Best Practices - Publishers

Web push notification is an effective way to engage and increase your traffic on your website. And with iZooto, you can even monetize it.

But before diving into it directly, it's quite important to know the right way to web push notifications. Push out too many notifications in a day and you end up being called spammy; push too few in a month and subscribers will hardly remember you and eventually churn.

Here is a guide on how you can effectively create a web push notification strategy to drive maximum traffic to your landing pages:

Subscription Prompt Customization

No one likes to be shown a bunch of different pop-ups the minute they land up on the website. Infact, chances of users canceling it or worse blocking it increases tenfold when the opt-in experience is not customized.

Check your average session time from Analytics and add a few seconds of delay to the prompt so that it doesn't show immediately on the website. You can even further customize it by explicitly mentioning the value that they would get by subscribing to notifications and make use of the readymade custom templates.

All prompt related customizations can be found under Modify Subscription Prompt.

Subscriber Acknowledgement

Enabling Welcome Notification ensures that your subscribers are acknowledged right after they subscribe to your website and also helps to create a lasting first impression. Here is how you can set it up.

If you have a URL on your website which has a fresh feed of updated content, you can use that as the landing page URL for your Welcome Notification.

Timing

We cannot stress this enough. The timing of your notification matters a lot especially if you have subscribers across different time zones. Make sure the schedule of your notification aligns with the timezone of all your subscribers.

Also, pay importance to the demographic. If your website is about DIY kitchen hacks and as per your analytics, the maximum readership is middle age housewives, push out notifications during the afternoon time - when they would have more time to read.

Similarly, if you wish push a breaking news update to your subscribers after 7PM or during the weekend, send it only to your mobile audience as mobile users would be most active around that time.

Frequency

In the battle of quantity Vs quality, it's always quality that wins. Always know how much is a bit too much and stop right there to avoid unsubscriptions.

We recommend pushing not more than 4-5 notifications daily. Being a news website, you might feel that every blog/content that gets published is important and urgent, however, that actually leads to notification fatigue, blindness and worse of all rampant unsubscriptions. This further affects the click rates and that hits the revenue potential.

Audience Selection

Pushing the right content to the right audience ensures that your notification piques interest and that translates to more clicks.

We recommend that you segment your subscribers on the basis of their interests and push notifications related to a particular category to only those subscribers who have shown interest in it. This makes the engagement highly contextual and value driven.

Content Representation

Your website logo speaks volumes. It helps your subscribers to relate to the notifications better as it brings a sense of familiarity to your subscribers and also creates a sense of credibility.

When it comes to the actual content, do not cram the notification title and message with the entire headline of your blog. Add just enough content to arouse the interest and make them want more information so that they click on it to read the whole article.

Wherever possible, add banner images and social media share CTAs for better visualization and content promotion.

Another important thing to note is that outdated content never gets pushed to users. Make use of the expiration time judiciously while drafting your campaign. We recommend setting it to 2-3 hours so that notifications don't get stacked at the user's end and do not run the risk of sending outdated news.