is triggered.
If the visitor clicks on “Allow,” he/she is added to your subscriber list.
Please note that this simple one-click opt-in is currently available only for HTTPS websites. The opt-in process for HTTP website is 2-click.
Step 2: Send Push Notifications
When a “visitor” becomes a “subscriber,” you can send them push notifications that will arrive directly on their browsers, be it on desktop or mobile.
These notifications will arrive in real-time. Clicking on the notification will take the subscriber to the URL specified at the time of sending notification.
How to Use Website Push Notifications
Most of you reading this will already have figured out some ways to use website push notification to further boost your website’s numbers.
So, I’ll skip the most obvious use cases, which are already familiar to anyone who deals in content marketing and eCommerce marketing—sending the latest articles on your blog, content offers to subscribers, sending your old-high performing content, announcing latest products.
Instead, I’ll touch upon some innovative ways you can use website push notifications which you may not have used through other marketing channels.
How to Use Website Push Notifications
1: Send Time-bound Offers and Deals
Website push notifications have the great advantage over other communication channels like email and social media in that the notification appears in front of the user in real-time, and it encourages an immediate response to the user’s part.
This comes in great use when you want to increase urgency by giving time-bound offers and deals to your audience such as the one below.
The inherent nature of website push notifications makes it a great medium to promote limited offers and discounts.
2: Deliver Personalized Offers Based on On-Site Behavior
Delivering personalized offers based on website behavior is a great way to get lost visitors back.
For example, if a user has spent a few minutes on a particular product page, you can send him/her a push notification saying that a 20% discount is available on the product for the next 60 minutes.
Or, if the user has bounced off after browsing some latest critically-acclaimed novels, direct him via notification to the latest Booker Prize winner, similar to the example below.
3: Automate Your Blog Readership Through RSS-to-Push
This one is particularly useful for bloggers.
Most, if not all, bloggers are familiar with RSS-to-email, which is a mechanism by which your newsletter subscribers get an automated email every time you publish something new on the blog.
You can implement something similar called RSS-to-Push, which, you guessed it right, sends an automated push to your push notification subscribers whenever a new post is published to your blog.
As more sites adopt push notification technology, it is becoming apparent content consumers are more receptive to receiving content through a low-touch real-time medium like push notifications compared to a email.
For example, the VWO blog found out that a series of blog posts, sent as both push notifications and emails, resulted in the push notification CTR trouncing email CTR by a whooping 331%.
4: Recover Abandoned Carts
You can even recover abandoned carts through website push notifications.
There are a couple of reasons why this may work better than other marketing channels.
Firstly, if the customer has bounced off the checkout page to compare the price on other websites, he/she may actually forget about the cart once they are done comparing.
A push notification, say, 15 minutes after the abandonment may serve to remind the customer of the cart and lead to an actual purchase, like the example below
5: Upsell and Cross-sell
Upselling and cross-selling based on a customer’s past purchases is a great way to get repeat purchases.
To do this, you may have to segment your subscribers into various buckets based on their purchase and behavioral data and then send them targeted recommendations through push notifications on their web browser.
Using push notifications like this requires a high degree of segmentation — the narrower your segments are, the more personalized recommendations you can send.
However, if you do this in a smart manner, you’ll collect a ton of loyalty from your customers who’ll start trusting you to curate products for them and then send them notifications about those products. This will save the customer from having to do any research. Here’s an example
6: Collect Feedback
Another great use case for website push notifications is to get feedback.
Website push notifications have certain unique capabilities, which distinguish them from other common feedback methods, such as email and on-site surveys.
Web push notifications have a great opt-in rate compared to email. The opt-in rate for push notifications has been observed to be close to 40%, which is approximately 10X the rate at which an average email rate builds. This makes your notification subscribers a much better representation of your overall audience compared to email subscribers.
One of the great advantages of website push notifications is that they work even if the website has been closed. Thus, you can get feedback from your visitors when they have spent some time away from your website, which will make their responses much more balanced and objective. On the other hand, on-site feedback methods usually suffer from a degree of bias due to the recency effect.
So with this said...
Push notifications blockers coming in 5,4,3,2......(let me know If you discover one =)
