10 Ways to Automate Your Web Push Notifications

UPDATED August, 2020

A content marketer’s job is certainly not an easy one- but you likely already knew that. As it gets harder to create meaningful content that will engage your audience throughout all phases of the buyer’s journey, it becomes more important to find ways to automate some of this process in order to save time and scale your efforts.

In particular, brands today not only have to create compelling content but also figure out how to best share that content. With email and social media platforms both largely supersaturated with content, it can feel like fighting a losing battle to connect with your audience. Thankfully, you’ve got another option that can not only connect you with your audience better than ever before but also save you time by way of automation opportunities.

What are we talking about? I’m sure you’ve guessed it. That’s right: web push notifications. With web push, not only are you giving your content a much better opportunity at being seen (no more email newsletters getting lost in subscribers’ inboxes), you can also create several types of automated campaigns that range from promoting general content, to personalized notifications that keep your customers informed about their purchases, automated drip campaigns that can help you achieve your marketing goals, and more.

These automated campaigns will save you hours each week that you can then spend on other crucial areas of your business that need your attention. If you’re unsure about what automation opportunities there are with web push, keep reading to discover ten unique opportunities that you should implement immediately. And in case you were worried, these are all incredibly easy to set up. Let’s get to it.

Triggered vs. Automated Notifications

There are two main ways that you can automate your web push notifications. One way is by creating a triggered notification. This involves setting up a notification and defining a trigger. The trigger can be nearly anything you want, but a common example is cart abandonment. In this case, you would set up a triggered notification that would automatically send to anyone who abandons their cart, as they ‘activate’ the trigger with their action. We will discuss this, and other triggered notifications, in more detail below.

The second type of automated web push notification is just that, it is automated. This is often done based on time (say, once a week) but can also be combined with our powerful segmentation tools to achieve more personalized, relevant notifications that your audience will appreciate and engage with.

10 Ways to Automate Your Web Push Notifications

1. Welcome Notification

You appreciate every new subscriber that agrees to be sent your notifications. Why not show that appreciation by sending a welcome notification? Previously, this would have taken a lot of time to create a new campaign for each new subscriber. With our automation, it’s taken care of for you. Simply create the campaign once and it will trigger automatically to each new subscriber you gain. Easy, right?

We also recommend including some type of introductory information. Perhaps this is a discount code if you are an ecommerce store, or a link to a webinar or whitepaper if you are in the SaaS industry, or even a link to your blog if you are a news site. The goal? Get your subscribers to engage with your website in some way. After all, that’s the whole point of your push notifications!

If you need more help setting this up, head on over and read our welcome notification documentation.

2. Welcome Drip Notifications

While everyone should take advantage of the welcome notification, there is another type of introductory campaign that many brands will find beneficial. Instead of just sending one welcome notification, you can set up a series of notifications that will send over time once a new subscriber opts-in.

Similar to an email drip campaign, you can use this series of notifications to introduce your new subscriber to your brand, your products, and any other relevant information that will be beneficial to new subscribers. To get started with this, you will need to first head to your dashboard and navigate to Websites > Edit > Miscellaneous Settings and select the checkbox ‘Track Subscriptions as Events.’ This will create a new custom event that you can then use for a series of triggered notifications.

By setting various delays with these notifications you can ensure they are sending at the exact time you want. For example, you might have one notification send 5 minutes after the welcome notification, and then another 2 hours later, and then a final notification a day later. That is just one example. You can customize your timing (and amount of notifications) however you want!

Similar to your welcome notification, this will only need to be set up once (unless you decide to make changes to your campaign). Once the custom event is set up you can create your campaigns, set them live, and they will automatically send with your custom timing to every new subscriber you get!

Check out our welcome drip notification documentation for a walkthrough on how to set this up.

3. Abandoned Cart Campaigns

We cannot say this enough: Every ecommerce brand needs to track and retarget abandoned carts. It is one of the most valuable campaigns out there for driving revenue, and best of all, it doesn’t take a lot of work to get set up.

In fact, if you operate a Shopify store, we’ve already got this event set up and tracking for you. All you have to do is create your campaign and set it live! If you aren’t on Shopify, it is still very easy to start tracking abandoned carts. We recommend using our abandoned cart documentation to walk you through the process.

With an automated abandoned cart campaign, you can retarget your subscribers with the hope of them returning to your store and finishing their purchase. When creating this campaign, you can decide how long to wait before the notification is triggered (for Shopify users the default is 1 hour, but you may add additional time if you wish), as well as the content of the campaign. For example, you may offer a discount code to help encourage users to complete their purchase.

If you already send abandoned cart emails, we still recommend setting up web push notifications as well. In fact, many users have found better results from their abandoned cart push campaigns compared to their email campaigns. Try it out and be sure to enable conversion tracking so that you can see the results for yourself!

4. Abandoned Funnel Campaigns

Similar to targeting abandoned carts, did you know that you can target subscribers who abandon other pages at your site too? While this can also be done as a more simple triggered campaign (see number 8 on this list), you have more advanced options as well that can help you target users who start to complete an action but don’t quite finish. One popular example? Form submissions. In this case, if a subscriber makes it to page one (where they fill out the form) but does not make it page two (say, a confirmation page once they submit the form) you can retarget them automatically!

This is a great and flexible type of automated campaign that can benefit just about anyone. If you have certain actions that you want users to take at your website (submitting a form, signing up for a newsletter, requesting a quote, etc.) you can help boost your completion rate by retargeting your subscribers and encouraging them to complete the necessary action.

Our abandoned funnel documentation will help walk you through this process.

5. RSS Feed Campaigns

We support just about all RSS feeds and allow you to easily create an automated campaign integrating with the RSS feed of your choosing. When setting this campaign up, you can use content that is automatically pulled from the RSS feed, choose your own content, or a combination of both. Finally, you decide whether to send this campaign to all of your subscribers, or only to a specific segment or segments. For instance, you may create a Tumblr RSS feed campaign and only send it to subscribers who have previously viewed that Tumblr. The choice is yours.

For more help creating an RSS feed campaign, click here to read our RSS feed documentation.

6. Automated Re-engagement Notifications

Here is a great example of an automated web push notification. This type of notification is set up as a manual campaign instead of a triggered campaign, meaning it will go out to a specified segment of users instead of one individual who meets a specified trigger.

Say a user (or users) haven’t visited your website in a week. Why not re-target them and send a notification saying you miss them? You can create an automated campaign that will do just that. You can determine the amount of time and also pick a certain page of your website that will trigger the notification. For example, you may base this campaign on your blog since that is a page that (hopefully) is regularly updated with new content that you don’t want your subscribers to miss out on.

Best of all, once you create this segment of users, it will automatically update according to your subscribers’ behavior. If a user heads to your website, they will be pulled from the segment and won’t be placed back into the segment unless they fulfill the conditions (in this example, that would be not visiting your website for a week).

If you are struggling to achieve consistent website traffic, this type of automated campaign is a great one to try out in order to boost your numbers.

7. Triggered Campaign: Notification Clicked

Not only can you set up triggered notifications based on a subscriber’s behavior at your website, you can also set up triggers based on their interaction with your web push notifications. By setting up notification clicks as a custom event, you can create really powerful notification drips that are all automated!

Similar to the steps for setting up a welcome notification drip, you need to first head to your dashboard and navigate to Websites > Edit > Miscellaneous Settings and select the checkbox ‘Track Notification Clicks as Events.’ This creates another custom event (Notification Clicked) that you can use for a new set of triggered campaigns!

Use this event to set up either a single triggered notification or create a notification drip by creating several notifications with different delays. While the welcome notification drip is great for subscribers at the top of your sales funnel, this notification drip is more flexible, allowing you to create drips for various phases of your sales funnel.

For more help getting started, check out our notification clicks documentation.

8. Triggered Campaign: Page Visited

Looking for an automated way to engage visitors who visit crucial pages at your website? You can do that easily by triggering notifications based on pages visited! This is another custom event that will allow you to send highly targeted and relevant notifications to subscribers who look at specific information on your website.

Keep in mind that you can also do this by creating a segment of users who have viewed a particular page at your site. However, that would be done with a manual campaign. If you are looking to truly automate this process, you should set it up as a triggered campaign that will send automatically whenever anyone visits a certain page.

Head to our page visited documentation for more help getting started with this.

9. Repeating Notifications

This next type of automated notification is strictly based on time. You have the option to choose when your notification will repeat, choosing either daily, weekly, or monthly. You can also choose to send this to either all of your subscribers or only to certain segments.

For example, you might wish to send a weekly notification to all of your subscribers letting them know about new products you have for sale at your store. Or, you could choose to send a monthly notification to any subscriber who has viewed your blog letting them know that you have published new content.

This is another flexible notification type that you can use to automatically engage your subscribers and get them back at your website. Be sure to make use of our action buttons to help boost your click-through rate!

10. Zapier Integrations

Finally, numerous automation opportunities come via our integration with Zapier. This feature allows you to integrate hundreds of apps with Aimtell in order to create push campaigns based on information gathered from these various apps. While there are hundreds of apps that you can choose from, here are three popular ‘zaps’ to consider setting up:

• Promote Social Media Posts: Don’t get us wrong, social media is a great way of interacting with your audience. With Zapier, you can combine your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest feeds with Aimtell in order to automate campaigns that promote your various social media posts. For example, you could automatically send a web push notification whenever you share a new Tweet or post a new Instagram photo. Don’t ever worry about your audience missing a social media post of yours!
• Incorporate Email Campaigns: Do you use MailChimp? If so, you can create an automated web push campaign that is based on your MailChimp email campaign. Again, as with social media, email is a great tool, but with open rates on the decline, your campaigns are likely far less effective than they used to be. Get more views easily by sharing your newsletters via an automated web push notification.
• Display Videos: Finally, you can use our Zapier integration to create automated campaigns based on your YouTube channel. Videos have become some of the most popular pieces of content on the Internet, so why not easily get more views by alerting your subscribers whenever you publish new content?

For more help, check out our Zapier documentation.

Wrapping Up

Simply put, you absolutely should automate your web push notifications in order to save time and secure better results. Hopefully this list has given you plenty of ideas for how to get started with automating some of your web push campaigns. There is so much potential with our automation and we love seeing how you make the most of it!

Do you have an idea for a new automation opportunity? We want to hear it! We are also always here to help if you need any technical support with getting started with automation (or anything else web push related for that matter!) Be sure to contact us with any questions or feedback.

If you are new to web push and want to give it a try, you can get started for free with Aimtell. Still need more information? No problem. You can always check out our Beginner’s Guide to learn more.

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