Are you a Shopify store owner looking to boost your bottom line? Want an innovative approach to increase customer engagement? Look no further than Shopify push notifications. Push notifications allow you to send messages directly to your customers’ devices. They’re a great way to increase sales and keep customers updated on new products and promotions. Overall, when you use web push notifications, the effect on your business’s bottom line can be wildly successful.
In this post, we’ll show you how to send Shopify push notifications. We’ll also give you some tips on making the most of them. So if you’re looking for a way to keep your customers coming back, read on!
Table of Contents
- What Are Web Push Notifications?
- The Shopify Web Push Opt-in and Notification Process
- Why You Should Be Using Shopify Push Notifications
- Sending Shopify Push Notifications: A List of Best Practices
- How to Send Back in Stock Push Notifications to Your Customers
What are Web Push Notifications?
If you’ve ever loved a brand so much that you wanted to know about every promotion they’re offering, you’ve subscribed to web push notifications. This is exactly how you want your customers to feel about your brand, to the point that they very willingly sign up for your push notifications.
Web push notifications are actionable notifications sent to customers’ devices, allowing them to opt-in to time-sensitive brand updates. The updates are personalized and contextual and engage and reengage active and inactive customers. These notifications remind your customers that you still exist.
Think of web push notifications as broadcasts to your audience. They’re a one-way stream to alert your customers of an update or upcoming promotion or remind them to hurry up and purchase that newly restocked product. You can use these different notifications in tandem or independently across various devices.
Recover Lost Sales Today with Web Push Notifications
With Back in Stock, you automatically capture consumer information and send them web push notifications when your products are in stock again.
Free 14-Day Trial
Web push notifications versus mobile push notifications: is there a difference?
Yes, although it’s discrete. For example, web push notifications deliver messages to a user’s desktop or laptop computers, while mobile push notifications deliver messages to (you guessed it) a user’s mobile device or tablet.
The Shopify Web Push Opt-in and Notification Process
To start, a user must allow push notifications for your website in their browser. Typically, a message pops up in the browser asking, “Would you like to turn on notifications for [insert website name here?]” and the user either accepts or declines. Unfortunately, this opt-in process doesn’t crossover to other browsers or devices. If a customer opts in on Google Chrome, they’d have to re-opt in on Firefox. The same goes for switching devices; if a customer opts in for notifications on their desktop but switches to their laptop, they’d have to grant access again on another device.
Once users opt-in to receive web push notifications, they receive alerts until they choose to opt-out or block notification delivery.
If the users choose to receive notifications, the webserver stores a certificate to identify and validate that a user’s device allows web push notifications. Then, when you’re ready to send a notification, the web push protocol sends a request.
Then, the push service keeps the message on the server until the user is active. Once active, the user receives the push notification, or the message expires after a specific time. As the push notification owner, you can give it an expiration date and can specify how long the message should stay in limbo before it’s deleted and therefore undelivered.
Why You Should Be Using Shopify Push Notifications
As of February 2019, 74% of American households have a desktop or laptop computer; that’s a lot of opportunities to send push notifications. The thing is, in 2021, push notifications generated 171% more sales compared to 2020, and 28% of consumers who opt into push notifications later go on to make a purchase.
What’s more is that Omnisend analyzed over 12 billion marketing emails, 63 million text messages, and 54 million web push notifications. They found that regular campaign emails and notifications had open rates of 27.6%, click rates around 0.53%, and conversion rates around 0.2%, whereas automated push notification open rates were 64.2%, click rates 2.26%, and conversion rates 1.34%.
Push notifications help your business in a few ways:
Getting started doesn’t require a complicated app.
Browser push notifications work like their mobile push counterparts, so you won’t need to develop an app or join the no code community in order to benefit from native push notifications on mobile devices.
Instead, you can get an app to do the work for you. With Back in Stock’s web push notifications, you can recover lost sales and bring back your inactive customers.
Back in Stock is a Shopify tool to help you notify your customers through email and SMS when products in your store are restocked.
Setup takes less than five minutes to install with no coding required. If you don’t want the Back in Stock theme colors, we allow you to personalize your theme or make your button with our JavaScript API.
Stop losing sales any time your inventory runs out. This way, anytime a product sells out, customers will be alerted instantly once you restock your product. This also creates a sense of urgency for your customers: they receive your notification prompting them to click on the product link thereby encouraging them to complete the purchase.
If you want to dip your feet into the world of restocking notifications, we offer a free plan to start. You can always scale up at any time.
Recover Lost Sales Today with Web Push Notifications
With Back in Stock, you automatically capture consumer information and send them web push notifications when your products are in stock again.
Free 14-Day Trial
Push notifications help to boost your sales and bottom line.
Web push notifications can be very powerful in increasing your business’ revenue and overall bottom line since they offer guaranteed impressions – your audience will undoubtedly see notifications pop up on their device. The notifications bring more traffic to your site, engagement with your product listings, and, ultimately, sales.
Push notifications make it easy for shoppers to opt in for future promotions.
Web push notifications have higher opt-in rates as compared to emails. Users don’t need to give their email address or other contact details and they have the freedom to unsubscribe to notifications whenever they want.
Online shoppers don’t need to take the time to type in their email address, name, telephone number, dog’s middle name, and other invasive information. By opting in to push notifications, customers only have to click “accept” or “allow” once. All it takes is that single click to commence the push notification process.
This leads us to another point about push notifications:
You can reach your Shopify store’s visitors instantly.
Unlike other communication methods, Shopify web push notifications can reach your audience even when they’re not actively browsing your website. Naturally, emails do this too, but web push notifications pop up when your visitors least expect them.
Also, web push notifications have zero risk of winding up in the dreaded spam folder. Nor can they be blocked by ad blockers.
They suggest conversion actions to your customers.
Because you deliver web push notifications in real-time, you can accelerate conversions with targeted, segmented messages. For example, reminding customers your product is back in stock, or perhaps you’re offering a special discount to a visitor who hasn’t yet made a purchase. Both situations may encourage them to make the purchase as soon as possible.
You’ll enjoy faster subscriber growth.
Sending out push notifications is the quickest way to grow your customer base. When customers opt-in, they’re already saying yes to your brand. You can quickly grow your email subscriber list. The notifications prompt customers to purchase, and they’re more likely to opt into your coupons. Consider pushing a notification saying, “Want to hear about more promotions? Sign-up for weekly discounts.”
Now that you know why you should be using Shopify push notifications, let’s review some best practices.
How to Send Shopify Push Notifications: A List of Best Practices
Shopify notification goals 101
Before sending out push notifications, consider the goals behind them:
- You want users to opt-in for Shopify push notifications, but
- You never want users to click “block” in the subscription pop-up.
When a user clicks “block,” this is called a hard opt-in. We never want customers to choose this option because reversing the block requires the customer to go into the site’s preferences in their browser, and at that point, you’ve already lost them. There’s no easy way to reverse this decision which means the customer will probably never reverse it.
So, there’s a soft opt-in and a hard opt-in. Let’s review these differences.
Hard opt-in: this occurs when the subscription pop-up displays right after the user visits the website without any context.
Soft opt-ins occur when a user’s action triggers the subscription pop-up. The notification includes information about why the user should opt-in to the notifications.
In most cases, you want to use the soft opt-in. While hard opt-ins seem tempting since they trigger right when the user visits the site, unfortunately, there are drawbacks including,
- The user ignores the notification. Other than clicking Allow, this is a best-case scenario for hard opt-ins since the notification pops up again on the user’s next visit.
- The user clicks Block and denies the push notification. This is the worst-case scenario as it’s nearly impossible to ask them back.
Showing the pop-up when a user first visits your site is risky. Why would the user trust your website? What sort-of notifications will they receive? Why should they blindly subscribe to your Shopify push notifications? If they’re wise, they won’t. People are inundated with information thrust upon them every day, so why add fuel to the fire? That’s why you need to tell them why they should trust your website. And that’s the job of the soft opt-in.
With soft opt-ins, you inform your users what to expect when they receive your notifications. You need to convince them that your notifications are worth subscribing to. The great thing about soft opt-ins is that if your user clicks No Thanks or declines the offer, you can show it again after a little while.
Soft Opt-in Push Notification Best Practices
Great push notifications inform users on why they should subscribe to you and what messages they should expect from you. So, to write the ideal soft opt-in, follow these instructions:
1. Segment your subscribers
When attracting Shopify subscribers to your push notifications, look into your existing customer data. Then, divide your customers into groups based on their behavior or anonymity. This way you can create customized web push notifications to engage various subscribers.
Segmenting customers means dividing customers into groups based on commonalities they share including age, gender, location, life stage, sales funnel stage, industry, and other factors. The segmentation process allows marketers to customize their marketing efforts to a variety of audiences. It helps a company to:
- Create targeted marketing campaigns tailored to specific audiences.
- Decide what communication channels are best for each audience.
- Test promotions and sales strategies.
- Build customer relationships.
- Develop customer service.
- Test product pricing.
You’ll need to gather customer information such as job titles, geography, age, and gender. You can find customer data based on information they provided for you upon signing up for a newsletter or sale, or you’ll need to dig deeper by acquiring information using other methods like face-to-face interviews, surveys, focus groups, and case studies.
Segmenting your subscribers might look like this:
Group 1: Identified subscribers – users who have purchased from your Shopify store and have shared personal information with you.
Group 2: Unidentified subscribers – this group consists of users who haven’t purchased anything from your store. You don’t have enough information about their shopping needs, but you can target web push notifications encouraging them to add items to their wishlist or cart.
Group 4: iPhone subscribers – these users only use iPhones.
Group 5: Android subscribers – these users only use Android.
Group 6: All subscribers – this group consists of all of your subscribers and is best used to send your Shopify store’s web push notifications.
These are only a few examples of segmented subscribers. When you organize your customers into groups it might look different.
2. Keep it simple but compelling
You want to use persuasive but straightforward language for your notifications. You only have a few seconds to grab their attention and tell them how you can help meet their needs so it must communicate a sense of urgency.
Let’s look at the anatomy of push notifications:
Title: Sharp and engaging, this title must create urgency for the customer.
Message: This is your one chance to convey what you need to. Keep it brief by explaining the value of the offer in the messaging. Why should they care about these notifications?
Logo: Add your brand’s logo so users know where the notification comes from.
Hero image: Push notifications with images perform better. Add images of your product or the service you’re promoting.
Call to action (CTA): Clearly define what the customer must do next with the web push. Do you want them to buy? Browse? Take advantage of a discount? Your CTA should reflect that.
Recover Lost Sales Today with Web Push Notifications
With Back in Stock, you automatically capture consumer information and send them web push notifications when your products are in stock again.
Free 14-Day Trial
3. Keep it short, but not too short
Oftentimes Shopify stores send out long messages that don’t get processed properly by the browser. Consequently, the messages are often truncated, leaving your store with a missed opportunity to convey what it needs.
By default, iOS only allows up to 230 characters, whereas Android notifications allow up to 650 characters. But, to get the best response, it’s recommended to keep your messages between 40-50 characters.
Brief is always better.
4. Get your messaging right
Customers love consistent messaging. When crafting your push notification messages, staying true to your brand is essential. Your messaging across all media channels must reflect this if your brand is fun and quirky like the Duolingo owl. Otherwise, customers won’t trust your company because they’ll view it capriciously.
Also, customers shop at stores they like because of the store’s personality and messaging. Think about your favorite store; what are their characteristics? Are they clever? Optimistic?
For example, take Shopify store Adored Vintage’s messaging.
Here is an excerpt from their website:
And from their Instagram:
They are consistent in both examples: informative, descriptive, and optimistic. Your brand’s voice doesn’t change depending on the marketing channel; it should always stay the same.
5. It’s all in the timing
Your messaging might be clear and compelling, but it will all be for naught if you send the message at the wrong time.
You want to send your push notifications when you know your users will be around. For example, you don’t want to send a message when your users are asleep or away from their computers. Instead, pick a time when they’re most likely to engage with the notification.
Remember when we talked about segmenting your customers? This is where segmenting comes in handy. You need to create conditions to send push notifications based on a user’s most active period or based on location. For instance, if a user logs in to your website at 3 pm but purchases around 10 pm, you’ll want to send that push notification around 10 pm.
You can also segment by geo-targeting users. Send messages according to the user’s local time zone. Another strategy is to target web push notifications based on a user’s weather conditions. If it’s a sunny day, wait to send that message on a cloudy, rainy day.
Most importantly, market to people, not devices.
6. Test Shopify push notification frequency
Like with timing, there is no optimal frequency to increase your Shopify store’s sales. And frequency varies from campaign to campaign. For example, if you’re having a one-day-only flash sale, you’ll want to send a couple of notifications in the days leading up and maybe two notifications the day of to remind customers to act. On the other hand, for a week-long campaign, you might message them every other day of the sale or on the first and last days.
To find the ideal frequency, refer to this guide from BusinessofApps.
7. Constantly monitor
When you’re in the early stages of web push notifications, you want to track the success of your campaigns. To measure the success, look at these key metrics:
- View rate: the number of users who saw the web push notifications divided by the number of sent push notifications.
- Open rate: the number of people who clicked on your push notifications divided by the number of people who saw them.
- Time spent on the page: time a user spent on your page after clicking the notification.
- Conversion rate: number of users who followed through on action after viewing the web push notification.
- Opt-in rate: the percentage of users who opt into your Shopify store’s push notifications.
- Opt-out rate: the number of users who opt out of your notifications.
- Re-engagement rate: the percentage of users who you re-engaged with marketing efforts. For example, sending a push notification to users with abandoned carts.
How to Send Back In Stock Push Notifications to Your Customers
To help you stay on brand, Back in Stock created web push notification templates so you can customize your notifications to your liking. Change the title, add a description, and preview your designs on various platforms.
Here’s how the push notification feature works for your customers – it’s super simple:
1. Your customer lands on a sold-out product that they like.
2. They click Notify me when available.
3. Then, they select the new Web Push option and click Allow to be notified via push notifications:
This will register the customer for push notifications on that particular product.
Ready to get started? It’s easy to set up push notifications in Back In Stock. Here’s what you need to do.
How to set up Back In Stock push notifications
1. In your Back In Stock app, under Account, select Web push notifications, then check Show web push option in popup form.
2. Customize your content:
- for your title, close to 39 characters are ideal.
- you’ll want about 150 characters for your description.
- enter the button and secondary button labels and URLs.
- upload your logo and/or other images.
3. Preview how the content will appear on an Android, Mac, and Windows device. You can also send a test to yourself to see what your customer will see:
4. Publish your template settings:
Then, when your item is back in stock, simply change its quantity in the app. Any customer who has signed up for push notifications on that product will be notified right away (this may take a couple of minutes after you’ve updated your inventory).
And, if you’re wondering who’s registered for push notifications on certain products, you can always check out the list under customer notifications in the app:
Learn more about Back in Stock’s web push notifications here.
The ability to send push notifications right to your customer’s browser is an excellent way to keep them engaged and up-to-date on your store’s latest products and promotions. So, if you’re looking for an innovative approach that will help increase sales and your store’s bottom line, give Shopify push notifications a try!
