What Features to look for in Web Push Notification Platform

By now, you know what is web push notification. It has found a place in almost every online industry. You know how important is web push notification in today’s time. You will find a lot of web push notification service provider as well. You are also looking to implement push notifications on your website. Do you know what features to look for in the Web Push Notification platform? In this article, we will show the push notification features that you should check before signing up with them. Knowing these features will help you to choose the best push notification platform.

Web Push Notification offers a lot of benefits. Some of the most important benefits are:

• Instant Delivery: Push Notifications are delivered in real-time on the user’s browser.
• Easy Usage: Creating and sending notifications is very simple easy. You can follow the best practices to send push notifications.
• Easy Integration: You can integrate Push Notifications within ten minutes and go live.

Now that you have decided to implement Web Push Notification, the next important thing is to choose the right push notification service provider. Every push notification service provider will offer certain features. However, depending on your need you should choose the right Web Push Notification Service Provider which fits your requirement.

We have created this checklist to ensure you choose the right vendor for your web push notification. Compare all the features and choose the best push notification service for your online business. With new GDPR guidelines, check if your Push Subscribers offer push features to be compliant with GDPR regulations.

Top 12 features to look for in Web Push Notification Platform

Good Customer Support

Web Push Notification is a SaaS product for marketers. Some of the common queries from a new user are:

• Where to place the installation code?
• I don’t have access to the root folder. What to do?
• Push Notification subscription pop-up is not coming
• My Push Notifications are not being sent. What could be the issue?
• How to test if the integration is done right or not?

You will surely have a lot of initial queries when you start using Web Push Notifications. All the above queries are very simple and take a couple of minutes to solve. However, to do so, you need strong customer support. Without proper support, your Web Push Notification journey can turn into a nightmare. So what should you do:

• Take a trial of any plan before finalizing
• Interact with customer support. Don’t be shy about asking even the basic questions.
• See if your issues are getting solved
• Do ask technical details as well. Your customer support has to have technical knowledge of Push Notification, else you will receive only sales talk

Only when you are fully satisfied and confident, you should proceed with Web Push Notification Service Provider.

Next, you should look at the features available at the Push Notification service provider. We have listed the basic features, which are a must-have to get full advantage of Push Notification.

Support For All Browsers & Both HTTP & HTTPS Websites

Check what browsers are supported by your Web Push Vendor.  This impacts the reach to whom you can subscribe as a web push subscriber.

Websites can be HTTP or HTTPS. Web Push Notification is supported only on HTTP sites. However, there is a workaround that can allow HTTP websites to use Push Notifications. What should you do:

• Check with the service provider and ask him if you don’t have HTTPS site
• If they don’t support and ask you to move to HTTPS, move to another service provider

PushEngage supports both the browser type and offers an easy way to install Push Notifications.

Trigger Web Push Notification

Trigger Push Notification are those which are triggered by user action. These notifications are sent automatically based on a certain event. Some of the important triggers you should check for:

• Cart Abandonment Notification: Most of the e-commerce website knows about cart abandonment. According to research, the average cart abandonment rate is 67.45%. To convert users who had already added a product to your cart is easy. You should start sending cart abandonment notifications to convert them.
  
• Browser Abandonment Notification: Many times users just browse through your product page. It is possible to target those users as well as using browser abandonment notifications.
• Custom Trigger Notification: Push Notifications are very effective for every online website. Many times you need a custom trigger like:
  • The user fills a form but didn’t register, you can send different notifications
  • When a user downloads a file
  • A user viewed one of your videos

You need to create custom triggers to target those customers. These custom trigger notifications are very effective to create different push notification campaigns.

Before registering with the Push Notifications service vendor, you should always check what are the different types of trigger push notifications are available.

Push Subscriber Segmentation

For any marketing activities, targeting is the soul. If your targeting is wrong, a well-crafted message will fail to yield the result. In Web Push Notification marketing, you can target customers. Web Push Notification allows you to segment your subscribers based on:

• Geo Location
• Device
• Browser
• The landing page where user subscribed to your push notification

Above are just the basic way of segmenting your push subscribers. You should check whether the basic level of segmentation is available or not.

At the advanced level, push notification service providers should allow to segment users based on action. You should dynamically add users to different segments based on their activity on your website. You should also be able to exclude a segment when sending a web push notification.

Schedule Push Notification

Another important feature that is a must-have for every push notification service provider is Scheduling. Similar to any marketing campaign, you can schedule your push notification to be delivered at a later time. Why is Scheduling of Push Notification important:

• You never miss interacting with customers even when you are on a holiday
• Never miss on sending Notifications during Sale Event
• The right timing can result in increased CTR for push notifications. Schedule notifications to be sent at on right time

Always check if the schedule is available with the Web Push Notification Service provider. It’s a very useful feature when it comes to engaging with users.

You should also check for subscriber time-zone feature. If you have subscribers from different geos, the same push notification will be delivered at the local time of the subscriber time-zone. This will eliminate the need to manually send notifications for different time-zones.

Price & Inventory Alert

One of the things that most of the online customers look for is a better price. They always look if they can get a good price on the product. One way to update the user on price change is “Price Alert Campaign“. Using push notification you easily update users on the price changes. This is one of the most effective campaigns for every e-commerce website as it directly impacts the revenue. Once activated, it will automatically update users when the price drops and bring them back to your website.

What happens if the product customer is planning to buy goes out of stock? You have lost a potential customer. Using push notification you can recover your loss using “Inventory Alert Campaign”. It will automatically send push notifications to the customer whenever their favorite product is back in stock.

Drip Campaign

Another important feature that has a great impact on the performance of web push notification is Drip. Drip Notification is a series of automated notification sent to a user based on certain actions. You can use drip for:

• Welcome Notification: Create a series of notification to be sent when the user subscribes to your push notification
• Nurture Leads: Educate users with a series of notification focusing on product features.
• Target Notification: You can combine Drip with segmentation to send specific notification series to users based on their location. For e.g., real estate can send different drip campaigns for people subscribing from different locations.

Drip Campaigns are the easiest way to bring back users once they subscribe to your push notification. You can even send Welcome Offers to your users when they subscribe.

Push Notification Analytics

Measurement is an important part of every marketing campaign. The important metric to check for:

• Opt-In Analytics: There are multiple designs for Push Notification Opt-In to choose from. You need to understand which opt-in type is good for your website. With Opt-In analytics, you can easily analyze the performance of Push Opt-In.
• Subscriber Analytics: Your website is accessible from across the globe. You need to see from which Geo you are getting subscribers. This will help you to fine-tune your offerings based on the user’s location. Especially for location-based services, these feature is a must-have for a Web Push Notification service provider.
• Notification Analytics: You need to see the performance of the notification sent. Analyze the performance based on how many notifications were opened, CTR, and other parameters. This will also help you to understand the best timing to send the push notification and also what type of notifications are preferred by your user

Before signing up with Web Push Notification service provider, you should check what analytics data will be provided. Analytics is very important to the success of your push notification campaign.

Country Adaptation

As discussed above, the Web Push Notification service provider should allow you to segment users based on Geo. Now you can send Push Notifications in the local language of your user. This will not only create a personal touch but also can lead to an increased engagement rate.

You can then send the same notification in different languages based on the user’s location. You can even combine user speaking the same language.

Push Subscriber Portability

You have put a lot of effort into getting push notification subscribers for your website. What happens if your service provider increases the price or you need more features which are not available with your current service providers. Whatever is the reason, if you want to switch web push notification service provider, you should be able to port your old subscriber to your new service provider. Things to check before registering for the service provider:

• Will they allow to port old users from a different provider to their platform
• If in future you want to switch service provider, can you port user from their platform to different platform

Ideally, you should implement web push notification without vendor lock-in or you should be told that beforehand.

Multiple Plans For Push Notification

Each service has some price to be paid for. You should check all the different plans available for a Push Notification service provider. You should check if custom plans are available. Many times you may need only a few features but those are available at higher plans which you can’t afford. Check if the push notification vendor has flexible pricing.

The next important aspect is to check price vs value. You should get value for the money you are paying for. The best practice would be to go for a trial plan for the top plan. This will help you to understand and explore all the features and then you can decide on which plan to take which will fit in your business requirement.

Multi-Platform Support

You are using push notification from one of the service providers. Currently, your website is on the WordPress platform and now you want to shift to Shopify. Will your push notification provider support the new platform? What happens if it doesn’t and you cannot export subscribers? In such cases, either you will lose your subscriber or be on the same platform.

Always check whether the push notification provider supports integration with multiple platforms. There are many platforms like WordPress, Shopify, Prestashop, Weebly, and more. You can also ask the installation process on different platforms. In WordPress, you can use the push notification plugin to get started with push notifications. Similarly, in Shopify, you can use the Push Notification app to use push on your store.

Another thing you can check before signing up with Push Notifications are:

• Reviews Of Push Notification Service Provider
• Awards & Recognition received by the Service Provider
• Awards from top SaaS review websites

This concludes the top features you should look for in web push notification platform before signing up with them. Chooses your vendor wisely to get the best service without trouble. Web Push Notification is a great tool to engage with users. If you are not using it, then you should give it a try.