Getting Started with Web Push Notifications

01Welcome and webinar overview

Hello, welcome to another Aimtell webinar. My name is Zack and I'm your host today. We're covering the what, why and how of web push notifications. I'd also like to point out that we just finished our six months free promo with Aimtell. For the month of April, if you were a new user, you got six months for free.

If you're a brand new user right now and thinking, "Oh no, we just missed that," never fear. There's going to be a promotion for being on this webinar that you can use when signing up and getting going with Aimtell, so stick around to the end and I'll make sure you've got that coupon code. You can take full advantage of everything you see today. Like I said, we had a six month promo, so we've had a very big influx of new users, and this is definitely geared to that. But if you're an existing user, or you're just a user who feels like they're trying to get to grips with it, this is for you as well. There is definitely value in this.

At the end, I'll be going over some strategies and examples to take your journey with Aimtell further. Without further ado, let's jump straight in. So what are web push notifications? Website push notifications are first of all different from app notifications because they are based on a website, a domain. They are sent to users that have opted in to receive them, and that sentence really does cover it. They are notifications that are sent to people that opted in at your site.

As you can see, they can be sent to mobile and to PC too, on most operating systems, so there's a lot of variation in the things that you can do. You can have a title, you can have a body, you can have up to two calls to action, and you can even have custom icons and custom large images, which support up to about 500 by 300 pixels, just if you're curious about the size. All of it is customized to your brand, your campaign, whatever it is, and Aimtell will help you out in getting that set up.

02Web push history and benefits

A bit of history about web push notifications: they're a relatively new marketing channel. This year I just found out we're turning five years old, Aimtell and web push notifications. Aimtell has been around basically since the start, and five years is a relatively short amount of time, especially when you compare it to email or SMS marketing channels. There are definitely pros to using web push notifications. None of this is meant to derail email or speak badly about email or SMS marketing, but Aimtell and web push notifications were created based upon the pain points from email and SMS.

A few of them: there's no spam folder with web push notifications. You don't need to try and get into their primary inbox. Nearly everyone nowadays has a phone, 99% of people, so you're going to be guaranteed that your notifications are coming across their phone. There's no data sharing, which is another big concern with email: "I don't want to give my personal email, I don't want that to be shared around." When you opt in, which we'll cover more in a second, a subscriber ID is made. This is anonymous, so there's no data to share.

And this is a big one, especially compared to SMS: there are really no compliance laws for you to worry about. It's not you, it's the browsers who have to adhere to these compliance guidelines. With SMS, for example, if you don't have a clear unsubscribe route, you can potentially rack up thousands of dollars in fines. So those are just a few reasons why web push notifications are useful, and what they are.

03Opt-in prompts and subscribers

Now, the opt-in. This is the absolute key when it comes to web push notifications, and one of the main perks and reasons why you should do it. It's a one-click opt-in. Once they click, like I said, they generate an anonymous subscriber ID. There's no personal data entry, there's no asking for emails, there's no asking for numbers. It's literally a click of a button.

Another really great concept to grasp here is that although you control the subscriber ID, it's very easy for your user, if they're done with push notifications, to unsubscribe. Like I said, there's no unsubscribe link or "stop messaging" instruction that you need to have on there. It's just a very useful thing to know that they can unsubscribe and subscribe easily, or I should say, they own the unsubscription.

I'll show an example here. This is a native opt-in prompt in Chrome. Blinds.com is a Home Depot subsidiary and they use Aimtell here. They've opted to use a very simple one-click opt-in. This is all it is: you go to this site and this is what it looks like. One click, Allow, a subscriber ID has been made, and suddenly some data has been tracked to that subscriber ID.

Another strategy you can use is custom opt-in prompts. Instead of a one-click opt-in, this is two clicks. This is Death Wish Coffee Company, and I used this in last week's webinar because I loved it so much. I really think this is a great and very simple strategy. They've used Aimtell to make a custom opt-in prompt. It's Death Wish Coffee, and it asks whether you want to receive notifications on deals and sales. The answers are "Nope" or "Hell yeah," and it just perfectly fits their brand. I really think they did a good job with this, and it could really boost opt-ins. You click on "Hell yeah" and then the native prompt is still there, so that's two clicks to opt in.

Once you've opted in, some data has been tracked, and back on the site we'll just click on one here. It's simple, basic stuff. No personally identifiable information is tracked just yet, but you can track that if you'd like. I'm saying that to cover any privacy concerns as well. It's very simple stuff, things like their browser language, whether they're on Chrome or Safari, whether they're on mobile or whatever, and location as well. Geolocation is obviously all done, as it is with Google Analytics, and it's exactly the same with Aimtell. That's all tracked automatically for you. Once they've opted in, they are now on your site, on your subscriber list, on your Aimtell dashboard.

04Why web push notifications work

So then the question becomes: why are web push notifications useful? Now I've got the opt-in, so what next? Here are a few reasons, and I've got a few written down in front of me. The big one is that, compared to email or SMS, the user feels like they own the data, which is so key in this day and age. I'm from the UK and I live in the States, and I can tell you that when businesses had to deal with the GDPR compliance laws, it was a nightmare. It was basically sink or swim when it came to internet marketing. The great part is that Aimtell is completely GDPR compliant, because the user owns the subscribe and unsubscribe button, and whatever data you track is all tracked anonymously to these subscriber IDs.

Another big one that I've got written down here is brand awareness. You can get your brand in front of the user. The example I like to use here is: let's say you are a women's fashion ecommerce site, and a user opts in to your site and they're browsing, but then they decide, "Okay, now I want to look at a different site," and they go to a competitor's site. If you've set it up correctly, you can send them a notification 15 minutes after they opt in, or a day after they opt in, whatever it may be. Even on a competitor's site, your brand can pop across the screen and cause their phone to vibrate. You get top of mind marketing, and it's so key to capitalize on that. You can even do brand awareness when they're not near your website at all. They can be outside doing yardwork and their phone buzzes, and they see a notification from your website. Top of mind marketing, brand awareness.

Next is boosting traffic and engagement, which is highly important. There's no inbox to check, there's no text to check or links to click on. You just tap on the notification from the lock screen, or even from your desktop, whatever you're doing, and you can get traffic back to your site and get that engagement up. Then there's growing your subscriber list, which is far easier to do than with email or SMS. We've covered the opt-in prompts: it's one click and there's no data to share, so growing your subscriber list is definitely easier. And of course, converting more visitors using hyper personalized messages sent to the visitor at the right time. We'll cover those in more detail.

The last one, which isn't on the slide, that I want to cover is the concept that it works at every step of your marketing funnel. Whether you're an ecommerce store, a publisher, a sports or betting site, or even if you just run a content site or a recipe site, there's value in push notifications at every step. Say you're a pre-lead business that mainly focuses on email marketing. People visit your site and they opt in, but they don't give you their email. Send them a notification to say, "Hey, enter your email, get 20% off," and so on and so forth.

It can even work all the way down at the bottom of that marketing funnel, with people who are post conversion. Let's say you're a company that sells protein powder and it's a monthly thing. You want them to come back to your site and buy next month's protein powder, or razors, or whatever that may be. You can track that they purchased and send them an automatic notification 30 days after the purchase, saying, "Hey, it's that time again to buy protein powder," or whatever it may be. So all the way from the pre-lead down to the post conversions, top and bottom of the funnel, there are uses for web push notifications.

05Installing the Aimtell code

Okay, so how do you use web push notifications? With Aimtell there are three steps that we like to use: installation, collecting subscribers, and then engaging those subscribers. That means installing Aimtell, beginning to get the opt-ins, and then sending push notifications. I want to do a quick sample here of just how easy it is to add a website on Aimtell. Often people think it's a lot more confusing, and it really isn't.

We'll use an example site, and obviously your URL will be whatever it is. Make sure to include the HTTPS in there. It's worth knowing that web push notifications only work when your site is SSL secured, so that's HTTPS versus just HTTP by itself. So you use www.example-site.com. Then upload a little icon here. This is useful to do, so I'll use this little Aimtell logo. This is important because if you don't have one set on specific campaigns, this is the icon that would be sent with the notification, so it's important to have a brand icon.

Once this is all set up, we then go to integrating Aimtell. There are a few different ways that you can integrate it. If you have a WordPress or a Shopify site, you click on these buttons here, respectively, for whatever CMS you're using. If you're on WordPress, we've got a plug-in, so don't install with JavaScript, use the plug-in. If you're a Shopify user, we've got an app, so go and use the app. There's no coding or anything like that. You literally just install it, log in with the Aimtell account you just made and link it, and it'll link up nice and easy.

Most users who are not using WordPress or Shopify are going to be using the JavaScript, so that's the one I'll be using in this webinar. It's two steps and it's very easy to do. You copy and paste the Aimtell tracking code, and then you upload a file into the root directory so it can be found at this address. So this would be example-site.com/aimtell-worker.js. If we look at Blinds.com, they've got their copy and pasted code on the backend, and if we search for the Aimtell worker, yes, this is what a correct installation should look like. The easiest way to test if it's working is to go to the site and see if you get the opt-in.

Once those two steps are done, just to give you a sort of time frame: if you've got a dev team, or if you are the dev team, this should take less than five minutes. If you aren't the dev team and you're thinking, "Ah, code, what the heck," this should take you 10 to 15 minutes. Feel free to contact Aimtell support at any point and we'll be more than happy to walk you through the steps and make sure you're up and running, because we want to make sure you're installed correctly from the get-go and there are no deliverability issues. Once we've done that, we'll verify it, and again, you can verify it yourself. Just go to the site and see if you get the opt-in.

06First steps with Aimtell

Now you've got an installed site. What should be your next steps, your first steps with Aimtell? Just so you know, that took less than two minutes to explain, and with the other work maybe that's another five or ten minutes. So you're looking at about 10 to 15 minutes to install Aimtell, which is fantastic, so much value there.

After that, what's the next step? Begin to collect subscribers. You should be one of those people. If you've not opted in to your site, I would highly recommend you go to your site and opt in. You just click on the Allow button. Not only is that helpful in the long run to see what automatic notifications are actually sent, it's also useful for sending test notifications to yourself. You can also see that in All Subscribers. This is a fake website, so let me go to a real site here. You can just go to All Subscribers, and once you've opted in, your subscriber ID will be there. I haven't opted in, but if I did, my subscriber ID would be here and you could view all the data there.

The next step is creating a welcome notification. If we jump back into this example, a welcome notification is sent immediately after a user has opted in. So I've just opted in to Blinds.com, and if a welcome notification was set up, an automatic notification would be sent. It doesn't have to be anything complicated. It helps get subscribers used to seeing your notifications, and it's so key. I'm just going to pause here for a second and say, if you've got any questions, I see a few questions I've answered already, but if you have any questions or anything like that, feel free to ask them. I'll be more than happy to answer them either as they come in or more towards the end of the webinar, so ask away.

For the welcome notification, it could be something simple like "Thanks for subscribing." Then maybe you want to use emojis. I like using these little emojis here, which is a very quick best practice: notifications with emojis in them are 85% more likely to be clicked on. I don't know why that happens. I think it's to do with the color and the attention grabbing, but that's the stat, so if you're not using emojis, use emojis. Then maybe something like "Shop now, check out our latest products." You can see what I like using there. Then this can just be www.example-site.com/new-arrivals, whatever it may be. If you use Google Analytics, you can click on this button and it will automatically give you all the right parameters that you need. Then you just click Activate, and that's it. If someone opts in, they'll be sent this notification, and you don't have to overthink it. It's cool just to get set up.

07Strategies and campaign examples

Okay, the next step. We've installed correctly and we've set up a welcome automatic notification. This is where I think the beauty of Aimtell comes in, so have a think about all of the different features available to you, or in other words, how to begin building out your web push strategy. We've already talked about the single click opt-in, and we've talked about the custom option, the two clicks. This is just something to think about that Aimtell allows you to do.

Another one is personalization. We touched on that earlier in the webinar. You can track things like first name, city or whatever, and you can begin to use that dynamically in web push notifications. And really the crowning jewel of Aimtell, what really sets us apart, is our automation. There's so much you can automate with web push, whether that be triggered or RSS or whatever that may be.

Here are some specific strategies. You may want to set up a welcome drip notification. That means you send one immediately and you set up another one to go a day later, and so on and so forth. It's similar to an email drip or SMS drip. Welcome notification drips are no different: you send one initially, then one a day later and one a week later. The triggers can vary based on whatever that is, whether they click on them or whether you want to just waterfall them very basically. This is a very useful strategy to employ.

Then there's personalized content in notifications. We just touched on that with first names, but I also like to say that targeted notifications always work better than general notifications. This isn't saying you shouldn't use general notifications, because there's no catch-all. But think about how you want to start bucketing your subscribers, whether that's by location, by mobile or desktop, or by activity, such as whether they viewed a page on your site. Begin to personalize the notifications that they're going to get. That's segments and personalization.

Probably one of the most important ones is notification timing. Timing is key, it's so important. Here there are two things: think about your vertical and think about your user. If you're a new site, right, in the news vertical, you want to be sending out headlines in the morning when they're drinking their coffee and scrolling mindlessly on their phone, and they think, "Look, I just got a notification from my favorite news site, I'm going to click on that." You want that to be sent at 7, 8, 9 a.m. in the morning. I know I covered this in the last webinar, but it's so important, so think about the timing and think about the vertical.

Now some web push examples to go with that, and maybe some automated stuff. First, abandoned cart or order updates and things like that, especially for ecommerce. I had one client, we had a call a couple of weeks ago now. I had a call set up with them, and by the end of the call we'd sent, I think, 10 automatic abandoned cart notifications. Over one weekend they generated, I think it was over $5,000 off one abandoned cart notification, and that took 10 minutes of work. They were sending notifications while I was on the call with them. So abandoned cart, if you're in ecommerce, should be your number one priority. We've got a template for it and really good documentation to help you get that set up, so if you've not done that, get that going. Item shipped and order updates are another example that's really useful.

Next, RSS feed or blog post updates. That's all automatic, and all you need is an RSS feed URL. You can begin to send notifications for content, drive traffic back to your site, increase those clicks and get users back on the site. If you're monetizing a platform, use the automatic feeds, and so on and so forth. Talking about the top and the bottom of the funnel here, there are also referral requests or review requests. You can automatically send them. Let's say they've bought a product: you want to send them a notification one week later saying, "Hey, review your product here." It's a really easy automatic way to get those reviews.

Another one is a manual repeating campaign for a weekly sale or weekly new products, which is really easy to do. There are also updates for your site, announcements and things like that. Those are definitely some web push examples to use. All that being said, I hope that's given you a quick start here, and some strategy and ideas to get going. I'm going to answer any questions. I see a few here that have come in, but if you've got any more, feel free to ask.

As for next steps, let's say you're a brand new client and you're thinking, "Okay, this is the first I've ever heard of Aimtell, what do I do?" Go to aimtell.com, click Get Started Free down here, make an account, and install Aimtell on your site. Do what I did. Then schedule a demo with us and request the demo. Either myself or one of our sales or support team will be on a call with you to help walk you through any questions you have. Then begin sending notifications: opt in and send yourself some notifications and see what's working. I think there's a key phrase there as well, for existing clients as much as new ones: if you're an existing client, optimize. If you see all this and think, "This isn't getting many clicks, this isn't optimal," tweak it a little bit, add a different emoji, use different images, whatever, and then adjust your strategy.

08Questions from attendees

Okay, cool. Questions here. First: can I install with GTM? GTM is Google Tag Manager. Yes, you can. If we go to the tracking code here and the installation steps, adding the tracking code you can do via Google Tag Manager. It's fairly straightforward, and if you're familiar with Google Tag Manager you'll know how to do that. But the uploading of the service worker file you'll still have to do outside of it, into your root directory. The reason for that is your service worker file enables off-site sending. It allows Aimtell to send if you're not on your site, so it's absolutely crucial for deliverability and you need to make sure that's on. But yes, you can still use Google Tag Manager.

Another one is about timing: when should I send automatic notifications? A great question. That's going to be different for every vertical and different for every campaign, so there's no one answer that fits all here. Unfortunately I wish there was, but there isn't. But here's some advice I can give you. Timing is key, so always be thinking about it when you create your new campaign. The second thing is to opt in to your site, and over time you'll see what notifications are sent and when. Begin to use that to your advantage. Think about the user experience, think about when you'd want your abandoned cart notification to come through, and think about the most opportune time for you to purchase clothes or whatever that may be. And just so you know, welcome notifications almost always work better when they're sent immediately, so always send welcome notifications immediately. That's just another one on timing.

I don't see any more questions in here, so I'm just going to give it a second as I close out, in case anyone else wants to ask any more. And like I said, if you are a brand new user and you're wondering how to get started, you want to use the code "best webinar". You can use that in settings. This is for new users here. Obviously I'm on a team plan, but you'll be the team owner, and there'll be a button in settings that says Add Billing Information. You can click on Add Promo Code down at the bottom and you'll be able to get all of that.

I'm also uploading the handout that I used today. It's the Aimtell webinar beginner's guide. You can download that yourself and follow along with the guide to get installed. Okay, great. I don't see anyone asking any more questions, so I'm going to close this one out. We're going to be having a few more webinars coming up in the next few weeks, so watch this space. We'll make sure you are optimizing and getting the fullest experience you can have with Aimtell. Thank you so much for tuning in. The code is "best webinar", one word, for brand new users. Thank you so much, see you all, stay safe, bye bye.