WHAT ARE PUSH NOTIFICATIONS?
Push notifications are messages that appear on the end users device without the need to have the application or website open. They have become part of our everyday life, a multitude of applications ping our mobile devices daily with the latest social media activity, incoming messages and order updates.
Chrome, Safari and Firefox have recently developed support for the web push API which prompted many websites such as Facebook, Amazon, Trello to jump on the chance to usilise this technology.
If you havent seen a web push notification before, check out this example taken from one of recently launched websites/applications CLUB+.
PUSH NOTIFICATION USAGE
As web push notifications are a reasonably new technology, analytic statistics are still quite varied and not currently well documentated, so at the risk of being ill-informed we wont be quoting any web push statisitcs here. However app notifications are well established and studies have shown they can have an open rate between 30% and 60% in comparison to a 5.4% email click through rate. Furthemore user retention of those subscribed to push notifcations are twice as high compared with those who arent subscribed.
As with emails, there are many factors as to the success of a notification; the industry, the delivery time, the content and the quality of the notification/email itself.
HOW WEB-PUSH NOTIFICATIONS CAN BE USED
Web push notifications can used in the same way to app notifications, for example:
"Your order has been despatched, view tracking information"
"John says: Hey, can I borrow you a second?"
"Read our latest blog entry, how to use web push notifcations"
"You have items in your basket, checkout now with this 5% voucher code"
Ideally in addition to giving a snippet of information, a CTA will be included to prompt a user interaction with the page.
BUT WAIT THERES MORE....
As previously mentioned modern browsers already support this new technology, even more exciting is the fact mobile web browsers are beginning to support web push notifcations. Various Android browsers already support this, Apple currently haven't given any timescales for web push support although have indicated it is something they are actively looking into.
This would mean you will be able to take advantage of being able to send notifcations to mobile and desktop devices without the overhead of running a separate application.
Sounds interesting? Drop us a message if you want to find out how web push notifcations can be integrated with your site.
