The Beginner’s Guide to Web Push Notifications

Let’s start off with the basics. Website push notifications are short clickable messages that are sent to users that have opted in to receive them (more on that process later). They have the same basic look as push notifications you are used to seeing on your smartphone, but instead are sent and received on desktop or laptop computers (as well as mobile devices like smartphones and tablets).

Web push notifications are useful both for marketers who create the notifications and for users who receive the notifications. Web push is incredibly easy to install and get started with and doesn’t require any major technical knowledge.

Their usefulness is also seen in their visibility. With traditional mobile push notifications you are restricted to sending messages to mobile devices only, but with web push, you can target your audience both on mobile and desktop devices. In fact, users do not even have to have their browser open in order to view your notification.

Web push is a proven method for engaging subscribers. While stats will vary based on things like your subscriber count, quality of traffic, device used, and more, the average opt-in rate for web push is 18% (compared to email which averages around 1.95%).

With a larger group of people to send campaigns to, you’ll tend to also see better results in terms of your traffic, conversions, and click through rates (CTRs). On average the CTR for web push campaigns is around 7%- much better than averages in email marketing which tend to hover around 2-3%.

As the effectiveness of email marketing fades, it is crucial to have another way to directly communicate with your customers or clients. Web push gives you the perfect opportunity to engage, and re-engage, your subscribers.

There are plenty of reasons why your business needs push notifications:

Plenty of users today are tired of giving out their personal information, but with web push they don’t need to. With the click or tap of one button a user can opt-in. You can then target them with notifications based on their actions at your website.

Web push helps you regularly drive traffic to your site by engaging your subscribers with relevant messages. Re-engage past visitors as well in order to bring them back to your website.

While your email may end up in spam or your text message go unread, your web push notification is guaranteed to be seen. Click it, and the subscriber is back at your website!

You also don’t have to take the time or spend the money to create a mobile app in order to engage users there. Wherever a user opts-in is where they will receive your push notifications. Web push allows you to connect with your audience no matter how they choose to access your website, and for a fraction of the cost of developing a mobile app.

While web push may be best known for its use at ecommerce and media websites for doing things like promoting sales, highlighting content, and retargeting abandoned carts, the great news is that it can be adapted to work with just about any website in any industry.

Here are just a few industries that are greatly benefiting from the use of web push notifications:

Web push is a game changer for those in the ecommerce industry. Create campaigns to alert users of sales, retarget abandoned carts, share new products, update users on their shipping status, and a lot more. Also be sure to segment your subscribers based on what pages they visit at your website, set up time-sensitive campaigns for quick flash sales, and engage in referral marketing to encourage your customers to help promote your brand.

Best of all, you can easily track your conversions and also set up plenty of triggered campaigns in order to save time while still effectively engaging your subscribers each step of the way as they go along the buyer’s journey towards becoming an actual customer.

If you run a media or blogging website and require constant traffic to your various articles and other forms of content, web push can help you make it happen. With web push you can segment your audience based on the type of content they view at your site, be first to share breaking news directly with your audience, make personalized content recommendations, and more. Retarget users who haven’t visited your site in a while in order to re-engage them and provide a more steady stream of website traffic that your brand depends on.

Travel companies also have much to gain when it comes to web push. Web push allows you to alerts users of important information regarding their travel plans, advertise travel deals, give personalized recommendations, send booking reminders, and a lot more! Many of these notifications are incredibly time-sensitive and with web push, you know they will be delivered and seen immediately. The result? An excellent user experience for your subscribers, something that they will certainly remember when booking future trips.

You can only send your web push notifications to browsers that support web push- thankfully that is the majority of them (you can see the full list later on). Getting started is as easy as installing a web push provider on your website. Depending on the service you use this can either be done by the use of a plugin if you use a platform like WordPress or Shopify, or can be handled by manually adding some code to your website.

You can be up and running with web push in just a few simple steps:

Installing a plugin or app will automatically integrate web push to your website.

If no plugin/app is available, you can manually add the javascript tracking to to the end of the body tag on your website.

If no plugin/app is available, you can manually upload the service worker file directly to the root of your website.

Setup the opt-in prompt to allow visitors to subscribe to your push notifications.

Create user segments for targeted campaigns including page views, device information, geo-location, user attributes, events, and more.

Send highly targeted, personalized web push notifications to your subscribers.

A user must opt-in before you can ever send them a push notification. Once they agree, they instantly become a web push subscriber. At that point, you can begin sending them notifications whenever you want. Your web push provider will then gather useful information like what pages a user clicks on, if they leave items in their shopping cart, or if they sign up for your newsletter. This information can help you form useful segments, or groups of people, that you can send notifications to.

A web push notification you send will be comprised of an icon, a title message, body message, your website URL, and in some cases, a push notification image. Clicking the message will send a user to a designated website or landing page.

Large images are currently available for Windows users on Google Chrome, for both desktop and mobile devices (Android only). This is a great way to make your notification stand out and really inspire your subscribers to click.

You can choose to use a custom icon that corresponds with a particular campaign, or you can leave it as your logo. You can also rely on other visual elements like emojis in order to better capture a user’s attention.

The look of the actual push notification will vary slightly depending on the browser a subscriber is using to look at it. Consider optimizing your notifications based on browser and device type so that they always look their best.

Website push notifications are currently supported on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, Samsung Internet, and Microsoft Edge.

The one major target audience you cannot send web push notifications to are iPhone users, as iOS does not currently support web push notifications.

We know this is an important segment of people for many of you, and we will offer iOS support as soon as we are able to. Learn more about web push and iOS and also sign up to be notified as soon as it becomes available.

Without it, you have no subscribers. While opting in to web push is much easier than say signing up for an email newsletter, it is still a crucial step that has to be completed. It is only once a user opts in that you can send them any push notifications. While opting in itself is incredibly easy (just click or tap one button), you want to make sure your opt-in process is optimized for gaining as many subscribers as possible.

Once you install a web push provider at your website, your website will begin displaying an opt-in prompt to visitors of your website. They can either close the prompt, choose to allow push notifications, or deny them.

The standard opt-in prompt will simply ask a user if your website can show notifications. To increase your chance of getting a user to opt-in you can consider creating a custom prompt that will give a clue as to what your notifications will be (announce latest news, preview sales, alert of new activity, etc.)

You also have the ability to create multiple custom opt-in prompts for various users based on things like:

Your specific web push strategy will be unique based on your brand and industry, but there are plenty of general rules that everyone should follow when it comes to web push.

• Optimize your campaigns based on a user’s timezone.
• Craft an actual web push strategy that includes clear marketing goals.
• A/B test your notifications to see what gets the best results.
• Segmen your subscribers according to their interests, activity at your site, demographic info, and more in order to send relevant campaigns.
• Personalize your campaigns to increase their effectiveness.
• Save time by automating some of your campaigns.
• Use quality visuals including large images to engage your subscribers.
• Track your conversions to see how your campaigns are impacting your sales goals.

• Send broad messages that are not relevant to your subscribers.
• Over-send messages that will annoy your subscribers.
• Take shortcuts to try and install your notifications quicker.
• Send poorly timed messages.
• Ignore your analytics and not track your results.

Men’s activewear company Rhone Apparel drove $93,000 in sales from their web push campaigns. By smartly segmenting their audience based on their spending behavior at their website, advertising sales, and announcing new products, Rhone was able to effectively boost their sales, as well as their web push click through rates (CTRs), getting impressive stats as high as 7.4%, beating the average email CTR which hovers between 3.42-4.19%.