Web Push Best Practices for Retail and Ecommerce

01Why web push for ecommerce

Welcome, everyone. We're doing best practices today, but to cover some basics first: why web push? I've covered a few things here. It's instant engagement, and it's probably one of the best marketing tools out there for retention and bringing users back onto your site. When you work with Aimtell, you can add a lot of different personalization options, like first name and last name, and dynamically pulling in images from things that people might be looking at. It's also a lot cheaper for user acquisition and retention compared to email or even SMS. It's way, way, way cheaper.

So what are web push notifications? Again, very simple, just the basics at the start. They are notifications that come across your mobile device, your laptop, your screen, whatever it is. It's right there in front of your face, and you don't have to go into any inbox or anything like that. Like I said, it's a new way to engage your customers. While it might not be brand new, it is still less than a couple of years old.

There's usually a higher click-through rate than email. It's a one-click opt-in process, where you get a little opt-in prompt at the top left. Like I said before, it's extremely cost effective compared to email or SMS, and it's supported natively on desktop and mobile, so people don't need to install anything. The only one it doesn't work on is Apple iOS, but believe me, as soon as Apple releases that feature, we will be on it. It's very easy to set up with a JavaScript tracking code or a service worker. If you've got WordPress or Shopify, it's even easier. You begin to collect subscribers, and that's it.

02Segmenting your shoppers

Jumping into some of the best practices and what you're able to do through Aimtell, the first thing I see ecommerce sites not doing, I should say, is using our segmentation features. We are very proud of them here at Aimtell, and they provide a lot of different customizable options for you. Segmentation isn't just for targeting. It can also be used for insights into how your ecommerce is doing and what it's up to. Segmentation works on automatically tracked data points that we check for you, and also on things that you want to set up, whether that's custom events or attributes you can begin to track.

For example, you can see a little example here: they visited a cart page, but they didn't visit the success page. What that means is that they didn't complete the order in the last 30 days. Not only can you then use this to target people and get them back on your site, you can also use it for insight. Okay, they are dropping off on this particular page, or whatever it may be.

If we jump into a dashboard over here, this is an older example site that we've built. I built a very simple segment here for people who visited any page URL that contains the word "dress". This was an old women's fashion site. They visited any page that had the word "dress" in it, but they didn't purchase, so we can track the custom events here. You can see there are 19,000 people here who are interested in dresses but haven't purchased yet. Not only is this good insight into how many people are viewing those pages, you can also use it in targeting.

It is very, very deep, and there's a lot of potential with segmentation. You can see this is just automatically tracked data. Whether you want to do it by city or location, or by whether they click on notifications, you can even do days since last click to do some retention efforts. We have device info as well. You can go even deeper into segments with the custom events and attributes that you can track. There is so much potential with segmentation. It is very, very deep, and I'd highly recommend you have a look at it. I want to touch on this in another webinar, because the sky's the limit, but I'm just giving you a rough overview of it.

03Action buttons and engagement

Jumping back into this PDF that we've got going on here, the next best practice I want to talk about is action buttons. This is for two very simple reasons. First of all, action buttons make the goal that you want the subscriber to accomplish easier. It gives them buttons to click on, which always makes it easier. But it also increases the real estate that is taken up on the screen. If you go to our documentation here and search for how my notification is going to look, you can begin to see this one without action buttons and without any images. It's just in the bottom right-hand corner. Let me close that out. Now look at one with action buttons and a large image. The size difference is incredible.

Believe it or not, simply doing this increases your click-through ratio quite dramatically. It's easier for the subscriber to complete the goal, meaning clicking on the notification, and it's also bigger, so there's more to click on. Another very easy way is to use these little things down here: emojis. Yesterday I had a notification come through on my desktop, and it had the Facebook reactions, like the angry face or the like button or the heart. My eyes were immediately drawn to it, and I actually thought, wow, that really pulled my attention. Colorful emojis and colorful images, along with making sure your wording is snappy or quirky or something like that, really do help get people clicking on your notification. So making sure that you're incorporating action buttons is highly, highly important.

04Automated and abandoned cart notifications

Here's the big one: automated notifications. Again, with segmentation, these can go as advanced or as deep as you want them to be, but they can also be very simple to set up with massive returns. I've drawn up some on the screen. You can see we've got welcome notifications, or welcome drip notifications. Whether you want to send a notification to someone who subscribes to your site, or send them a welcome promo code, and then hit them a day later with another one, even a week later, you can do that. You can send abandoned cart notifications, as in "Hey, you left something in your cart." You can send abandoned order or even abandoned funnel notifications to retain users.

There are also order updates, whether that's an item shipped, an item purchased, or an item confirmation with your confirmation link. Even if there's been a problem or a delivery update, you can get them back to your site really quickly, much quicker than email, actually. You can upsell and cross-sell products, and you can do that pre- and post-purchase as well. That's a really clever one which we don't see many people use, but it's a very big ROI. One client, off the top of my head, does an upselling notification after people have purchased, and they've made $30,000 in three months in additional revenue on top of the original sale. You can also automatically send out new sales, discount and promotion announcements, or weekly "we think you might like" posts.

We saw in this segment here that if someone visited a page with "dress" in it but didn't go on to purchase, then when someone goes into this segment, you can send them a notification saying, "Hey, we think you might like this dress," since they've shown interest. Another very simple one is to send a thank-you notification for subscribing, or for purchasing. Send them a thank you saying, "Here, have 20% off your next order," or whatever it may be. The point is that it's minimal effort to set up the campaign, but it can bring in literally thousands of dollars through upselling and retention, whatever that may be.

A notification I want to show you quickly is an abandoned cart, and how easy it is to set up. Again, we're working off custom events, so we've got an example right here. To track abandoned carts, you're going to need to do two things. You're going to need to place an abandoned cart listening snippet on your cart page, and then you're going to need to place a cart completion listener on your thank-you or completion page. If you've got a dev team, or you are a dev, you'll understand that you can dynamically update some of these features on the back end, and you can describe values and things like that.

All that means is that a user visits your cart page and we listen for that, but they don't visit the cart completion page. That pings a custom event on the back end of Aimtell, which you can then set and define as a trigger. For Shopify, just as a side note, if you're a Shopify user, we do all of this automatically for you. If you're not using Shopify, just follow those simple steps I shared, and you can begin to send these notifications very simply.

So you set the trigger to be cart abandoned, and then when someone abandons a cart, we'll send this notification. You link to the checkout, and it will dynamically update. You track conversions, which we'll come to in a second, but most of the time that's going to be items purchased here. Then you can set a few settings, like how soon after the cart was abandoned it goes out, whether you want auto hide, who you want to target, and so on and so forth. It can be as advanced or as basic as you want. You track the events, and it doesn't have to be an abandoned cart here. You can track whatever you want. If you want to track a custom event and set that as the trigger, you can do that, whether that's a PDF being downloaded, a form being submitted, a video being watched, whatever it may be. You can set your trigger to be whatever you want it to be, based on the custom events that you're tracking.

A simple setup, well, I say simple, it's a little bit more complex but very effective, and this is just to expand your mind on this, would be to set up an automatic campaign to be sent out weekly to new users who subscribe that week. You set up a segment, and you set up a repeating campaign that you send out. Then you've got a trigger notification waiting on the back end, so that if someone clicks on that weekly notification, you automatically send them another notification six hours later. All of a sudden you're beginning to build that engagement base. You can start to see who's more active and who's not active, and you can grow your engagement a lot, lot quicker.

Just to jump in here, I'm going to try to answer questions at the end. I see a couple of questions coming in, so I'll reach them at the end, but if you've got any questions, feel free to use the GoToWebinar question-and-answer feature, and I will be more than happy to answer your questions at the end if we've got time to reach them. I want to keep this to around 20 to 25 minutes to honor your time and not overload you, but we also want to give you as much as we can in that time.

05Conversion tracking and revenue

The next best practice is conversion tracking. If you're not tracking your conversions, it's very simple to do. It's pretty similar to tracking custom events, and you just have to define that event as a conversion. We have our own in-house conversion tracking based on any event that you track. In most cases in ecommerce it's most likely going to be item purchased, but it could be something like samples sent, an email address being given, or an SMS number being given. That's the beauty of our tracking: you can define it to be whatever you want. You can even ascribe dollar amounts. You can dynamically add dollar amounts, and you can dynamically add item names and labels and things like that. It's all done through the coding on the back end. If you have any more questions about specifics on that, please reach out to me afterward and I'll be more than happy to help you.

If we look at an example campaign, we'll jump back into this here. You can see some click-through ratios and conversions. You can see here that this campaign has had 15 conversions, so we'll look at the results. We can see that we've ascribed a dollar amount, and this campaign has generated $1,400. This is a fake account where we've manually loaded it in, but it gives you some numbers. For an abandoned cart campaign, you'll probably look at about a 6 to 7 percent click-through ratio, and your dollar amounts are obviously going to vary based on whatever you're selling.

But off the top of my head, there's one client I saw in the past week who, within three months of having this set up, generated fifty thousand dollars in automatic notifications. They were selling blinds, window blinds, and the notifications just sent people back to the site to the cart they had abandoned. Whether they went and made a coffee, or closed out accidentally, or forgot, that was fifty thousand dollars, and it took them 20 minutes to set up. That pays for a lot of our service, so it's very, very worthwhile to begin to track those conversions and see what's working.

We've got a little conversion view up here, where obviously we're selling yellow duckies and very expensive blue duckies. You can download the conversion results and have a look at what's working for you. It's also worth knowing, and I've got it open in the documentation center here if you're unsure, how to track the events and define the conversion. Let me pull it up. Where are we? There we go. Going into the edit version tabs, you need to make sure that tracking conversions is on, and you want to select whatever you're tracking. In this case we want item purchased, and there you go. It's as easy as that once you're tracking those events.

06Integrations and what to avoid

We've also got quite a few additional features that I, unfortunately, don't have time for. I'm just looking at the clock, and we don't have much more time to go into them, but you can see some of them here. You can import subscribers, so if you're new and you're with someone else, you can import any subscribers. We also do monthly feature releases. This month, in the next few business days, we're bringing out templates to automatically make notifications for you, which is going to make it even easier. You'll have a template, you click on use template, you change the links, you change the images to be your brand, and bish bash bosh, you'll start sending notifications.

We also have a lot of different integrations available to you. We use an API, so obviously if there's anything on Zapier, we have an integration with it. For example, with Instagram we've got notifications, so if you make a new post, or you've got a good social media presence, we've got Facebook too. That could be whatever you want, or if you're using a CRM on the back end to track customers or anything like that, we've got these things here, so have a look in there. I'm sure there are a lot of valuable things. We also have our unique relationship with Shopify, where we have automatically built a lot of different things on the back end for you. If you've got Shopify, it's even easier to track conversions and set up those notifications.

I've said a lot of do's in this webinar, but I just want to share a quick don't. Don't spam your audience with notifications. Protect your brand, be deliberate, and strategize about what you want to be sending your user base. I'm not saying that to make you afraid to send notifications, but if you're sending 20, 30, 50 a day, you might be selling a little bit too much. Just to give you a little peace of mind, we've got a lot of different frequency cap settings to make sure that you're not sending out too many notifications, whether that's in automatic notifications or in hard-coded frequency caps. You can access that very simply by clicking on Websites, selecting the website you want to edit the frequency cap for, going to Misc Settings, and then you've got a frequency cap here that you can edit and look into.

07Q&A from attendees

I think that covers a lot of what I wanted to talk about today. I see some questions here, the first from Jordan. Thanks, Jordan, for asking the question. The question is: what if we send people out to another domain, can we track stuff on there? Good question. The short answer is yes. Let's say your site is yoursite.com and you've got an ecommerce site that is store.yoursite.com. All you need to do is click on this little button, cross-domain tracking, and create a little cross-domain tracking pixel. Item purchased might be the thing you want to track, but it could be video watched, PDF downloaded, whatever it may be. You just copy and paste this and place it on the appropriate domain, and it will then ascribe those tracked events back to the original domain.

The next question, which looks like it's from Timmy, is: what do we automatically track for you? That's a good question. We track a lot of stuff. Let me pull up the documentation if I can find it. It's under automatically collected data, so that's what we want to look at. Click on this, and there we go. You can see here that we track device type and language. This is actually very useful, because if you've got multiple stores, we will automatically send the opt-in prompt based on the language, and you can then segment and send them appropriate notifications based on that. You can track cities, and you can track IPs when you want to single out employees or whatever, so you can do that also.

For Shopify, like I said, we track a lot of different data automatically. The things you'll have to set up are items purchased, the shipped event, add to cart, and cart abandoned, and we also track all of these custom attributes that you can use in names. I'm looking at the clock, and that's about 20 to 25 minutes, so thank you for those questions. We're going to call it there.

Like I said, ecommerce right now is a fantastic time to begin using Aimtell. If you're a new user and you've never used anything to do with push notifications, and you're wondering what to do and this is your first time ever seeing anything like this, we've got a six-month promo for new users right now, a free promo. I'd be more than happy to get on a call with you and help you get set up, again making sure that you're taking full advantage of everything that's available to you. If you have any more questions, feel free to hit me up. My email is zack@aimtell.com, and I'd be more than happy to answer any more questions you have.

That's it from me here at Aimtell. We've got another webinar coming up next week for content and publisher sites, if that's more the vertical you're in. I'd be more than happy to help you out and get you going. Thank you very much, stay safe, stay healthy, and thank you so much for tuning in.