As these notifications are delivered directly to the user’s device, users don’t have to be present on the website to receive these notifications.
Push Notifications are best used for delivering time bound content and engage users. Some of the popular use cases of push notifications include retargeting users abandoning shopping cart, activating dormant users with offers, retaining loyal users with personalized content and more.
Just like native app notifications, web push notifications are meant to facilitate timely flow of information. To subscribe or opt-in to these notifications, users are not expected to download and install an application. Users can simply subscribe to these notifications by clicking on the Allow button on the permission prompt.
Web push notifications are used by marketers to build user engagement and retention. Businesses across categories are increasingly relying on web push notifications as a communication channel. Especially retailers, media publishers now heavily use web push notifications as a communication channel to generate traffic consistently. The primary reason for this adoption is plummeting performance of email, SMS and display ads.
Some of the popular use cases are:
Web push notifications are delivered even when the user is not on the website. On Desktop, these notifications are delivered to the browser, right next to the task bar.
The user must be an active subscriber to receive these notifications. It is important to note that Apple is yet to support web push notifications on iOS. Follow this thread on the status of push notifications and service workers on iOS.
Once you've enabled web push notifications on your website, your web visitors will start seeing a subscription prompt. You will be able to send notifications to these users after they have subscribed to your website notifications.
By default, web push API can only be used by websites operating on HTTPS protocol. For websites operating on HTTP protocol, subscribing to web notifications is a 2-step process. The subscription process involves the user subscribing to a secure subdomain such as yourdomain.izooto.com or notify.yourdomain.com. Since this is a two click process, the opt-in rates are far lower as compared to HTTPS, hovering around 1% - 3%.
It is important that users are convinced to subscribe to notifications before they are prompted. There are multiple ways of educating the end user. Here are some of the recommended approaches :
1. The user should show intent before a site asks for permission : Most of the marketers and developers commit the mistake of asking permission on page load time. This is not an ideal experience and impacts the opt-in rates adversely resulting in more users actually blocking than allowing for notifications.
2. Using a custom opt-in prompt : Brands can use their own custom opt-in prompts which resonates with their website to trigger a sense of trust and favourable impression. Most push notification service providers provide a wide range of options where you can play around with the logo, text and color.
A custom prompt also has an additional value. It allows you to explain the value of enabling web push and gives you the option of prompting again if the user declines.
One of the most frequently asked questions is how many users subscribe or opt-in for web push notifications. All the leading browsers - Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and other Chromium-based browsers now support web push notifications. The permission or opt-in process is similar across the browsers. Users are required to grant explicit permission to a website (web app), hence opting-in to receive push notifications. It is important to understand that the capability of web push notifications is only for websites operating on HTTPS protocol ( with an SSL certificate. Subscription or opt-in rates usually vary from anything between 5% to 10% of total unique visitors, depending upon the implementation. Marketers often use a double opt-in process to ensure that users opt for notifications instead of blocking them. To convert your website visitors into subscribers, it is critical to design the right subscription UX with web push notifications.
Click-through rate for push notification is defined as the number of clicks on a notification divided by the number of subscribers who have viewed the notification. Marketers often use Notifications Clicked / Notifications delivered to calculate CTR's. For example, if a notification is delivered to 100 subscribers and receives one click, then the click-through rate for the notification would be 1%. Most marketers use this metric to understand the effectiveness and success of their push notification campaigns. There is no pre-set benchmark of click-through rates of push notifications. CTR's of push notifications depend on multiple factors including -
‘One size fits all’ doesn’t work very well with Web Push Notifications. Assuming that all subscribers will have the same preferences can result in a high number of users unsubscribing from notifications. It’s common knowledge that sending targeted notifications can help you engage better and get higher click rates. Also by narrowing your focus and targeting selective segments, your subscribers will find your notifications to be much more relevant and keep them from churning away.
For example - while segmenting your subscriber base by their recent activity, it can help you identify some of your most loyal subscribers. It could also allow you to send follow-up campaigns to your most unengaged subscribers — the ones who haven’t done any activity in the past few days.
Similarly, if you planned to target recent subscribers with a “Subscription Date” segment, you might encounter higher engagement and lower bounce rates (due to definite recall) than you would if older subscribers were targeted. Click Through Rates on notifications targeting a specific audience can be as high as 40% also.
While the adoption of web push notification has been nothing short of crazy, the question on the impact of web push implementation still exists in the minds of marketers.
Well, here is the short answer – No.
There is no negative impact of implementing web push notification. The fact that Google has been pushing for it aggressively, definitely suggests that there is no possible negative impact.
Read this detailed data-driven post on the impact of Web Push Notifications on SEO.
Learn more about industry-specific use cases.
Internet is everywhere and so are your users – prospects and clients. Clearly, you can no longer afford to ignore that “international-time zone-user-set”. Especially, in such cases, communicating with users across different timezones is a key challenge. More than often marketers not paying heed to this, end up irritating customers. End result – user churn. It is for this reason, understanding your audience is extremely critical. There is fair amount of sensitivity attached to receiving notification on the wrong time – we help you take cognisance of that.
There are couple of points to keep in mind before taking that “Make or Buy” decision. Building a web push notification platform will, in fact, make it a second product altogether within your core business - a product that demands continuous resources to -
When making that rather important “Make or Buy” decision, ask yourself - are you ready to put in that amount of resource, time and money?
Your sheer focus rightfully needs to be spent on your core business/product, which, as we all know pretty well, isn’t web push notifications. So why not let the “others” take care of it, the ones for whom building web push notifications is the core product? They’ll help you do a much better job at it, don’t you think?
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