Web Push Best Practices for Bloggers and Publishers

01Welcome and webinar overview

Hello, welcome to another Aimtell webinar. My name is Zack, and I'm your host today. I'm going to be going over some best practices for bloggers, publishers, content and news sites, and things like that. Hopefully I can give you some strategies and best practices, and some things to improve your usage of Aimtell.

So what is Aimtell? Aimtell is a web push notification platform. We can send notifications based on your domain and get your users re-engaged. At the moment, content is very valuable. Some data is showing that on average people are spending three to four or more hours a day on their phones, more than when they were outside, and obviously everyone's quarantined at the moment, so everyone's in front of devices and in front of their phones. So now is the time to begin engaging your user base and the people who visit your site, and making sure that you are engaging with that growth.

There's a lot I want to cover today. It's going to be about 25 minutes, or that's what I'm aiming for. If you've got any questions, feel free to use the questions panel in GoToWebinar that you'll see, and if you want to ask anything, I'll try to reach them at the end. Okay, great.

02RSS feed automation for publishers

What are some of our best features that can be used for content sites? There are a lot of different things you can use, but by far the most valuable is our RSS feeds. RSS notifications are very simple and easy to set up, and all you need is an RSS URL. Once you have that, you can put it into our RSS notifications, build out the notification, and it will send automatically. You build the campaign, this is where you put the RSS feed URL in, and then you can begin to send out the notifications. So this is what it looks like, just a quick recap here. RSS feeds, automatic notifications, dynamic links, here we go. You can use a title in the body. This should all take you roughly ten minutes, so it's a fantastic way to do it, and if you're updating your content, think about all of those opportunities to send out notifications and get the latest content out there. It takes ten minutes.

Now, targeting is where it gets a little bit more advanced. You can begin to track things for subscribers, like page views and category clicks. For instance, on this BBC News site, let's say I click on the tech category. I'm viewing a page of technology, or this video, or if I wanted to look at a UK-specific one, all of these things can be tracked, used in segmentation, and then used to target. If you're a bigger news site and you've got loads of different categories and multiple RSS feeds (there's no limit on the RSS feeds that you can set up), the targeting drives your click-through rates through the roof. You won't believe it. The fact that people are only getting the ones they want to see drives clicks up. You could also use RSS feeds for different or external sites. You can use YouTube ones, so if you've got a YouTube channel or an Instagram or whatever, anything that has an RSS feed is usable in the Aimtell platform. It takes twenty minutes to set up, it'll lower your cost per click dramatically, and it's so simple that anyone can do it.

03Triggered notifications and drips

Okay, the next one we want to jump into stays in the same vein of automated notifications. A few more people have joined as well, so welcome. We've just covered RSS feeds, and we're going to cover some other automatic notifications here. Most of our automatic notifications are based out of our triggered notifications tab, but there are a few possibilities with integrations, so I'll cover triggered notifications first.

Triggered notifications are based off events, and these events can be tracked. We track a few for you, and you can begin tracking them yourself. I'm not going to go into too much detail on how to do that on this one, but it's fairly straightforward. It's a little tracking snippet, you can define one to be whatever you want, and then they'll begin tracking. You can then use those tracked events either as conversions or as a trigger to send notifications. That could be multiple things. It could be a PDF being downloaded, a video being watched, or a page being viewed. What are some of the other things? They visited a specific landing page, they entered their email, they clicked on a button. The sky is the limit. Triggered notifications can then be used to send a second notification based on an initial event.

Some use cases for content sites: the best one I can think of is a page view drip, and we'll cover another very popular one, a welcome drip, later on in the webinar. For instance, let's say someone views a specific page. Not only do they get the RSS notifications, but you can then send them a specific notification based on that. You can set that up to go wherever you want, and you can set up as many as you want, with a time delay and things like that. You can also do it off an RSS notification, so we'll just jump into that from here.

Let's say we're assuming you've set up an RSS feed. We want the trigger to be the notification clicked, and then you can set it up as the RSS feed, imagine an RSS feed with the ID 1234. Let's say someone clicks on an RSS notification, and you can set up this notification to be however you want. It's very simple. I set this up just for the webinar, and this will send every time someone clicks on the notification. It's a fantastic way to make sure that people who are curious about that content are getting the relevant content. It's just another next step you can take to make sure you're getting the right content in front of the right people.

You can even do something like a click-out drip. If you earn money on getting people from your site to other sites, you can put that in the URL of these clicks. Say they click out and you track the original click-out. You can send another notification clicking them out again, and that's twice the revenue for the same amount of work. So that's an overview of triggered notifications. We'll come back and cover welcome notifications in a second.

I also want to cover our integrations, as I said earlier. Not only can you set up automatic notifications based off events, you can also use things like Instagram or Facebook to get notifications sent out automatically. We've got a lot of different integrations. For Instagram, you can click on this here, it uses Instagram's API, so anything that's on Instagram we can work with. For instance, if a new media item is posted, say someone uploads a new image, you can send a push notification. It takes two minutes to set up, and I kid you not, when I help clients that way (I'm part of the client success team), when I help clients build out and give them optimizations, nine times out of ten they have zero integrations set up. It takes minutes to do, and it's so simple to get your marketing streams streamlined. We've got Facebook and a lot of other ones as well.

We also have a lot of ESP integrations for email. Let's look at email here, because you can see all of these different things that we use. So there's MailChimp, and you can connect them all up and make sure they're all in the same place. Klaviyo is another one that is very popular, and we've got an integration with that. We also have SMS feeds. So have a look in there. It's so simple to set up, and it's absolutely worthwhile.

04Segmentation and targeting options

Okay, so that's a lot of different things when it comes to automatic notifications. What else can we do? I touched briefly on it, but our segmentation is by far one of the most valuable things that we offer here at Aimtell. It's a competitive edge, and it's so deep, there's so much to it, and it's very useful for insights as well as targeting. There are three things I want to touch on when it comes to segmentation that I think are very valuable for content sites: the first is categories, the second is device type, and the third is location. You want to be segmenting based on those three things.

Categories, or the interests of users. For instance, we talked about the sports RSS feed. A segment you could make would be whether they visited any page URL that had the word "sport" in it. You could then use this for insights, to see how many of your users are interested in sport, which is a good thing to know. But you can also use this in targeting, to make sure that these people are getting the relevant content. Categories and interests are a super easy one.

The second one is device type. If we go back here to segmentation and click on mobile, by default we track mobile or desktop for you, so you can see device type here, mobile or desktop. You can use that in the notifications that you're sending. Send mobile notifications to users on Android or other mobile devices, and it increases your click-through rate. Or do the same for desktop, for Macs or whatever it may be.

The last one I want to touch on is location. We track location for you by default, and you can use this to segment but also to target. For instance, you might want to send a notification saying "Hot breaking news in California." You can take the segment and target people based on that. It's very simple, but it can drastically increase your clicks and lower your CPC. So that's segmentation. There's a lot to it, but those are the three areas I wanted to cover.

05Welcome drip and content strategies

We're going to transition now from some of our best features to strategies and different things you can do. I said we touched on the welcome drip. Welcome notifications are notifications that are sent when a user opts in to your site. If you don't have one set up, it should be the number one thing to do, as well as your RSS notifications. If you've got the feed, always do your RSS as well. You can do simple welcome notifications on the Welcome Notification tab, but I'd recommend you start using the triggered notifications. We've got a very simple template that you can use, Welcome Push 1 and Welcome Push 2. Welcome Push 1 will be sent immediately, and Welcome Push 2 will be sent one day later after opting in.

All you do is view the template and use it. It will then move into your triggered notifications, and you edit it for your brand. You add in an image, you change the icon, maybe you change the wording, and you want to change all the links to make sure they go to the right place. Think about where you want your visitors to be going and where you want to direct them. Everything else is automatically set up. The trigger should be "visitor subscribed to push," and that's all it needs to be. We're not tracking any conversions, and there you go, it's all set up, easy peasy. You activate it, and this notification will be sent when someone opts in to your site.

You can then stagger them, so we've got one for day 0 and one for 1 day later. I've had clients who did seven or eight notifications spanning over about two weeks, and they were getting insane click-through rates all the way up to the end. It depends on your vertical and your niche, but it's a great way to get that user engagement straight out of the gate.

Another strategy I'd recommend is personalizing the content. For instance, if someone views a page on your site, use that in the way you target them and send notifications. Categories and page views are some of the best ways to do that. Clicking on entertainment and arts is drastically different from being interested in business, so making sure that they aren't getting spammed with notifications that aren't relevant to them is vital. We'll cover frequency capping later on in the webinar. I'll also cover notification timing along with frequency capping.

Then there's segmented content and new content. Again, we're hammering home segmentation. Not only can you use segmentation to get relevant content out, you can use it to make sure new users or old users are getting the new content. Something you could possibly do is make different segments based on when they clicked or when they subscribed, and then send notifications on that. The content is so key, and so is making sure that relevant content is sent to people. Opt-in incentives I'll cover last, as I think that makes a good last topic. First, notification timing and frequency capping.

06Timing and frequency capping

Timing is key. Why do I say that? Most of the time, when people get to a point where they can send out notifications, the next step is asking "why aren't my clicks higher?" Well, I take a look and they're sending at 11:47 in the morning or 3 a.m., and they're not thinking about when they're getting the content in front of people. It's different for every vertical and every niche. If you're a news site, you maybe want to be sending out your notifications at 6 a.m., 7 a.m., or 8 a.m., when your users are waking up. Hit them with a drip every day, and you want to be sending those notifications so that as they're waking up, making their coffee, and picking up their phone, the headlines are already in front of them. You've really thought about it and sent it out. You can do that with our time zone feature, so it's global as well. But timing is so key. The 6, 7, or 8 a.m. slot for a news site is going to get much higher click-through rates than 2 p.m. in the afternoon, or 3 a.m. when they're asleep, or when they're at work and not checking the headlines. Just giving 10 minutes of thought to when you want to send can make all the difference in how your notification click-through rates improve.

Frequency capping as well. I know I touched on that a little bit earlier. A very common question we have here at Aimtell is "I want to make sure my users aren't getting fatigued with my content." Absolutely, great question. How do you do that? We've got state-of-the-art technology to make sure that you aren't fatiguing any of your users. The most simple and basic is our website-level frequency capping, where you can set a customizable limit on your frequency. It's under Websites, Edit, and Misc Settings, and all it is here is the daily push frequency cap. You can set this to zero, which means no limit, or you can put it at 3. That means that no matter what, no matter how many automatic notifications are set up, they will only get 3 notifications a day. You could have 10 triggered drips, you could have 15 RSS notifications updating twice a day, you can do all of that, but they will only get 3 notifications a day, to protect your user. Again, it's different for every vertical, and you want to make sure you're optimizing that.

The next level down is campaign-specific frequency capping. RSS notifications by default have a frequency cap in their settings. That means this YouTube one here is only going to send one a day no matter what, even if you update it. This is absolutely crucial for news sites. For instance, the BBC feed that we were looking at updates its content every minute, so that's a lot of different notifications. You can see here the rate at which they update, which is four times in an hour. So we set the limit to be two a day for this particular campaign. Again, it's different for every vertical and every type of content, so that's where you can get as granular as that.

You can even go one step further and begin to put frequency caps on users. For this one, what you could do is use "days since last click" and set it to less than one day, so you exclude people from notifications to make sure that they're not getting spammed. This is obviously a bit extreme, but I wanted to make you aware of it.

07Custom opt-in strategy

The last thing I want to go over before we jump into some questions (I can see some questions here) is the opt-in. This is highly strategic, and again, different for every brand. Opt-in prompts are completely customizable. You can make them look however you want. You can have a native one, which is the browser one here, or you can have a custom one, which is a two-click prompt. It's customizable, you can make it all you want, and you can even tie it to JavaScript on your site. It's a great way to customize it and bring some strategy in there. Maybe you're a content site and you do podcasts, and you want to put a picture of your face next to it. Or you sell sunglasses, for instance, and you want to put a picture of some sunglasses on there and build out that UI and UX journey.

Some things to note, though. Generally, if you don't think about a custom opt-in, the native opt-in prompt will have a higher opt-in percentage. However, if you have a great strategy and you've thought about it, and you make it relevant and eye-catching, which is the point of this for your users, it will always beat the native opt-in prompt. So you just have to think about it and give it a little bit of work, and it's different for every vertical.

Okay, so we've covered a lot there. We covered automatic notifications, the RSS feed, segmentation, and even some basic welcome drips and some strategies for you.

08Q&A from attendees

I have some questions here. I can see one from Justin, which is "What about different browser languages?" That's a great question. By default we track browser languages and automatically assign that to the user, so you can see it in subscribers and then in the users. This one is English (US). Now, how do you use that? I would create a segment based on this information and then begin to use that segment to target people. You can use that in the RSS feed, so you can have an English RSS feed and a Spanish, French, or German one, wherever it may be, and use that to target. We've got full support if you want to use multilingual campaigns. You can create an English campaign, a Spanish campaign, and so on and so forth. It doesn't translate automatically, just so you're aware, but yes, you can definitely use that to your advantage. That's a great question.

I also see another question here from Jordan, asking whether the data on the overview is real-time. That's a great question, and it brings me to talking about the logs. The overview updates about every one to two hours, and you can see when it was last updated. If you want the most accurate real-time information, I'd start looking at the logs down at the bottom here. The logs, custom events here, you can export them, and they are absolutely real-time, so you can explore them and analyze them in a third-party app. The overview is about one to two hours. Segmentation updates dynamically every one to two hours, and the campaigns and RSS update within minutes, sometimes seconds, depending on the load.

So there are some great questions there. Now I want to give a chance for anyone to ask if they've got any other questions, or any specific strategies they want me to touch on, just before we wrap it up and I give the recap of the webinar. Thank you so much, by the way, for attending. I see there are definitely a few more people who've joined, so I really appreciate that. Let's give it a second to see if anyone else wants to ask anything.

Okay, well, let's give a quick recap and then we'll close it out. In this webinar we covered RSS feeds and automated notifications. They're all automatic. To do RSS you just need an RSS feed, whether that's internal to your domain or an external site like YouTube or Instagram. You can put those feeds into the dashboard and begin sending notifications with minimal effort. You can have a lot of different types of automatic notifications, whether that's triggered or through an external integration like Facebook or Twitter, or your ESP or your SMS provider. You can begin to combine your marketing efforts and work that way. We've got the best segmentation on the market right now, and the sky is really the limit with it. You can begin to get very granular with your users and what you're sending.

Some specific strategies are welcome notifications, which are so simple and easy to do. For triggered notifications, you use a template, you edit it for your brand, and it's all done and dusted. And the integrations are there for the other ones. You can personalize and get new segmented content out to people as quickly as possible, combining the segments and the automated features. We also talked about notification timing and frequency capping, and why it's important to set those up to protect your user base and make sure you have a strategy. Last, we covered the opt-in and all of the different things that are possible to improve your opt-in percentage.

Oh, I just saw a question come through: what is the average number of notifications publishers usually send? Again, it's different for every vertical and it depends on how much you segment. The sky is really the limit here. If you're talking about a daily average, it varies, obviously, with subscriber count. I would say a good place to start would be maybe three or four different triggered campaigns and maybe a manual campaign, in combination with your RSS feeds. If you're setting your RSS feeds to send out one a day, that's definitely going to be one. Then you've got your manual notification, that's two. And if you say the average trigger being pulled is one in four, which is about average, that's about three notifications a day, with one manual, one RSS feed (segmented, that's really important), and then a couple of triggered notifications. So I hope that answers your question. About three to four notifications to each user every day is a good plan.

Just to touch on that before we close, it heavily ties into frequency capping. If you're getting users who are saying "oh, that's too much," then you can adjust it back. A good tip, and this is just a general tip, if you're curious about whether you're sending too much or too little: opt in to your own site. If you haven't opted in, opt in, because you'll begin to see all of the automatic notifications you send, and it's a good way to test whether they work and how they look as well. Opt in to your site and you can see if it's too little or too much.

Okay, any other questions before I close out? I'm going to give one last chance. Since we don't have anything else, I'm going to close it out. Thank you all for joining. I don't see anything else, so in that case, thank you so much, and we hope to see you at another webinar. See you.