The topic of the message can be anything, it could be about a promotion in your shop, the newest blog post or news from the business world. It is up to us how and what exactly we want to communicate to our users. The magic of push notifications comes from the fact that each subscriber does not have to be present on our site in order to receive messages from us. All that’s needed is that the browser itself is open, from which the subscription was made, for it to appear in the bottom-right corner. Even if the browser is closed at the time of dispatch, the notification will be displayed as soon as it is opened again.

What are the possibilities?

When it comes to being a true newsletter successor, push notifications have got you covered on every aspect:

• There is no need to collect user’s personal information
• They are displayed instantaneously, without the need to open each message
• Their dispatch can be set for specific target groups
• Higher CTR
• Set expiration date for notifications

Users find it easier to consent to receiving notifications, they do not need to provide their email address, thanks to this the opt-in is also much higher than in traditional newsletters.

What’s more, thanks to the direct nature of notifications, it is easier to compare statistics of singular dispatches. This allows us to precisely trackthe effectiveness of our ad copies and makes it easier to improve our client communications.

Best Practice

As with every marketing tool, push notifications also have a set of best practices to follow if you want to improve effectiveness and refine communication with our site’s user:

• Do not overwhelm your user with notifications – if you send too many then instead of attracting them, you will push them away and at some point, they may even revoke their subscription
• Make the content fit the medium – push notifications have to be direct, there is no place here for elongated texts, it needs to be to the point and attract clicks
• Make the medium fit the content – if your campaign concerns a specific region of the country then set the dispatch for those geo-ips, if the promotion of the product ends on a certain date that set your notification expiry for that time. All this should be possible in a good push tool
• Remember that it’s worthwhile for notifications to be sent out at certain times, no one likes to receive messages at 6 am and few people will pay attention to a dispatch on Saturday at 10 pm. It helps to set the time of sending for one that will be the most effective. Which brings us to…
• Mind the statistics! Everything is important, from the CTR of singular dispatches to data about the whole project. What time are most displays? At what day of the week are most subscriptions made? This is all indispensable information which will allow you to talk to you customers even more effectively.

Part Two – PushAd

PushAd Platform

While making PushAd as a tool for handling Web Push Notifications we wanted to make something more than just a way to send notifications. Most of all we cared about creating an intuitive service, so that anyone could use it. Statistics, project settings or the notification history is always available in at most two clicks. Clarity in available possibilities and ease of use. By the same token, in every functionality we always give the last word to the user. If you don’t want something to be displayed, display at a different time or for it to look different – all this is possible. This section will show you an overview of PushAd capabilities and instructions of their use. So that you won’t have any doubts and can take care of what’s most important – your users.

First Steps

• Logging in

1. Setting up an account is very easy, all we need is your email, phone number and name of the company
2. An individual person can also set up an account!
3. After your first log in, you will be taken to the project settings

• Integration

1. For pages that use the http solution, you just need to set up a subdomain, from which notifications will be sent: for ex. myshop(.push-ad.com) Make sure that your subdomain name has no dots in it!
2. After setting up a subdomain you can copy the code that is available in the “integration code” tab and paste it to the HEAD section in the html of your page, or in Google Tag Manager
3. You can even check whether integration went smoothly with a special button
4. If you need deeper integration and your page supports it, you may use the solution for https pages
5. Apart from the code, available in the “integration code” tab which has to be copied to the HEAD section of your site, you have to download two files and copy them to the main catalog of your server
6. This solution provides a faster subscription time for users and only your address is visible on sent notifications

Project Settings

• Remember to set up an image in the “general” section of your project. This will be the default icon for every newly created dispatch and thus we suggest for it to be the logotype of your firm best adapted to the 300x300 resolution
• Here you can also decide whether you want to display subscription bell with, or without the notification history as well as what it’s color is. We will come back to these functionalities at a later date.

Amassing subscribers

• In the beginning, after a successful integration, the most important step is establishing what, where and how quickly will invite your users to become part of the subscriber base

1. How quickly after opening your site do you want for a pop-up to appear with a subscription invitation. The best results seem to come from the 2-3 seconds range, so that it’s not as soon as the page loads, but not so late as to miss the interest period
2. If permission is not granted, how much time should pass before an invitation is displayed again. We suggest values on the level of 6-14 days, in order to maintain a good relationship with our users
3. On which devices do you want the banner to display

Choosing the banner

1. After deciding these settings, time has come to choose the subscription banner. There are four to choose from: medium-size in the left bottom corner, a very large one that takes up the bottom half of the site, a small one up in the middle of the screen and lastly, the system-default banner
2. The last option is activated by standard and not without reason, because from our experience, it is the most successful
3. Every banner, apart from the last one, can be visually edited. This way we can change it so that it fits well with the overall graphic style of our site.
4. If we activate more than one banner, the user will be shown one of them, at random
5. Additionally, there is an extra choice of custom banners, which give you an option to upload your own personalized banner created in html. For the most demanding clients.

Welcome Message

The last tab in project settings is the “Welcome message”, this is nothing else than the first notification which will be displayed to the user when he or she becomes a subscriber

1. As always, we give the option to turn on or off this setting. From our point of view, we wholeheartedly recommend it, because such a notification is a great way to connect with our anonymous user as well as to show what are push notifications.
2. Remember that there is a possibility to add new languages, so that this message gets displayed according to user’s preferences (it will adapt to browser settings). If the language of your user is not in the notification’s settings, then by default it will show the one marked by the star.

First Dispatch

- Press on “Deliveries manager” one the left side panel, then on the option “create delivery”

- First of all, we can decide to whom do we want to send each notification (please note that this requires an activated user tagging service)

- Depending on the language of our users, we can create more than one subtype of message, so that the notification appears in the preferred language (option “add new language”)

- We enter the title, content and URL address to which we want our message to link to, e.g. the address of our promotion’s page

- The notification’s icon will be automatically added. This will be the graphic, which we have in our general settings. It can be changed, of course, remembering the recommended dimensions of 300x300

- For Chrome users we can set up a special large image that will appear with our notification. It is very important that it’s dimensions are precisely 300x200, then it will appear correctly

- The next two options allow us to set when the notification dispatch should be stopped and when exactly should the notification be sent out. If we don’t make use of these options then the notification will be sent out immediately for the next month to all current subscribers

- The last option, again concerning Chrome users, allows us to set up to two special action buttons for our notification. Each can have a different icon and lead to a separate URL address

- A prepared notification can be previewed, which means that we can see it as it will appear to our subscribers. More than that, we can save this message as a draft, so that we can come back to it at a later time

Statistics

• PushAd is not only a tool for sending, it’s also a service which gives us the ability to deeply analyze previous campaigns
• After logging in to our account, the first thing which we will see is precisely the page with all the statistics of our project. Here we have all the most important data concerning how Push ad works on our site
• Apart from this, we also have access to a tab called schedule and history (through the side panel > deliveries manager). Here we can look through all the notifications that have been sent, await dispatch, or have been saved as drafts for editing.

Additional Functions

• Bell

1. In the general settings of our project we have the possibility to activate the bell, which is a small icon that will appear in the left, or right bottom corner of our site
2. This bell is nothing else than a shortcut which lets users monitor the state of their subscription and even allows them to subscriber or unsubscribe
3. We recommend this setting be turned on, since it gives users a feeling of more control

• Notification History

1. This is really an expansion of the bell functionality, it additionally allows the possibility to look through all the notifications that said subscriber has received from us
2. These notifications retain their functionality, meaning that they link to set URL addresses. Furthermore if any notification is unread by the user, it will be specially marked in order to get more attention