What are best practices for Web Push Notifications?

Just like with email, the way your Web Push Notifications are perceived and experienced depends on how you use them. When done well, they can boost engagement. If they're done poorly, they can annoy your audience. Here are some tips to help you find the most success.

Opt-In Prompts

Do Not Trigger the "Opt-In Prompt" Too Quickly

One of the main mistakes a company can make is triggering the "Opt-In Prompt" right after someone visits their website for the first time. They have no context for who you are or what you're about so why would they let you send them anything yet?  It's like entering a store and having the staff ask you to give them all your personal info before you had a chance to even walk around.

This is why we have rules in place to prevent this pitfall. If you choose to display the "Opt-In Prompt" on the first, we require at least a 30 second delay.

Tell People What Value You Offer

We must earn people's trust before asking them to give you anything. When you design your "Opt-In Prompt", it is important to make the language your own. 

• Tell users what type of notifications you will send
• Be transparent about what you will send them and stick to that
• Always send users relevant content
  
  

Use a Custom "Opt-In Prompt"

This relates to building trust with your audience. Research strongly suggests that a custom "Opt-In Prompt" gets more engagement. Since so many tend to implement Web Push Notifications poorly, many people can ignore the browser's native prompt experience.

AWeber uses a custom "Opt-In Prompt" allowing you to upload your logo and modify the description. This lets you clearly communicate your brand and the value you offer.

Content and Design

When to Send

The best time to send web push notifications is based on the industry and audience. Timezone differences also factor in. In a very general sense, sending between "3PM to 6PM" seems to have the best rate of engagement.

We provide stats on how many people click on your notifications and you can use this data, to fine tune your strategy.

Send web push notifications between 3PM - 6PM (Monitor and adjust based on audience and industry). 

Relevancy and Value

All notifications disrupt a user's flow so we need to make sure the message is relevant and valuable. The same guidelines we use for writing emails applies to web push notifications except now the messages must be much shorter and direct.

• Balance between writing too much and too little
  • Don't be too wordy or people won't read. Web Push notifications are small and rely on movement not size.
  • Overly vague copy leaves the user confused and guessing at the content
• Avoid jargon and unnecessary words
  
  

Quality over Quantity

Be careful not to burst out too many notifications in a short amount of time. This can easily overwhelm and irritate your audience. Over time this practice will lead people to view your brand negatively and can be perceived as spammy or untrustworthy. 

Instead, be more intentional with your content. Send fewer notifications more meaningfully.

How should the notification look?

You can add a title, description, and image to your Web Push Notification. Web Push Notifications are relatively small, so you want to make sure the title and description are concise. Depending on what you're promoting, you can include a call-to-action. For example, if you want to encourage website subscribers to read your new blog post, you could write something like "click here to visit my blog."

The image should be a JPG, PNG, of GIF file type and less than 1.5 MB in size. The recommended size for your images is 192 px by 192 px or larger.