Creating Automated Web Push Notifications

01Automated campaign types overview

Welcome. Today we're going to be talking about automated campaigns, the benefits of them and what they all are. There are a few different types of campaigns, and they range in complexity and in depth. But they are all set-it-and-forget-it, easy ways to add value to your business through push notifications without much work. I'm going to start by showing my screen here.

02Repeating manual notifications

I think I'm going to jump right in. Probably the easiest way to do an automated campaign is to set up a manual notification and set it to repeat. We've got a lot of variety here, but I've made a quick one. You build out your body and your title however you want, add action buttons, whatever it is. The targeting and the conversions we'll go over on Thursday. Then we come to this section here. If you want to set up a manual repeating notification, you just need to set this to true. You can set the frequency here, and you can set an end date if you want to.

It's worth noting that there are a few pros and cons. The pro is that you can do a lot of targeting. For instance, let's say you want to set a repeating notification to hit everyone who hasn't been to your site in 30 days. You could do that in here. You could create a segment, which I'm sure we'll go over in another webinar, create a simple segment, target those people and set it to go out weekly. Very simple, and that's a good pro. The con is that it's not dynamic. It doesn't react to a user on your website. Whenever you set it up, that's when it's going to be sent out.

03Setting up welcome notifications

With that being said, I want to jump right into some of the real automated campaigns. We'll start with the most simple and then go to more complex ones, but as you get more complex, more customization options open up. By far our most simple and, in my opinion, most effective notification is our welcome push notification, which, as you can imagine, gets sent out as a welcome for driving to your site. It can be very simple, like this one. This took me two minutes to type out.

There are two things I want to talk about with welcome notifications: icons and images, and the link that you use. With icons and images, it's very important that you use good colors and good images. It takes up real estate on your subscribers' screens and it draws attention. If you're using monotone gray colors or darker colors, chances are most people aren't going to see them or notice them. So using good icons, using good images, and even using emojis is another good way to add attention-grabbing color. I haven't used any here, but good emojis help.

The second thing is the link. Give it a second thought. I just linked to the Aimtell blog here, but think about where you want to be linking to. If you're a publisher, maybe you want to link to your highest converting lead page. If you're a hotel or in hospitality, maybe you want to send people immediately to the booking page of your favorite hotel. If you're e-commerce, maybe you want to send them to sales or something like that. The reason is that most of the time the click-through rates on welcome notifications are the highest of any campaign, simply because someone opts in, immediately gets a push, and usually clicks on it.

Once you've set it up like this, you click on activate. This one's already active, and you can view the results here and see the clicks start to flood in. This should take you two minutes to set up, if that, and maybe a little bit longer if you want to get a good image. It's a super easy way to add value.

04RSS feed notifications

The second most simple automated notification is RSS notifications. To do RSS notifications, all you need is an RSS feed URL or link. I've made a little example here. nasa.gov has a bunch of different RSS feeds that are publicly available, and I've just pulled one of them. I'll get rid of this so you can see there's nothing in there. You put one in, click refresh, and it will dynamically pull a title, a body and a link from your RSS feed, from your content. This title, body and link will then be used in the actual notification. So whatever the title, body and link are here, that's what will be in the notification.

You could technically choose a recipient (we'll come back to this), click on save right now, and that's all you need to do. However, I like to do a little bit of customization. If you're doing a video RSS feed, maybe you want to say "watch". If the body is very long, you could do something like "click here to watch more". You can again use emojis and things like this. You can also add action buttons, so if you're linking to a YouTube RSS feed, you can add a one-click subscribe URL here as well, like "click here to subscribe". The sky is really the limit. This took two minutes to set up. Again, it's important to get a good icon, and an image as well if you want one. Then select the recipients you want to send to.

Probably the most important thing about RSS feeds is this setting right here. Some news sites are sending 50 articles a day on particular RSS feed URLs, and you don't want your subscribers receiving 50 notifications per day. Maybe you want to send five a day. This particular RSS feed is weekly, as you can see from the dates, so it isn't going to matter much. But you can choose your maximum number, so one a day, or one an hour, or whatever you want. You click on save, and that will now be working and will automatically send out notifications. This is a fantastic way to set it and forget it with minimal work.

05Triggered notifications and custom events

The third type of automated notification that I want to highlight today is probably our most complex, or I should say it could be the most complex, and that is our triggered notifications. There are a lot of different types of triggered notifications that you could potentially do, and I've listed a few here as examples. A triggered notification can be described like this: you define a trigger, and once that trigger is pulled, a notification is automatically sent for you. That trigger can be anything, but it's based on tracked custom events.

If we go to our documentation center here, tracking custom events requires a category and an action, and these other three are optional. The category could be video and the action could be watched. The category could be PDF and the action could be downloaded. It could be URL visited, or cart abandoned. The sky is really the limit here, and we've left this deliberately open-ended. There are two ways to track custom events: using a simple JavaScript code, or using our API. The API is a little bit more advanced. If you have a dev team, you should definitely check out our public-facing API. We're very, very proud of it, and it's accessible at aimtell.com/api, so you can have a look at that.

For most people, though, this is what you're going to be using. All you do is set a category and set an action. If you want to, you can add a label, a value, or even variables to make it as granular or as open-ended as you want. You create this code and put the script on your website. Once it begins to track those events, you can verify that they're happening down here in the custom event logs. On this example site, a few events have already been tracked as examples. You can see "subscribe to push notification clicked". We're going to come back to those. You can see there are a few more custom actions here too, and like I said, they are very open. Here's one, "video watched", and you can see that the video watched had the label "blue" and the event value one. So we can go as granular as this.

Once the events are tracked and begin to show up in the event log, you can simply go to triggered notifications. I've already made a simple one here. You would do whatever you want here, but I've made a very, very simple notification with an action button to our YouTube channel, linking to our home site. We want to set the trigger to be "video watched". This would pull the trigger whenever the category and action was "video watched". But let's say we only want it to fire for that particular one that we saw in the event log. We would set the label to "blue", and if we wanted to, we could set the value to one. So now you can see how granular this is. It would only fire for that event. If we want it to fire for any video, we can just leave those blank. You can see how granular and how specific you can get in there.

You can also set up conversion tracking, which we'll go over more on Thursday. Here is something very important: you can set a time delay. When the trigger is pulled, you can have the notification sent 15 minutes later, for example. With that you can also do segmentation and targeting. If they've already watched the video and already received a notification, you can create a segment for that. The sky's the limit with this. It's a little bit of a more advanced feature, but it's a new feature and it's very, very useful.

Like I said, triggered notifications are going to be different for each vertical. That was just an example of how to set one up. For e-commerce, maybe you want to do something like an abandoned cart, an item shipped, a checkout, or new sales. Maybe you're an agency and you're tracking PDF downloads. Maybe you're a hotel or a travel site and you want to track a visit to a confirmation page or a landing page, and send notifications to remind people to book. Maybe you're in sports and gaming and you do registration, or they entered their email, so you want to make sure you can send them email drips. There are a lot of different variations, but like I said, the easiest way to understand it is that you need to begin tracking events, which will populate the logs, and once the event logs begin to populate, you can use those events in campaigns.

06Shopify and default events

There are two things I want to touch on here. If you're using a Shopify integration or the Shopify app, we automatically collect a lot of these for you. You don't have to do any of the work, so it's even easier, and possibly we'll go over that in another webinar. It will literally take you two minutes to turn on. You input the content, input the links, and everything else is automatically tracked for you. It's as simple as turning on the notification.

There are also two default events that we can track for you, but we have them off. To access them, you go to websites here, click on edit, click on misc settings, and you can turn these two things on. Remember those events I showed you? They are off by default, but you can turn them on, and then this will track notification clicks and subscriptions as events. If you wanted to do a much more complex welcome notification, that is how you do it, and here you can do a welcome drip or anything like that.

07Integrations and wrap up

Okay, the last thing I want to touch on before we close out today is our integrations. We've got a wide variety of integrations that you can just turn on, and I think it's probably one of our most overlooked features, but it has the most potential. For instance, if you've got a Mailchimp account and that is your ESP, and you're sending out emails twice a day or something like that, and you're not seeing the conversions, or you just want to reach your customer base better, you can link your Mailchimp account with your Aimtell account and automatically send out push notifications based on the emails that you're sending. It's worth searching for whatever integration you want. We've got a lot of them on here, and you can begin to see some of the integrations available to you.

In closing, I just want to say that we've got a great depth to all of our automated notifications, ranging in their customizable options. The beauty of them is that you can set it and forget it, for every vertical, no matter what you do. It's a way to add value with your notifications with minimal effort. One of our clients is an e-commerce site and they use abandoned cart notifications. Someone abandons a cart, and you can send them a notification that sends them straight back to the cart. They've generated almost $75,000 off ten minutes of work over six months. So there is a lot of potential value, and they were able to track that through our conversion tracking, which, like I said, will be covered next Thursday.

To close up, here are some links. If you need help creating a triggered push campaign, you can go to our documentation at aimtell.com and search for "trigger push campaigns", and this will help you get started. We've also got a selection of automation examples here. Here are a couple of them. You can see here I set up an abandoned cart and things like that, and there are a lot of different ones available, like viewing your specific page. I think that's enough for today. I'm not noticing any questions being asked, so that's fine. There's going to be a survey, and once this is done, if you want to go over any more topics, let us know. We hope to see you all again. Thank you for tuning in.