One of the commonly heard issues from consumers around Push Notifications is that sometimes they get too many of them, irrelevant notifications, and at the wrong time. We recommend our customers to use segments, to target your customers, use triggers/context of action on your website, to send at the proper time, and also to limit the number of notifications.
Even with that, when a user opens their browser after many days, he is flooded with a queue of older notifications from several sites. This can be annoying to the consumer and can lead to users unsubscribing. We listened to your feedback, and have a feature that will help you limit the number of notifications at a given time a user will get from your site.
You can use the expiration time for notification to limit the number of notification sent to a user. By default, this is set to a month, but you can specify it to shorter durations for ensuring your subscribers do not get more than 2 or 3 notifications from you.
Here is how you can set this up
- Say you are sending a notification each day at 10 AM, and you want your subscriber to not get more than 2 notifications. Remember in Web Push as soon as the customer comes online and opens a browser, all his pending notifications are displayed.
- So when you send on Monday at 10 AM you can set your expiry date to Wednesday at 9:59 AM, This way at any time not more than 2 of your notifications are shown to the user.
- On Tuesday at 10 AM when you send you can set the expiry to Thursday at 9:59 AM.
This is useful for cases where you may be sending several notifications a day and after some time old notifications are not relevant. Also, some sites want to reduce the number of notifications received by them to ensure the consumers don’t feel it is one too many.