Web Push Notification Best Practices

01Welcome and opt-in prompts

Hello and welcome to another Aimtell webinar. I just see people logging in here. My name is Zack, I'm from the client success team, and I head up the webinars here at Aimtell. We've been doing a best practices series at the moment, helping our people see the most out of Aimtell. We've done a few vertical-specific webinars, I should say, but this one's going to be much more of an overview.

There's a lot to cover today, but it's all going to center around a main idea: creating deeper relationships with website visitors. More importantly, it's going to be centered around the idea of what your goal is with Aimtell web push. There are a lot of things you can accomplish with Aimtell, but if you don't have an end goal in sight, maybe a conversion or, like I said, a goal for the users who visit your site, it's going to be difficult for you to get the most out of it. This is one that you can borrow if you like and make your own. It's going to be different for every vertical and everything like that.

So the goal is creating a deeper relationship with website visitors, or more to your website with web push, in other words. There are a few ways to accomplish that, creating depth to your website, and we're going to jump straight into some of the best practices in how to get that going.

The opt-in prompt is the first thing that users will see when you're using web push notifications, so it's very important that you get that right. The strategy you're using, I should say, needs to be working for you. Some sites just need the native opt-in, but we do provide the capability to do custom opt-ins. On the dashboard you can simply click on opt-in prompts down here and begin to go through and build one out. It's very straightforward and takes 5 to 10 minutes.

With that, you can have something like this. Death Wish Coffee are customers of ours and they've begun to use their own custom opt-in. This is very brand-centric, very simple, very straightforward. There's coffee, and the prompt asks whether you'd like to receive notifications, deals and sales, with options of "no" and "hell yeah." That fits their brand and their aesthetic, and it immediately caught my attention. I was like, oh yeah, I'd be interested in this. That's just an example where someone is using custom opt-ins to help promote their brand and how their brand feels as well.

Just to give you some numbers here, very conservative numbers are about a 25 to 35 percent opt-in rate. You can see that very simply on the overview if you select your opt-in rate down here. 25 to 30 percent is just the base standard. However, when you utilize a strategy you can sometimes double that to 30 to 50 percent, and depending on your vertical you can get upwards of a 90 percent opt-in rate, which is mind-blowing. Think about that and compare it to email and SMS, and you really get a sense of how a good opt-in strategy can be so beneficial in the long run. So opt-ins are a very, very important thing right off the bat.

02Segmentation and device formatting

Moving straight along, I want to talk about segmentation and specifically browser and device formatting for web push notifications. A lot of people may ask, what are web push notifications? They're little notifications that come across your screen, on your mobile and on your desktop. They all look different for every browser, or I should say they could potentially look different on every browser and every device. So it's important that you begin to use our segmentation and browser and device formatting, not just to make sure your notification is being delivered correctly, but also so that you are sending targeted notifications to people.

Our segmentation is a bit of our competitive edge. We have state-of-the-art segments, and we're actually very proud of it. Basically you can create buckets of people, and those buckets can then be used for insights and also for targeting. Spending the time to think about what segments you want to use is so worthwhile in the long term. Doing it right from the start and making sure that you're targeting people correctly is a big one. Targeted notifications always work better than a one-notification-captures-all sort of thing. I'm not saying that you should never use those, but when you use specific notifications for specific people, it always helps.

You can target by location. We also track pageviews for you, as well as people's interests by what pages they use, what device they're using, and so on. You can even set up your own tracked data point and use that. It's very easy to do.

Take this example ecommerce site. A segment you might want to utilize is people who visited a page URL that contains the word "dress," because that tells you it's an interest of these people. But you also want to track a custom event for whether they've purchased an item. This took maybe two minutes to set up. There are about 75,000 subscribers in here, and about 20,000 of those 75,000 have visited a page with "dress" in the URL but didn't convert. Not only is that useful as an insight, where you can see, okay, this is what they've been looking at but they're not purchasing, you can now use it to target those people with a specific manual notification, like "Hey, have you checked out this dress? Have you seen this dress?" and so on and so forth. Making sure that you use segmentation is the number one thing that I see people not do, and it's so important to begin using.

The same thing goes for browser and device formats. We automatically format your notifications for the device that they're going to, so we do that for you anyway. However, some notifications look different from others, so if you're sending to all of the browsers and all of the devices, you may want to edit and tweak the wording. We've written down here: place the most crucial part of your message towards the beginning of your title or body to ensure it doesn't get cut off.

It's also very easy to test. We've got fully built-in test capabilities on this specific notification. You just send the test push to yourself and see how it works and how it looks. Again, it's browser-specific and device-specific, so it does matter. Targeted notifications work.

03Call to action buttons and timing

Next is call to action buttons. They're so simple and easy to use, yet I see the majority of people not use them. Why use call to action buttons? Well, in any marketing scheme, CTAs are so important. They help make the goal that you want your subscribers to achieve easier, and that's why you should use them. You just click on the little buttons down at the bottom here and add in whatever you want it to look like. If you're doing an abandoned cart campaign, use some emojis here, and you can link to up to three different places on your site.

That is so useful if you want to be linking out to multiple locations. If you're a publisher or an advertiser or something like that, you may want to send people out to three different locations, so you have three different opportunities to get that click out and get that revenue. It draws attention and increases the real estate on the screen. If we go to some docs here and see how notifications look, this is on a mobile device without any call to action. This is with a large image, and also with the action buttons. You can see there is much more space for someone to click on. It's very simple and straightforward, but again, you'd be surprised how many people don't utilize our action buttons, so begin to use those.

Another best practice is timing, or optimizing by the user's time zone. Timing is key. If there's one sentence I want you to take away, it's that timing is key. That goes for all campaigns, whether manual, triggered or welcome notifications, and even for the opt-in. Just spend 30 seconds when you're scheduling your notifications to think, okay, when do I want this to go out?

A great example that I thought of the other day: if you're a news site or a content site and you want to send out a daily notification showing people the daily news headlines, you don't want that notification being sent at 11:30 at night, or at 2 p.m. in the afternoon when everyone's at work. You want it sent at 7, 8, or even early, 6 a.m. in the morning. So how can you guarantee that you can do that globally? Well, in our scheduling feature for notifications, you can optimize by time zone. Whatever time you set is the time that it will be sent in each person's time zone, globally.

Note that you need to make sure you schedule this 24 hours in advance. That is so crucial. Let's say I want to send at 8 a.m. on Saturday. Where I am, I would need to schedule that basically today to make sure it's set up at least 24 hours in advance, and then it will show up on everyone's device at the appropriate time. So it's a great and simple feature to use. It's just one button, and you can guarantee that your notifications are being sent accurately.

04Triggered campaigns and personalization

We're now getting into the meat and bones. I know I'm going quite quickly here, so if you need to take a little pause and get a drink, I'm going to take a little sip of water here, but like I said, we've still got a lot to cover.

The meat and bones of Aimtell, and really the beauty of what's possible, has to do with our automatic campaigns. You can create manual notifications, or manual campaigns, which are very good. In summary, you create the campaign, select your audience, and then schedule it. Triggered campaigns are actually dynamic, based upon your web visitors' use of your website. Whether they view a page, whether they purchase an item, whether they download a PDF, whatever it may be, we can track it, use it as a data point, and define that as a trigger to get the notifications out.

Triggered notifications generally have a higher CTR than manual notifications. The reason behind that is that you're sending curated and tailored content to people based upon their interactions with the website. So how do they work? Triggered campaigns work based off triggers, and triggers are based off tracked events. Basically you track an event, you define it as a trigger, and then it will automatically send when that trigger is pulled.

This is really where you can see the ROI with Aimtell. It might be through abandoned cart notifications, where someone abandons their cart if you're ecommerce. It might be a PDF download or an application download if you're a content or software site, a form submission, or an email drip, whatever it may be. It could even be a notification click drip. This is a big one at the moment. If you get paid when someone clicks on a notification, maybe what you want to do is set a click on a notification as a trigger, and then six hours later you send another one. Really, the sky's the limit with this, and with 15 minutes of work you can begin to track those events, create the campaigns and send them out.

Events are open-ended. Let's go back here to the documentation. What do I mean by that? We deliberately set it up in a way that you can choose to track what is valuable to you. It's very simple. You just place this little piece of script code here and swap out what you want these values to be. Once they start to track, you can begin to use them in triggered notifications. Just quickly to show you here, whatever the event may be, you just set the category and action to whatever you're tracking.

Again, I know this is a very high-level overview. If you've got any more questions, please utilize us. We're more than happy to help you get these set up, so schedule a call and let's get some specific strategies for your vertical.

Along a similar vein is employing personalization. This is based upon what you track as well, but instead of events, you can actually start to track custom attributes. Custom attributes could be things like age, name, location and things like that. When you place this code on your site, we automatically ascribe the data to the subscriber ID, and then you can use that in a notification. Let's say you're tracking a first name. You can just use curly brackets and first name, and you can set some fallback text here. So let's say you want "Hey," and then the first name we track. My name is Zack, so "Hey Zack." If they don't have the data tracked, you just say "there," or "check it out," whatever it may be.

This phenomenally increases your clicks. When you see a notification that has your name in it or your location and stuff like this, you're going to be getting more clicks. People are naturally more drawn to it, their interest is piqued, and they're curious. You can use this in notifications but also in segmenting. You can track it from places like forms, checkout pages and email drips. If you're a political site, or you're tracking people's interests, maybe you have a little form with checkboxes of interests. You can track that as a custom attribute and use that to segment and target people, again touching on the segmentation.

To summarize triggered campaigns and personalization, the idea is to think about what you would want when you use your site, your UX. What would you want as a notification? Track what you think will get people's attention. One of the best pieces of advice I give people is to opt in yourself and see what you get, and what you don't get, and set that up.

05A/B testing and custom icons

Okay, A/B testing. This one is very good for people who are beginning to want to optimize their notifications and who want to protect against things like user fatigue. We have state-of-the-art frequency capping to make sure you're not sending too many notifications, but A/B testing is also absolutely crucial if you want to advance your usage.

So what is A/B testing in notifications? Let me pull up a manual campaign here. A/B testing simply means you can create two versions of the same push, and it'll send to 50/50 of the targeting you set. So you can build out A and B and send them out. Why do this? Every subscriber base is different, and the idea is that you need to test and then you need to adjust. That might mean different wording, different emojis, images or no images, smaller images, different icons, different colors, whether you use call to actions, what links you're using, and so on and so forth. The testing is crucial to optimize your campaigns and make sure you are reaching that goal that I mentioned at the start.

Another use of A/B testing: let's say you're an ecommerce site and you want to send a notification giving a promo or sales code or discount code. You could do version A with 15% off and version B with 10% off, and see which one does better. You're still getting the conversion, but maybe you're saving five percent on those campaigns. So there's a lot of different stuff there that you can use.

Next is utilizing custom icons and images. This one can get very messy very quickly, but the main idea is that it's always good to have your brand on it. Your brand is always going to be in the URL, so it's not essential that your brand is in the icon, but that's definitely a good practice. If you want to vary it a little bit, there are some browsers, I know Mac, that might only let you see an icon. So if you're selling a leather bag, maybe you want the leather bag to be in the icon rather than the entire image, because the images are going to be shown on Macs. Having a think and a play around with custom icons and things like that is a very good practice.

I just want to take a second here as well. If you guys have got any questions or anything, I'm going to see if I can get to them at the end. We're getting a few questions in, so if you want to ask a few more, I'd be more than happy to reach them if we've got time. Feel free to ask away.

Okay, great. So, using icons, oh, actually I want to touch on emojis here as well. I see a lot of people not use emojis, and I actually found out that push notification open rates or click rates improved by almost 85% when they included emojis. That shows you how important emojis are in drawing attention immediately. If you're not using them, use them. It's the simplest thing, really.

06Conversion tracking and analytics

Okay, and number 10, setting up conversion tracking. This is absolutely a best practice. You want to be able to see where the conversions are happening, and maybe just as important, see where they don't happen. Click through ratio is a good metric, so CTR, clicks, is a good metric, but it shouldn't be the only one that you're tracking for success.

The same as with triggered notifications and personalization, you can set up tracked events and define them as conversions in individual campaigns, in the conversion tab. Let's say, for instance, you're a publisher and you publish content, and your conversion is someone who clicks off your site, which is very common in this industry. You would then want to track that conversion as a click-off. Again, you can do that through tracking custom events here, which, by the way, you can track on button clicks and things like that as well. There's some stuff in here to help you do that. Maybe you want to ascribe a value to it and label it. Make it as granular as you want. If you want to track "button clicked" as the conversion, you track it, and every time someone clicks on this notification and then clicks on the button, that will be tracked as a conversion automatically ascribed to this notification.

While we're on this topic, you can also use our built-in Google Analytics tracking. This is great because you can begin to track very simply without having to do any extra snippet placing or anything. Just use Google Analytics here and you can automatically track that.

Okay, to summarize here a little bit. I know we've gone through these quite quickly and I'm conscious of that, so any questions, feel free to shoot away. Basically, you need to have a goal with your marketing and with Aimtell, and once you've got that in mind, you can begin to use Aimtell to its fullest potential and accomplish what you need.

07Next steps and new features

So what are the next steps for you after this webinar? First of all, if you're not an Aimtell client already, we've got a 14-day free trial, and we're actually running a special promotion right now. If you are a brand-new client, you can use a promo code called "best webinar." When you sign in and create an account, you can access your billing in settings. I'm on the team plan here, but there'll be a button here that says edit billing info. You just add the promo code "best webinar" and you can get 25% off your first three months.

We also want to help you guys get going. Another next step, if you're ready with us, would be to use our demos, so schedule a call with us. We've got dedicated support team members to help you get Aimtell set up on your site. There are a few ways you can do it. aimtell.com/demo is a great way to get there, but if you're already in, you can just click on this little button at the top and click on request demo or contact support, and I'd be more than happy to help. The documentation center can help you get set up as well.

We're also bringing out new features every month. Last month we just released our templates feature and our webhooks and postback, so there are even better ways to do it, with pre-built stuff. In the coming months we're actually bringing out a CPC monetization feed, so if that's something that interests you, keep your eyes peeled for that.

08Q&A from attendees

Okay, I've got a few questions coming in. We've got one question here asking, what happens if someone blocks a notification? That actually brings us back to custom opt-in prompts. With a custom opt-in prompt, if I click on yes, it will then show the native prompt, at which point they'll have to click on allow again. Now, if someone blocks the custom opt-in prompt, you can actually show the opt-in prompt again to users, maybe in a week or so. You want to be careful that you're not overly showing it, because if they're not interested, they're not interested. But that is a potential way to work around people blocking notifications, and that's a definite advantage of custom opt-in prompts.

I've got another question here: what happens if we don't have the data for custom attributes? That would be our fallback text. You can put in fallback text, and it's very, very straightforward. It's just curly brackets and whatever the attribute is, then use the fallback text. It could be first name, or if you want to do location, it can be whatever you want it to be.

Next question: you showed your own custom opt-in, but how about the native opt-in, is it overruled? What do you mean by that? Just to get a little bit of clarity on native opt-in. Not any time soon, that is okay though. I'm sending you my email here, so email me your question and give me a little bit more context, and I'd be more than happy to answer that in more detail.

Okay, so the question is, do I always get the opt-in of the browser? Yes, you do. For instance, I'm on this site here and I get the opt-in. That will always show. If you set up a custom opt-in, you can define when and how often you want it to show. You can even do it if they view a certain number of pages, or on a page scroll, and this will be how the prompt gets shown. With either the custom opt-in prompt or the native opt-in prompt, you can even go as far as to say show on specific pages only, and this will overrule everything on there as well. So yes, you will always get the option of the browser there.

Okay, great. Well, I know we're coming up on about 30 minutes here. We want to try and keep these to 25 to 30 minutes just to respect everyone's time. I know there's so much content going on at the moment, and we're all working from home, so we really appreciate you taking the time. I'm learning more about Aimtell and the possibilities of what you can do as well.

So if you're a new user, remember "best webinar" for 25% off for three months. If you've not taken advantage of that, I would highly recommend you do. Thank you so much for tuning in. We've also got a handout for the guide I just shared if you want to download that. Great to see you all, and I hope to see you again soon.