What are Push notifications?

What are push notifications?

Push notifications are crisp clickable messages that help businesses to engage their audience, both on mobile and desktop. Push notifications are frequently used to share latest information, offers and sales, breaking news, live event updates.

They are permission-based notifications sent by an app or a website. Once subscribed to the notifications, the subscriber receives push notifications on their device helping them to stay updated with the latest and the greatest. Though app push notifications have been around for about a decade now, web push notifications and Facebook Messenger notifications are relatively new, but thriving nevertheless. They are widely leveraged in the marketing stack to seal all the gaps in the audience engagement flywheel.

Who uses push notifications and why?

Push notifications are leveraged by businesses of all types - newsrooms, bloggers, online retailers, service providers, the list is endless. As for digital publishers- marketers, editors, and product managers make the most out of push notifications. It is used aggressively by publishers to build, engage, and retain their audience.

Publishers rely heavily on push notifications, update users about breaking news, new stories, reminders for subscription renewals, course commencement, transactional alerts, retarget users to make a purchase, and whatnot. Push notifications can be personalized to send contextual and relevant messages by creating different sets of audiences according to demographic, device, interests, behavior, and location. One can schedule, set it on recurring, and set drip campaigns to reach out to the audience to reach out to them at the right marketing moment. Publishers have seen rampant growth in engagement and retention with push notifications.

Pros & Cons of push notifications

Pros-

Higher visibility - Push notifications are personalized updates that are delivered right at the corner of a user’s browsing screen which makes them highly visible.
New real estate for push ads - Along with boosting your website traffic, push notifications also offer comparatively higher CTRs on ads. More and more media companies are moving towards this new reliable revenue stream that monetizes your audience (subscribers) that are 100% owned by you.
Timely and customized - Push notifications and their opt-in can be customized for a website’s design and theme. They are delivered instantly and can also get scheduled for later.
Higher conversion rate - Given that push notifications offer high visibility, it brings 12X the CTRs of that of an email.

Cons-

Interruptive in nature - Push notifications are delivered just like a pop-up ad making them interruptive. While this might work for a business that has clearly defined the time it’ll send the notifications, it fails to deliver a good user experience at the times.
Spammy – Research gate, in their recent study, revealed that users on average receive around 80 notifications/day which is just mind-boggling. Imagine your device going gaga about the updates. The industry needs to restrict the ill-usage of push notifications that otherwise are one of the best channels to engage your loyal users.

Push Notification Channels

Web push notifications

Web push notifications can be sent to users on both mobile and desktop even when the user is not on the website. The user does not even have to download an app to receive notifications. Web push notifications reach upto 80% of all internet users.

Web push notifications are supported by Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Edge on Desktop and by Chrome, Firefox, Opera on Android Mobile. Support for iOS push notifications is not yet ready, but there is still a ray of hope.

App Push Notifications

App push notifications are sent to users who have installed an app on their mobile devices. App push notifications is widely used; an average US smartphone user receives 46 app push notifications per day. Users on iOS have to explicitly grant permission to receive notifications, but users on Android will start receiving notifications one the app is downloaded and launched.

The user need not be actively using the app to receive notifications, which makes it easier to engage users even when they are not on the app. With app push notifications, you can include images, gifs and videos along with the notifications, letting you grab user attention instantly.

How do push notifications work?

Web Push Notifications - Web push notifications need a push notification delivery service that comes with every browser that supports push notifications. Chrome uses Google Cloud Messaging (and now Firebase Cloud Messaging), Safari uses Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) and Firefox uses MDN servers. Next, the developer needs to register a service worker on the browser (only chrome and Firefox). Now, once the user opts-in, a subscriber ID is generated in order to receive updates from that website.

App Push Notifications - In order to use app push notifications, businesses are required to connect their apps with the app push service provider. You need to share the Firebase Server API Key and Sender ID for Android apps and an APNS .p12 Certificate for iOS apps.

Messenger Push Notifications - To engage a user via messenger push notification, the conversation has to be initiated by the user. To simplify this, Messenger has created message types and message tags that help businesses define what type of content (sponsored, standard or news) will be shared with the user. For news websites, Messenger push notifications right now are available under the news messaging type only. It requires them to apply for the NPI registration and define the type of content you plan to share via Messenger push notifications.