Follow These Steps to Create an Effective Web Push Strategy

Let’s face it: Web push is pretty great, right? Maybe we’re slightly biased, but nonetheless, we believe in the power of push. And better still, it’s so easy to get started, you can get set up and send out your first campaign in as little as 5 minutes. We’ll never apologize for making web push notifications easy to create and send, but we do want to caution you against sending campaigns without a strategy in place.

Just like with any other marketing you do, such as content marketing, having a strategy in place is a major key to success. Without determining what you want to accomplish, it’s hard to know what exactly you need to be doing. With that in mind, we thought we would lay out some basic tips for creating an effective web push strategy.

First: Determine your marketing goals

Before setting up anything, you need to have a clear understanding of what you are trying to accomplish with your web push notifications. Are you trying to increase conversions, boost website traffic, or encourage more people to sign up for your newsletter? There are endless options you might be considering, and it is fine to have more than one goal, but they should be clearly stated up front so that you know what you are trying to accomplish.

A popular formula for creating a marketing objective is the SMART method. Objectives should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.

An example in this situation might be that you wish to increase the number of users who read your blog by 20% within 6 months. With this objective in mind, you can begin to form campaigns that are targeting this goal. In later steps, we will discuss how to form these campaigns and how to measure their success. For now, you are simply planning out what you wish to accomplish from this marketing platform.

Second: Get people to opt in

Now that you have an idea of what you want to accomplish, it’s time to start getting users to subscribe to your notifications. Once you install web push notifications, users will start seeing your opt-in prompt immediately. By default, the standard opt-in prompt (shown below) will display to all users when they first visit your homepage.

Especially if you are a new website, it is in your best interest to show your opt-in prompt to all users when they land at your website (although you do have the option to set your prompt to trigger at different locations- which you can read about here). By showing your prompt to everyone, you have a greater pool of people that are seeing the prompt and are making the decision to opt in or not. By burying it on another page, fewer people are seeing it, and therefore you have fewer opportunities to get a user to say yes and opt in.

However, something you should heavily consider is implementing a custom opt-in prompt. This prompt will display before the standard prompt and gives you the opportunity to explain the value of your notifications to your users. Take the blog marketing objective we mentioned earlier, for example. If you run a blog or other similar content based website, your success is based on whether or not people view your content. Consider tailoring your opt-in prompt accordingly.

If you run an ecommerce store and your marketing objective is to boost conversions, your opt-in prompt might ask users to subscribe in order to be alerted of new sales and promotions.

Third: Start segmenting users appropriately

Once you start accumulating a solid number of subscribers, you should start grouping them appropriately. These groups of people are called segments. Once you create a segment you are able to send a notification to just that segment. This is incredibly useful because it allows you to send tailored campaigns that match the interests of the given set of people.

For example, say you run a blog that covers a variety of topics: Sports, Travel, Politics, and Entertainment. Someone who regularly reads your sports articles may not find your entertainment push notifications relevant. Instead, you can create smart segments based on peoples’ interests. People who view your sports page gets added to the sports segment, travel to the travel segment, etc. With this data you can send specific notifications to the people who are most likely to find it relevant and interesting.

Fourth: Create enticing copy/incorporate quality visuals

Something to keep in mind with web push notifications is that as easily as a person can subscribe, they can also easily unsubscribe at any point they want to. If a user fails to see the value of your notifications, why would they wish to continue receiving them?

Segmentation helps you send your notifications to the right audience, but the next thing to keep in mind is the quality of the notifications themselves. Poorly worded notifications can easily result in a loss of subscribers. Rather, take some time to create enticing, clear copy that will inspire your users to click.

Think the above notification will result in a lot of engagement? Our guess would be no. For starters, the post isn’t clear. You know there is a new blog- but what is it about? Is it something a user will be interested in? They have no way to know. Instead, find a way to capture their interest. This might be a breaking news headline, or a quick sentence that will inspire a reader to want to read more.

Visual elements can also improve the quality of your notifications. This can either be in the form of custom icons (which display everywhere but on Safari desktop notifications) or large images, a relatively new feature that you should take advantage of (right now for Chrome users only).

Fifth: Build personalized campaigns

Broad campaigns, on average, are less effective than relevant, personalized ones. People heavily prefer, and at this point expect, website content and associated marketing efforts to be personalized. In fact, 74% of customers admit to feeling frustrated at content that isn’t personalized. With this in mind, your personalization efforts should absolutely extend into your web push notification strategy planning.

This in part is accomplished by segmentation. You can take things further, however, by setting up notifications that are directed at an individual user. These notifications are known as triggered notifications. These notifications send as the result of an action that an individual user takes at your website.

One easy triggered notification you can set up is a welcome notification, which sends automatically to any new subscriber. The above example is a popular method for ecommerce stores. Going back to our blogging objective, you might consider a welcome notification that includes a different type of special offer, such as a free eBook or other piece of premium content you have created.

There are numerous other types of triggered notifications you can send, and because they are sent as a result of an individual user’s actions, they are all guaranteed to be relevant and highly personal. There are several pre-set triggered campaigns for Shopify users (for things like abandoned cart and shipping confirmation notifications), but any user can set up triggered notifications using custom events.

Sixth: Determine the proper frequency

Head back to your childhood to help you understand this step. Remember the book Goldilocks and the Three Bears? That’s your inspiration for figuring out your right posting frequency.

Porridge that’s too hot or too cold is no good. Same goes with web push. Sending too many or too few notifications is ineffective. Instead, you need to find the right balance. Sadly, there isn’t a certain magic number that equates to the perfect number of notifications to send to a user each day or each week. Rather, when building your strategy, make sure that each notification you send has visible value to your audience.

Sending multiple notifications to a user each and every day? That’s likely too much. Sending one message total per month? Likely not good enough. As with any other marketing method, part of finding the right strategy for you is simply to try something and see what works and what doesn’t. Which leads us to our final tip…

Seventh: Analyze your results and adjust accordingly 

You’ve put in a lot of time up to this point building your strategy. Congratulations! That’s awesome. Here’s the (semi) frustrating news. Your strategy is likely going to have to change at some point. But that’s okay. Trial and error is a big part of marketing, and analyzing your past performance is the best thing you can do to inform your strategy going forward.

Thankfully, we provide plenty of analytics tools for you to utilize. Our notifications are expertly tracked so that you have a clear picture of what your subscribers are doing, what is working well, and what needs some improvement. If something isn’t working well, change it!

Maybe your custom prompt doesn’t seem to be inspiring users to subscribe. Try something different. Maybe you’ve reached the end of your 6 months and didn’t get your 20% more readers to your blog. Consider changing your copy or creating additional segments. Your results should (and will) guide you in the right direction.

Following these steps should help you tremendously when getting started with web push notifications. Click here to start using Aimtell today.