EngageBay's Intelligent Push Notifications

Push notifications are actionable, rich or personalized messages that nudge users to take an action. In simple terms, Push Notifications are short, pithy messages that appear on a user’s mobile or desktop, encouraging them to take some action. We know that people get busy and they are likely to forget about the offers you announced earlier via email or about the items they put in the cart but didn't complete the purchase. This is where a short reminder message on their device can go a long way to motivate them to complete the transaction. Remember that push notifications are strictly opt-in.

Push Notifications are:

Studies have shown that push notifications click rates are 4-8x more than that of emails. It is mandatorily an opt-in, permission-based medium. Only if a subscriber has opted-in will he receive notifications and moreover, they can choose to opt out anytime. Consequently, push notifications are an extremely powerful channel for both communication and marketing.

Push Notifications:

It is not advisable to measure the success of push notifications by using its click-through rate as a metric. This is because it is relatively easy to game this number by creating ‘clickbait’ content that might get people to the app, but that is similar to cheating since it is likely to negatively impact user experience.

Create your success goal around your end objective, that is for your users to buy your product, and then conduct tests and view reports around that objective. In case your push notification campaign is designed to improve user engagement, use that specific metric to identify those who received the push and those who did not. Always keep your eye on the bigger picture. Avoid driving up specific metrics while ignoring others that may in fact be more relevant.

Push Notifications are dependent on services such as Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), and Apple’s APNS, which enable notifications on Safari, and Windows Notification Service for Microsoft Edge.

For example, in the case of FCM, (a messaging solution that allows both mobile applications and websites to send notifications to subscribers), the application servers send the content of the notification along with subscriber information to FCM. FCM then verifies the information and then sends the notification to the end-users’ devices. Once the notification is received, the devices send 'Click' and 'Delivery' data back to the application. This data helps websites and apps track the performance of these notifications. Although FCM falls under Google’s services, it also works with other browsers that support Push API like Mozilla Firefox and Opera. This enables the sending of push notifications to a web app via a push service. It also helps web applications receive notifications sent by a server.

Whenever you notice a banner or pop-up alert on your phone or your desktop device, know that it is a push notification. This alert is shown irrespective of what the user is doing. These alerts are usually textual in content but they often display rich media as well. They are often personalized.

Many mobile operating systems also show push notifications chronologically, together in a single view. On iOS, Apple has a dedicated Notification Center where users may view their notifications in chronological order. On the other hand, Android devices show unread messages on the lock screen.

In order to add push notifications to an application, the publisher of the application needs to register with the push notification service of the Operating System (OS) that they’re developing for. Then their OS service provides an API to the app publisher so that the app can communicate with the service. The app publisher then adds the software development kit (SDK) to their application, and finally uploads the app to the appropriate app store.