Hi again! Updating you with the most recent trends, events, and updates within the digital marketing world. In this post, we are covering all the important updates that took place in September.
1. Search Marketing Updates September 2020
Google Organic Algorithm Updates
September has been subject to a lot of volatility as many tracking tools showed erratic behavior. At first the SEO community didn’t interpret this as the early signs of a core algorithm update as the client rankings had not point in the same direction. However, things changed in a few days and the community started to talk about dropping rankings and even pages from Google’s Search Index.
Had some key landing pages dropped out the index for no obvious reason today @sengineland@rustybrick – another bug?
In the end it turned out to be a bug related issue but the rankings have been volatile nonetheless.
Free listings on shopping tab becomes available for Europe, Middle East and Africa
After its launch in the US earlier this year, free listings will be there for EMEA businesses on the shopping tab in mid-October. US businesses who used free listings to support their Google Ad campaigns saw an increase of 100% in views and 50% in visits.
That said, you don’t have to advertise on Google to have access the free listings. Retailers will be able to connect with more customers and customers will have more product options and easy access to them.
Google Ads Updates
Dynamic YouTube Lineups With Contextual Targeting
Google puts machine learning to use to analyze each channel’s content. This allows them to create dynamic lineups of channels categorized by specific topics, cultural moments and popularity.
This will enable advertisers to scale their reach while keeping the viewer relevance as high as possible. Advertisers will now be able to find new customers that are seeking content that is aligned with the advertisers’ brand, product or service making the connection at the right time and the right place.
Google gives the best example: “If you’re a home decor brand whose video ads on YouTube focus on redecorating, you can use dynamic lineups to show your ads in videos relevant to your business. These lineups may include videos of house tours, storage solutions, and home improvement projects.”
A recent Ipsos study showed ads based on consumer interest and intent caused 32% higher ad recall and 100% higher purchase intent.
2. Marketing Tech Updates September 2020
Referral Marketing
Word of mouth will yield the most outcome for most businesses when it comes to demand generation. Especially when cost of acquisition and ad spend is increasing year by year to make the market more competitive.
It’s the most authentic way you can increase your brand awareness and loyalty. If you can create a lot of advocates for your company this process will take care of itself. But there is a way to accelerate it. Instead of creating a whole plan and acquiring the resources internally to implement it, you can utilize a software to do it for you.
There are many ways to do it:
Creating gift cards to be shared online
Launching referral programs
Gathering reviews
The most important thing is to find a supplier that easily integrates with your platform and help you A/B test different tactics and show you the results with analytics.
Criteo Dives Deep Into Analytics
Retargeting ad company Criteo announced they’ll have 2 new dashboards and a new reporting tool in their suite.
The Audience Explorer dashboard will provide an exclusive dataset about recurring shopping patterns and the categories and the brands that your existing customers are most interested in.
The Audience Performance Report allows you to compare different segments by size, reach, exposure, purchasing power and gender oriented items to optimize target audiences and campaigns.
The new Shopping Journey Dashboard gives how different audiences move through your funnel. This is great for coming up with different tactics and see how much they move a group from one step to another.
3. Social Media Marketing Updates September 2020
TikTok introduces Duets
Another feature was introduced by TikTok that will increase the engagement levels and the community feel. YouTube and Instagram introduced short content features lately to keep up with TikTok. But TikTok has kept their foot on the pedal with new features.
These were the things that happened in Digital Marketing in September 2020. You can also read all updates on Digital Marketing Insights page.
Web push notifications are clickable messages sent by a website and appear on the screen of a user’s device, even if the website is closed and the user hasn’t filled any type of registration form. It is the latest and a very powerful digital channel for websites to re-engage and communicate with subscribers who opt-in to receive them, providing useful/interesting information.
What are web push notifications used for?
They’re used as a direct communication channel to keep users informed about news, promotions, abandoned products on their shopping carts or general information and updates. Web push notifications can be installed on any website: e-commerce, newspapers, blogs or magazines and their purpose is to entice users to return to the site and complete an specific action.
Where do web push notifications appear?
The format and position of web push notifications changes depending on the operative system, browser and device they appear on. They slide on the top right corner on Mac devices, on the bottom right corner on Windows devices , and on mobile they appear in the same way to a regular push notification from an app.
Windows Desktop Web Push Notification
Android Mobile Web Push Notification
What’s the difference between web and mobile push notifications?
Mobile push notifications are messages sent by an app that is installed on a mobile device or tablet. In order to receive them, users need to give permission and they’re shown on the screen of the device, no matter if the user is actively on that app or not.
Web push notifications are simply the website version of the app push notifications. They are messages sent by a website and delivered through browsers even when the users are not on that website, to both mobile and desktop devices.
The first time a user accesses a notifications-enabled website, users will be asked if they would like to to allow or block them by a browser permission prompt, just like apps would ask their users to allow notifications.
What’s the difference between pop-ups and web push notifications?
A pop-up is a message that suddenly shows-up on a website over the content while the user is currently navigating on it. The majority of them show-up as soon as a user lands on the page. In some cases they can be activated based on users’ actions, such as a click, scrolling down, spending a specific time period or closing a window (exit intent pop-ups).
Web Push Notification
Pop-up
Pop-ups can appear both on desktop and mobile, and are typically used for advertisement with the purpose of directing the user’s attention to a specific message in the site they’re visiting. User experience is usually diminished by these types of messages as they’re considered intrusive and annoying.
Web push notifications differ from pop-ups mainly because they’re shown on the screen of the user not necessarily within the browser window even if the user is not on the website, while pop-ups can only be shown within the browser window when the user is actively browsing on that website.
What elements compose a web push notification?
Web push notifications are composed of various elements that conform their anatomy. They include: icon, headline, description, call to action button, a large image and the page url from where it’s being sent. All the elements are modifiable for each notification, you can change the icon, image, text, CTA for each one if you wish to.
Icon: The icon is usually the logo of the brand. Its position inside the notification varies between different OS and browsers, but is always visible. The icon has to be a square image preferably at least 256 x 256 px.
Tips and insights: if you use your logo, you can adapt the design to match the season or a holiday!
Headline: The headline is the first text line of the notification. It usually appears in bold letters as an attempt to catch the user’s attention in most of the browsers & OS’s. The length of the visible area varies between 43 to 69 characters depending on different OS and browsers
Tips and insights: use the most appealing words at the first 43 characters of your content to make sure it’s visible regardless of the OS and browser.
Description: The description is the textual content that follows the headline and it’s used to offer a more detailed explanation. The length of the visible area varies between 50 to 136 characters depending on the OS and browser.
Tips and insights: use the most appealing words at the first 50 characters of your content to make sure it’s visible in all OS and browsers. Personalise the content using the dynamic parameters in this section as it has more area which can accommodate longer values of parameters
Large Image (Optional): An image that complements the message, it should be descriptive and appealing. It’s only visible on Google Chrome, Windows and Android OS.
Tips and insights:push notifications with images have a 20% higher CTR, according to A/B testing conducted by several Frizbit clients. The ideal ratio of the image to make it visible on all OS and devices is 2×1 horizontal, minimum size being 512 x 256 px and recommended size being 1024 x 512 px. You can read more about the ideal size and resolution for rich web push notifications here.
Page URL: Is the domain of the website that’s sending the notification, the one the user subscribed to. The subscriber can be directed to any destination URL, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the same domain.
Tips and insights: send subscribers to a page as close to the lower end of the shopping funnel as possible. This will increase the possibility of conversion. Don’t forget to add UTM tags to track the traffic coming from each different push notification campaign
Action button (Optional): Action buttons (you can have up to two) are optional buttons which can be used as call to action to tell users what you want them to do, what action is expected from them. Its visibility also varies depending on OS and device. It is possible to define a distinct URL to action buttons, other than the main URL of the notification.
Tips and insights: be precise on the CTA (Call to Action), tell the subscribers exactly what you want them to do: finish your purchase, book now. Don’t forget to add UTM tags to track the traffic coming from each different push notification campaign.
Even though all web push notifications include the same elements, how they’re shown will depend on the browser, operating system and device. Some will include the image, some won’t and the visibility of the text and action buttons will vary as well.
All the elements can be highly customised with personalised text, images and even emojis. If you make use of the dynamic parameters, you can include even more specific information such as category name, product name, product image, product price and user name to make the message as relevant as possible for each user, making them feel that you’re talking directly to them.
What are web push notification character limits?
Character limits are different depending on the type of device, browser, and operating system. The character limit varies between 40 and 75 characters for titles and between 50 and 225 for descriptions.
These are different character limits for web push notifications and applications. However, it is very important to use the space in each notification so that your subscribers can see the whole message.
Here you can find the table with all the push notification character limits across different platforms :
On Android, the length of the description varies depending on whether you use a hero image or not. You can go up to 50 characters in the description with a hero image, while without hero images you can go up to 441 characters.
For Windows 10 web push notifications, the maximum title length limit is 63 characters and the limit is 128 characters for the description.
For Mac the ideal is to limit the title to about 40 characters and the description to 80 characters.
What operating systems support web push notifications?
Web push notifications are supported by all major operating systems, except iOS. Windows, Android, MacOS work properly with web push while iOS doesn’t support them by default.
Chrome Android Web Push Notification
Chrome MacOS Web Push Notification
Chrome Windows Web Push Notification
Firefox Android Web Push Notification
Firefox MacOS Web Push Notification
Firefox Windows Web Push Notification
Safari MacOS Web Push Notification
What browsers support web push notifications?
All major browsers, Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Microsoft Edge support web push notifications, except Internet Explorer.
What devices support web push notifications?
Web push notifications are shown on desktop, mobile and tablets even if the user has left the website. Their appearance and where they’re shown will vary depending on the operating system of the device.
2. How do web push notifications work?
From the publisher’s perspective
Web push notifications work for any kind of website. Any brand or business that owns a website can configure and send web push notifications very easily. No mobile app is required to do so, and the implementation is fairly simple by adding a small piece of code from a web push notification service platform to their site. We explain the process with more detail ahead in this article.
From the user’s perspective
Web push notifications is a permission based marketing channel, which means that it can be only sent to a user if they allow a website to do so. In order to start receiving web push notifications all a user needs to do is basically to opt-in (give permission to that particular website to send push notifications) and become a subscriber. This can be done by two ways:
Native opt-in: is the browsers’ default prompt to ask users their permission to subscribe to the web push notifications channel. It includes a non-customizable text and uses the language settings chosen by the user. It triggers when a user visits a site for the first time and they have to click “allow” or “block”.
Custom opt-in: is a form of opt-in which shows first a pop-up that can be customized with the website’s branding that also appears the first time a user visits the site. It offers the possibility to personalise the message and include the logo of the brand. It can be shown on the top middle of the screen and after clicking “allow” on, it triggers the browsers’ opt-in prompt, in which the user must give permission again to become a subscriber. The downside of using a custom opt-in, is that it requires two clicks from users in order to actually allow the notifications and this results in a 3x decreased opt-in rate.
Opt-out: How to disable web push notifications?
When it comes to this channel, the users have complete control over them. In order to unsubscribe from web push notifications, subscribers just need to access their browser settings panel, look for the notifications option, find the website they would like to opt-out and select “block”. The process may vary a little depending on the browser you use, for details you can check these articles:
There are two types of web push notifications: manual and automated. Depending on the service provider you choose, you’ll have more options regarding the type of messages you can send. The difference between them is their triggering mechanism:
Manual (bulk) push notifications: manual web push notifications are used to send manually a massive communication to all or a segment of users informing about special discounts, promotions, time sensitive sales or new products. They could be understood as the push notification equivalent to email newsletters. You can send messages regarding:
News
New blog post
Event information
Flash sale
New products
Automated (triggered) push notifications: automated notifications are highly personalised messages sent to users based specifically on their individual behaviour on the site. They’re designed and scheduled to be sent automatically in predetermined time frames after a user completes an action. You can define as many scenarios as you wish to trigger an automated web push notification, depending what type of site you have:
E-commerce: you can define events that send a message to users for every step of the funnel. Ex. Cart Abandonment, Product Retargeting, Category Retargeting.
Travel: you can define events to trigger notifications to recover lost reservations of the users that didn’t complete the booking or to improve the UX of the trip. Ex. Last Seats for a specific destination, last available room, check-in, boarding, luggage reminders.
B2B/SaaS: you can generate more leads by sending a sequence of web push notifications to nurture leads that visited a page but dind’t complete a sign up.
Real Estate: you can generate more leads and interactions by communicating with users about a listing they have viewed but didn’t engage with it or recommending similar properties or announce them about new listings.
3. Why should I use web push notifications on my website?
Web push notifications present a direct and real-time communication channel with users. Subscribers receive the message when they’re online, which highly increases the chances of interaction within minutes of the notification being sent. There’s no other digital marketing channel that has this inherent power that web push notifications have.
Engage anonymous users
The main reason web push notifications are becoming so popular amongst marketers, is because it is a unique channel to retain users that didn’t leave any personal information on the website. To become a subscriber, a user has to simply click “allow” on the opt-in prompt without filling any form, sharing their email address or any other type of personal data. This presents a major opportunity for businesses to create a flow of communication with users that might never decide to drop their email.
Reach both desktop and mobile without having an app
One the most attractive features of web push notifications is that they don’t require an app to function. In order to send a push notification, you just need to have a website and you can reach your subscribers on both desktop and mobile devices. This means that you don’t have to wait for users to check their emails to get the message through. Being able to reach people at any time, on any device is a unique advantage of web push notifications.
Reach users out of the website
What makes web push notifications so special is that they can reach audiences even when they’re not actively browsing your website. If a user subscribes, leaves and starts navigating any other site, they’ll still receive notifications from you. There’s currently no other direct digital marketing channel you can do this with, which adds to the list of reasons why you should use web push notifications on your website.
Generate traffic in seconds
Web push notifications is a real-time communication channel. This means users get the message the moment they’re online which inmensely increases the chances of interaction. On average, most notifications are clicked within the first hour after receiving it. For example, with manual web push notifications, you can direct lots of traffic in a very short period of time. In less than a minute after sending it, you’ll see sessions being generated on your web and users engaging with the site in real-time in your web analytics solution.
Time efficient
Digital and online businesses are used to working with multiple marketing tools to get their message across. Most of the time it would seem overwhelming to add one more channel to the mix. However, web push notifications is different. The campaign setup is extremely simple and you don’t have to spend a lot of time creating each message and manually sending it. Using automation you can create templates that will be sent automatically when triggered by an event you define on your site. You’ll only need to invest some time once to configure your campaigns and that’s it!
4. Are web push notifications effective?
The most simple and straightforward answer is YES! But let’s dig a little deeper. If used wisely it can become the most effective retargeting channel for online businesses.
High opt-in rate
Web push notifications have proven to be much more effective than other traditional channels. They have an average 3x higher opt-in rate than emails, which can easily be related to how seamless the process is. With just one click, visitors can become subscribers without handing over their email address or other personal information. Reducing the steps one person has to follow and complete to opt-in to any type of digital communication, will decrease the hesitation and make them more open minded to subscribe.
High CTR
Stats have shown that web push notifications have a 4x times higher click through rate than emails. That’s a 8,5% over in comparison to the 2.4% CTR of emails. The hyper-personalisation capabilities of web push notifications, allow to significantly increase the CTRs. When people feel like you’re really talking specifically to them, it will translate into more clicks and that is one of the biggest benefits of using web push notifications.
Profitable channel
Web push notifications present a very valuable alternative for marketers that allocate a big part of their marketing budget to retargeting ads. Most web push notification services are based on monthly fees that vary on the amount of subscribers or visits to the website. There are no extra fees for the amount of messages sent, implementation nor PPC rates involved. You can send unlimited notifications.
This makes the cost of retaining a customer very profitable. Consider that returning users that have already converted are the biggest asset to your business. Web push notifications allow you to bring them back without having to spend a large marketing budget chasing them around with expensive retargeting ads.
How much can you increase your revenue with web push notifications?
Web push notifications offer varied results depending on the industry, type of business and amount of traffic of the site. You can access our calculator and introduce a few data to estimate how much you can increase your revenue using web push notifications in just a few clicks: https://get.frizbit.com/revenue-calculator/
5. How do I send web push notifications from my website?
1. Upload Service Worker
The process of implementing web push notifications is very simple and can be done in any website. The first thing you have to do is to upload the Service Worker file of your provider to the root folder of your website’s domain. A Service Worker is a file that allows a browser to run functions that don’t need a web page such as sending push notifications to a user when they are not on your site.
2. Add JavaScript snippet
The next step is to add the JavaScript snippet of your provider that will help you create a user profile for every person that visits your site, allowing you to to track their behaviour. There are two options to do this:
A) Via Google Tag Manager: most web pages nowadays already use GTM and you can easily add this snippet as a tag on GTM. Besides, a web push notification service provider such as Frizbit can offer all the implementation on GTM in a few moments.
B) Adding directly to the web: if you don’t work with Google Tag Manager, you have the alternative to directly add the JavaScript snippet by copying and pasting it inside the <head></head> section of your website.
Working with a web push provider makes the process very simple, since they can take care of all the configuration, onboarding and then they hand everything over to you. After the setup is complete, you’ll instantly start collecting subscribers when they visit your site and opt-in. All that’s left is to design the notifications. Some providers, like Frizbit, will offer you templates, advice and support for the optimization of your campaigns.
How to create a web push notification?
Web push notification service providers usually have a dashboard where you can create the content of push notifications. Frizbit’s dashboard allows you to design your messages personalising with the use of all kinds of dynamic parameters and also see the changes in your design in real time for each browser and operating system. This way you have complete control and awareness of how the notification will be shown to users.
Access the dashboard, select “New” and enter a name for your campaign
Fill in the information of the title, and description and include the icon
Select the options for Google Chrome and add a large image, write the message for the call to action. You can add a second one if you wish to.
Follow the same steps for Safari
In the “Advanced Options” tab, you can set a timer and add a tag for your campaign.
Proceed to select when and how you want the notification to be delivered: right now, scheduled, recurring or event triggered.
Next, continue with the audience segmentation. Here you can select as many filters as you wish, such as language, country, type of event, browser, device and much more.
Once you’re done, you can save your design as a draft or publish immediately. The web push notification you created, will be saved on your dashboard and you can edit it later or copy it for new creations.
Remember you can perform different versions and conduct A/B testing. You can assign percentages of users to each campaign variation and see for yourself which one performs better. Use the results to optimize your notifications as much as possible and get the best results.
6. What metrics should I track to optimize my web push notification campaigns?
Web push notifications significantly increase user engagement and improve retention rates. There are several metrics you should keep an eye on in order to constantly improve your campaigns.
Opt-in rate: is the percentage of the unique users on your site clicking “allow” and becoming subscribers. Keeping track of this information will give you hints on where to ask users if they want to receive notifications from your site and adjust accordingly. You can place the opt-in prompt in any page you want, and trigger it by an action of the user. It’s not necessary to ask permission within the second a visitor enters the site.
Click-through rate: is the percentage of subscribers that click the notification over the total number of subscribers you sent it to. It’s so important to keep close track of this number, because it lets you know what type of notifications your subscribers are responding to. You can test different messages changing the title, image, description and CTA and analyse which ones are resulting in more clicks.
Time spent on a page: when sending a notification, you tell users what to expect when they click on it. Directing them to a good landing page that fulfills their expectations is key. That’s why you should keep track of how much time subscribers spend on a page after they click the notification. This will give you valuable insight on how the messages portrayed in the notification meets the landing’s information. If there’s no connection between the copy of the notification and the content of the page you send users to, bounce rate will increase, letting you know there’s an issue in copywriting.
Opt-out rate: shows the number of people that unsubscribed from web push notifications from your site. This is a vital metric to keep track of. Naturally your opt-in numbers should be much higher than opt-outs. If you discover that your opt-out rates are increasing over time, ring your alarm bells and start looking for the problem. In this case it’s usually related to low relevance of your notifications, or maybe you’re sending too many notifications that your subscribers perceive as spam and decide to opt-out.
Conversion rate: this is the ultimate goal of your campaign and the main metric of any type of business. This metric indicates the accomplishment of your goal, whether completed sales, signup or another type of engagement. All of the improvement efforts for other metrics should be aimed at ultimately increasing conversion rates. You can have great opt-in rate or click-through rates, but if they’re not translating into conversions, it is time to evaluate your web push notifications campaign strategy in place, identify the problem and do whatever it requires to resolve it.
You can keep track of the majority of these metrics, setting goals on Google Analytics and checking the reports that provide your web push notifications provider.
7. Are web push notifications GDPR compliant?
Web push notifications are GDPR compliant by nature. They present a direct communication channel with users with no personal data requirements. This means that users have to give consent to become recipients, but they don’t have to provide their name, email, phone number or any other type of personal information.
These instant alert messages are device oriented. The user is not targeted based on some personal data they share, but to their device. The subscription information is all stored in the browser, so businesses have no access to it and can’t use it or sell it in any way.
The user is the one in complete control by having access to the notifications panel, where they can easily decide to opt-out if they wish to.
8. What makes a good web push notification?
The best web push notifications have three attributes that bring results: they’re relevant, personal and precise. This channel offers many possibilities that can greatly benefit your online business if used correctly. If you exploit all its features with a well-thought strategy and avoid common mistakes, you’ll be a web push notification lover just like us.
A great web push notification is:
Relevant: Tracking the user’s behaviour on your site gives you all that you need in order to make the notification as relevant as possible. Define different scenarios to trigger a specific notification based on each user activity, so that the message they receive is directly linked to what they did on the site. You also want to keep in mind user segmentation. You don’t want to send a special offer on a product today, to a customer that bought it the day before. The same way you should keep in mind to send notifications about sales or special offers during the time they’re active and deactive the campaign the minute the promotion is over. Web push notifications that are highly relevant, have much higher click through rates.
Personal: Make use of all the dynamic parameters available: user name, product name, category name, image or any other available parameter to design a super personalised notification. If a user feels that you’re talking directly to him, the message will present a higher value and the user will be more enticed to engage with it. You should also contemplate language and time zone. Customize the campaign for each language and country you’re sending it to. The content of your web push notification has to appeal to each subscriber as an individual.
Specific: Great web push notifications let the subscriber know exactly what you want them to do and what they can expect when clicking that action button. Make it clear and precise with your title, message and CTA. Write the text keeping in mind how it will display on each OS and browser. Write the most important message in the title to make sure it’s always visible and make sure you link to the right landing page where your subscribers will find all you promised in the notification.
9. How to choose a web push notification service provider?
There are a list of features and considerations to be made when choosing a web push notification service. It’s important that you do your research and don’t jump ahead and go for the first service you find online. The main aspects you must consider are:
Customer data protection
There are many well-known free web push notifications service providers in the market. You might feel enticed to choose one of these instead of a paid one. The thing is, that free web push notifications services might sell your customer’s information, they’re “free” for a reason. When using one of these providers, you allow them to collect and sell your subscribers behavioural data, which can be purchased by your very own competitors. You have to decide which price to pay: a normal service fee or to sell subscribers personal information to third parties.
Subscriber portability
When choosing a web push notification provider, you want to make sure you collect subscribers under your own domain. Some of the providers offer you an alternative way of subscription where the users will be subscribed to a subdomain of the provider rather than the domain of the business itself. If you agree to this, all the subscribers that accept and opt-in to notifications from you, won’t belong to your website, they’ll belong to the website of your service provider. This means that, if one day, you wish to change providers for whatever reason, you’ll lose all your subscriber’s base and will have to start from scratch.
Personalisation and automation
Make sure you select a platform that offers the option of hyper-personalisation through dynamic parameters. As we mentioned before, customised notifications that include details like user name, have higher CTRs and lower opt-out rates. The same happens with automation. Notifications triggered by the behaviour of users on the website, have high relevance that translates in better engagement.
Good customer support
Whether you’re new with web push notifications, or have been using them for a while, good customer support is extremely important. You want to choose a provider that’s always going to be present if you have any doubt, concern or issue with your campaigns. Frizbit offers its clients a step by step onboarding, ready-to-send templates for your automated campaigns and consulting of any type.
When choosing a push notification provider, seek one that offers a trial period. This will help you ensure it ticks all the boxes and put you at ease with your decision. If you want to request a demo from Frizbit, click here and let us know!
Hi again! Updating you with the most recent trends, events, and updates within the digital marketing world. In this post, we are covering all the important updates that took place in August.
1. Search Marketing Updates August 2020
Google Organic Algorithm Updates
August 2020 has been a quiet month if you don’t count the SEOs bracing themselves for not one but two Google search glitches that happened on August 10th and August 15th. The first one especially had a major impact on the results for a brief period of time. Luckily things were back to normal shortly in both instances.
Google upgrades Activity Cards for shopping, product, recipe, and job searches
Google always finds new ways of delivering what people are searching for in the most convenient way. Their newest addition is the search activity cards.
Shopping Cards
Many online shoppers go through various articles, reviews, and benchmarks before purchasing a product. This feature allows them to see relevant products from previous searches together and compare them easily.
Jobs Cards
Jobs card touches a pain point of every job seeker. It allows you to filter out newly posted job posts from the ones that you’ve already seen. This ends going through the same posts every time you do a search. Now, you’re always up to date.
Recipes Cards
Whether you make the same recipe frequently or you’re on a quest of trying every Lasagna recipe out there, Google has you covered. They show you the previous recipes you searched for and other relevant ones based on your query with thumbnails.
Google Ads Updates
Google announces the plan to add Lead Form Extensions to Display Campaign later this year
A research done by Google back in March suggests a third of online shoppers prefers to shop from business that allows a wide array of options to contact them. Lead Form extensions are a considerably way to capture leads.
This new feature generated powerful results in Jeep’s cases as they saw 10x growth in their completed forms with their Korea branch. This makes sense as these forms enter the shopper journey when the attention is captured and the intent to buy or at least to explore is high.
The good news is the Lead Form Extensions will be available for display campaign later this year.
Easy import for offline conversions
Most of the time a buyer’s shopping journey is not as seamless as marketers would like to simplify with their funnels. It is often we see that the product discovery and vendor comparison is done online but the actual purchase takes place in the brick and mortar world.
Google makes it easier to import offline conversions to your CRM. Now vendors can bridge the gap in their CRMs in cases where a journey started with a click on an ad or call from that add. It sounds like a great way to understand what kind of ads work and drives acquisition beyond the online world.
ZenBusiness, a company that helps other businesses, experienced a 400% increase in customer acquisition year-over-year when the utilized the offline conversion data with the Smart Bidding feature to single out and target high-intent customers. There are specific instructions for those who use Salesforce Sales Cloud and Zapier.
2. Marketing Tech Updates August 2020
Chatbots
Although Chatbots are not new, they’re gaining momentum and it seems they’re here to stay. As in most cases marketers want to automate the grind work with chatbots.
Some of the things including a Chatbot in your omnichannel strategy are as follows:
lead generation
lead qualification
lead nurturing
increased engagement
faster one-touch sales
traffic segmentation
scheduling meetings
sharing short surveys
and more…
The aim is not to remove the personal touch out of the interaction. The aim is to save time, engage prospects, and help those who seek instant communication with a conversational approach.
3. Social Media Marketing Updates August 2020
TikTok introduces analytics
This month TikTok launched its analytics page for the Pro accounts. The analytics page provides an overview of historical performance analytics such as video views, profile views, and the number of followers.
The content section shows the trending videos you have and view numbers for the past 7 days. The followers section on the other hand help tracking the audience growth and the number of likes, shares, and comments.
Instagram challenges TikTok with Reels
TikTok has been dealing with being deemed as a potential threat to US national security. As if it wasn’t enough, now things got, even more, rockier for the Chinese app with Instagram’s new feature launch, Reels. Instagram wants to broaden its capabilities in the short-content sphere.
Reels give you the chance to create and edit 15-second multi-clip videos with audio, speed setting, and AR effects.
These were the things that happened in Digital Marketing in August 2020. You can also read all updates on Digital Marketing Insights page.
Hi again! Updating you with the most recent trends, events and updates within the digital marketing world. In this post, we are covering all the important updates that took place in July.
1. Search Marketing Updates July 2020
Google Organic Algorithm Updates July 2020 mainly has been a calm month regarding google organic algorithm updates, even calmer than June. There was no official update declared by Google.
There is only one probable update as far as some SEOs mentioned some changes on their organic traffic on July 23rd & 24th. The general comments of the SEO community, again, have been negative. There is no specific type of websites or queries being affected more than others, according to the comments of webmasters.
The impacts of the probable Google Algorithm update on search results, by Semrush
The impacts of the probable Google Algorithm update on search results, by CognitiveSEO
Google Ads Updates
Zero commission fees on Google Shopping when product is bought on Google
Google continues to shake up the dynamics of the e-commerce websites.
The first wave was in April 2020. Google had announced that they made all the listings on Google Shopping in the U.S. for free in the pursuit of enriching the number of the products listed there, as all products will be listed no matter if they are paying or not. (It was just the Shopping tab at first)
Then, the second wave took place at the end of the last month. At the end of last month, Google announced that they made the free shopping listings also available on the main Google Search results page in the U.S. This helped shoppers choose the products and sellers that will serve them best, from the widest variety of options.
The third and the final (at least for now) wave was announced in July 23rd. Google is now launching “Buy on Google” checkout experience and the retailers who participate in this program will be able to sell products directly in search results and they no longer have to pay a commission fee for sales made via the ‘Buy on Google’ option. This is a payment option that lets customers buy products without leaving Google search results.
New Product Attributes in Shopping Ads
Google started showing product attributes such as “Material” in Shopping ads, which is a new feature that e-commerce marketers have to pay attention and don’t forget to add these attributes to their product feeds. This is very new test which has been caught up by a Jackson Lo as you can see on this tweet.
Google displaying “Material” in their shopping ads.
Introducing new features for responsive search ads
Responsive Search Ads (RSA) are the new type of search ads which allow marketers to add multiple alternatives to headlines and descriptions to the text ads and machine learning optimizes the performance of the campaigns by showing more relevant combinations to increase engagements. Now you can use location insertion to dynamically add where your product is offered. After having it set up, the ad can automatically include city, state, or country names based on the locations of potential customers or their areas of interest.
How to add location insertion to the responsive search ads
2. Marketing Tech Updates July 2020
A continuous growth in the marketing tech industry has shown a lot of potential as one of the most in demand tech solutions. But as new, popular markets evolve, changes are bound to happen.
Deloitte publishes the 3rd Edition of their survey “State of AI in the Enterprise”
In July, Deloitte publishes “Thriving in the Era of Pervasive AI“. According to Deloitte’s survey of 2,737 information technology and line-of-business executives taken in late 2019, 61% of respondents said they expect AI to substantially transform their industry in the next three years. Adopters are making significant investments with 53% spending more than $20 million in the past year on AI and talent. The category of adopters has increased from 21 percent to 26 percent since the 2018 survey.
At your e-commerce company, increasing online sales & revenue is probably your main goal which is going to last forever. In order to achieve that, you are using a mix of channels and platforms, such as Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Retargeting Ads, Pop-ups, Emails, SMS, etc. But this year, if you’d like to be ahead of the competition, you have to add an innovative solution to your existing technology stack of traditional marketing channels. This new “hack” is “Automated Web Push Notifications”. It’s like automated cart abandonment emails but without email or product retargeting ads but without ads.
You might be aware of the “Web push notifications”, which are the browser version of the push notifications we know from mobile apps. With web push notifications, websites can get opt-in from users without email addresses and send notifications even when the users are not on the website.
Why to use Website Push Notifications at your Online Store?
Higher Engagement Rate: Web push notifications have x4 higher click rate than emails, with an average click rate of 8.5%, while emails have an average click rate of 2.4% according to Mailchimp.
Higher Opt-in Rate: Web push notifications have x3 higher opt-in rates than emails with opt-in rates ranging between 2–10% depending on the country, industry and type of website; while it is 2% for e-mails according to Sumo
Re-engage with Users Who Don’t Sign-Up: Many users prefer not to leave any personal information on the website, because of this they don’t sign-up or leave an email address for newsletters. But with web push notifications, you can bring them back even you don’t know their e-mail address.
No App Needed: Via web push notifications you can send push notifications both mobile and desktop users, without having a mobile application.
Yes, website push notifications is a quite nice retention channel in general and “manual” push notifications are very useful for blogs and media websites, BUT as an e-commerce you can make the most out of it only with “automated” push notifications.
How does push notifications on automation work?
Scenarios: Define scenarios of customer journey, after which the notifications will be triggered and sent automatically. These are “IF this THEN that” type of scenarios such as “if the user abandon the cart after adding items then send a cart reminder notification after X hours”
Templates: Create templates of notifications for each scenario and personalise them with dynamical parameters such as “Product Name”, “Product Image”, “Product Category”, “Customer Name”, etc.
Why Automated Push Notifications are Crucial for E-commerce?
Always to the right person: As push notifications are triggered by user behavior, always the most relevant users receive it. That’s why both click rates and conversion rates are quite high.
Automation is time-efficient: As notifications are triggered automatically with user behavior, you set the scenario and template once, and that’s it. So, you don’t have to spend any more time to write content of notification, etc.
Hyper personalised: You can personalise notifications not only with demographic parameters such as “First Name” or “Salutation” but also any dynamic parameter you have such as “Product Name”, “Product Category”, “Product Image”
Automated Push Notification Use Cases for E-commerce
Cart Abandonment Notifications:
Probably the most effective and most converting campaign type ever for e-commerce, as 3 quarters of the carts are abandoned on the average. It’s very powerful as it can recover the abandoned carts even from the not signed-in users -which is not possible with cart abandonment emails- Strongly recommended for any type of e-commerce.
Scenario:
IF the user does [AddToBasket] event for a {Product}
AND does NEITHER [Purchase] NOR [RemoveFromBasket] event.
THEN send after X hours.
Product Retargeting Notifications:
This is quite similar to the retargeting ads, now you simply don’t need ads to do retargeting. You don’t need to buy ads or deal with ad blockers, because you can do retargeting with notifications. Many users browse products but then leave the website without even adding to the cart. Now we can remind them the last product they have browsed.
Scenario:
IF the user does [ProductView] event for a {Product}
AND does NOT [AddtoBasket] event.
THEN, send after X hours.
Category Retargeting Notifications:
Many users visits category pages, product listing pages or search result pages even before clicking on a product. Indeed, they take enough actions to tell us what they are really up for. Wouldn’t be great if we could send push notifications with their search terms or the category names of the products they have searched for?
Scenario:
IF the user does [ProductView] > 3 event where the {ProductCategory} = “PERFUME”
AND does NOT an [AddToBasket] event.
THEN send after X hours.
Periodic Retention Notifications:
Most valuable users are always returning users. Then you have to bring them back periodically for a good reason.
You can create automated campaigns to invite them periodically back to the website with some incentives that you can provide, such as discounts or coupon codes.
Scenario:
IF the [Last Session] is more than X days, THEN send
Cross-Sell Notifications:
If you are an e-commerce selling a lot of items which can be combined together? Then you can create cross-sell campaigns to automatically suggest a complementary product some days after the customer completes their purchase.
Wouldn’t be nice to complete their look?
Scenario:
IF a user does [Purchase] event
AND there is a combination product
THEN send after X days
Up-Sell Notifications:
Most of the time users are confused with the alternatives and they are waiting for someone to say “this is it!” as the salesman in a fashion store saying “If I were you, I would buy that”. Then why not doing the same digitally? Create an up-sell campaign for automatically suggesting the user with your battleship of your collection.
Scenario:
IF the user does receives [CartAbandonment] notification for a {Product}
AND does NOR [PURCHASE] NEITHER [RemoveFromBasket] event.
THEN send after 2 days.
New methods and tips for brands to do permission marketing after losing majority of their mailing lists due to GDPR
What is Permission Marketing?
Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.
The term of Permission Marketing was coined by Seth Godin in 1999 on his book with the same name “Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers”. This concept can be defined as the antecedent of inbound marketing. It inspired many brands to shift how they do marketing. It encouraged (only some of) the brands to stop bombarding their audience with advertising in paid media and to reach out to them with a type of content they promise after getting the permission from them. You can read more on the article on Seth’s blog.
Examples of Permission Marketing
Landing pages which request our email address in order to send us a white paper, an e-book or invitation to an event or webinar can be some decent examples of permission marketing. The most common example by brands is that they ask e-mail addresses to send their newsletters. It’s also common to incentivise by offering a discount for e-commerce companies.
Channels of Permission Marketing
Even though it has been used as synonyms, permission marketing is not all about email marketing. There are many other and effective opt-in based channels.
Email marketing has been flagship of permission marketing channels for many years, due to being more affordable and direct.
SMS marketing has been used widely as well, as it is quite powerful to reach users in seconds, but harder to get the permission for a mobile phone number and it’s more expensive per each message sent.
Direct mail, another popular channel of old times, are mainly forgotten in most of the countries now at least for many digital businesses. In your mailbox I bet you are finding some brochures about the supermarkets or services around your location, but you didn’t give permission for that, did you?
Social media channels such as Facebook or Twitter are some other channels can be counted as permission marketing as end users follow or like pages and brands share their information or updates via there.
Push notifications came to our lives as the newest method of opt-in based marketing channel. We have push notifications in our lives since 2009 on mobile apps and mainly since 2015 on websites.
But Permission Marketing was Really Permitted by End Users?
If it was really permission based, why are we receiving emails or text messages from the senders that we have never permitted? As an end result, these channels are identified as “spammy” by end users. But what is wrong with them? That’s due to the fact that, these channels are inherently weak for privacy and personal information, which allows this conclusion to be drawn.
On all of permission marketing channels except push notifications, the medium requires a type of disclosed address to convey the message to its subscriber.
For email that’s the email address.
For sms that’s the mobile phone number.
For direct mail it’s the work or home address.
One can easily copy and paste a spreadsheet with thousands of emails or phone numbers in seconds and start spamming. That’s why these channels can be used to spam, even though no consent is given.
Why GDPR was Rolled Out?
It is not only hackers, who find insecure databases to steal information from, causing you to receive emails from people that you don’t know. In the opt-in pop-up of many brands, even without you realise or tick a box, you accept to share your contact data to the 3rd party partners of that brand. That’s why all your personal contact data are spread on different databases all over the world. That’s quite improper, no? All of this information is personal information and it should be treated as such by the brands. European Union believes so, too.
As a response to that European Union rolled a new comprehensive data protection law which is called General Data Protection Regulation or “GDPR” in short. GDPR was adopted in April 2016 by the EU Parliament and became effective on May 25, 2018.
Permission Marketing after GDPR
If you are based in EU or at least you are serving some customers within EU soil, hopefully you took the necessary means to comply with the GDPR.
There are some notable requirements brought by the regulation regarding the permission marketing.
The consent should be given explicitly. It cannot be collected in silence or pre-ticked boxes.
Separate consent boxes should be used for accepting to receive emails and accepting the other terms of the service.
Keeping a record of the consent as an evidence including who gave the consent, when gave the consent, for what they gave the consent, where they gave the consent and if they have withdrawn consent or not.
The latter is a requirement affecting both the consents which will be collected in the future and which have been collected in the past. In case you haven’t kept the record or if you basically haven’t get the consent before, then you have to ask for the consent again. Exactly this point made lots of companies lose 90% of their email databases.
Just like the size of the opted-in email database dropping by 90%, then effectiveness, opens, clicks and revenue should drop by 90% from this channel, as well.
How to Grow your Database Again after GDPR?
The first idea to come to your mind is probably showing more pop-ups to get their e-mail address and consent, right? Yeah, but that’s not a really good idea, because that’s your reaction after losing the permission to communicate with 90% of your email database.
Why to push too hard to grow your email database? Users are already fed up with sharing their personal information to be contacted and they are much more sensitive about their privacy more than ever.
You should consider building a new database of a brand new channel: Push Notifications.
If you have a mobile app in place, mobile push notifications;
If you have a website, website push notifications;
If you have both, use both!
You Should Start Building a Push Notification Subscriber Base, because…
It doesn’t require any personal information from users such as email address to deliver a message, update or offer.
It’s technically impossible to send a message without getting the consent.
It’s very easy to opt-in and opt-out.
It’s inherently secure as the consents are given to the domains and they cannot be faked, copied or shared to a 3rd party.
The consent data is stored on the secure push notification servers of the browsers you trust.
It naturally complies with GDPR, unless you use a data processor who doesn’t comply with GDPR.
Boost your Permission Marketing with Push Notifications
Push notifications are perfect complement for your permission marketing. It doesn’t cause any problems using emails and push notifications together and you can use them hand in hand.
As push notifications are free of personal data, you can still get consent from privacy-concerned people for push notifications who wouldn’t opt-in to the emails. The opt-in rate for push notifications are usually much higher than emails, so you would grow your database much faster with the inclusion of push notifications to your permission marketing toolset.
A list of 5 most important points to consider while making the decision on your browser push notification provider and setup.
No matter if you are a business owner, a digital marketer or a marketing agency, either you have been already or will be at the position to start using push notifications on your website. But there are a series of decisions to be made: which provider to choose, what features to look for, what kind of setup to do. Should you choose the first provider that reached to you or should you choose the provider that you see on some other websites?
The answer is a big NO!
This is because website push notifications are quite different than e-mail or sms marketing in terms of installation and subscriber data management. After you start with a provider, most of the times it is much harder to migrate from one provider to another.
That’s why you should consider your choices comprehensively, in order not to regret your decision later. Here is a list of 5 most important criteria businesses should consider before they start using web push notifications.
1. Free Services Sell Your Customer Data and That Can Become Accessible to your Competitors!
According to the main market research tools, the push notifications provider serving the most websites in the market is a completely free service. It sounds great, right? Why would you pay for it, if there is a similar one for free?
But have you ever thought why could it be free, while others are paid? You should! As they say, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”. When you are using one of these completely free services, you allow your provider to collect & sell all the data on your website or app including all the personal data of your own customers including their e-mail addresses, cookies, etc. Technically, via the javascript code that you install on your website or via the SDK that you install on your mobile application, the provider is able to collect all these data.
The worst is that, as you gave the permission to sell your data, they can sell the data of your customers on any platform including DMPs and even your direct competitors can access your own customer data easily. Instead of taking advantage of using a free tool, you can lose all your customer data to your competitor.
The answer lies behind the Terms of Services that you sign when you start using the service. Here is an example:
This data collected includes: End Users’ mobile advertising identifiers, such as Apple IDFAs and Android Advertising identifiers; End Users’ email addresses End Users’ IP address, device push token, precise location (e.g., GPS-level) data, network information, language, time zone, product preferences, and privacy preferences. The Parties shall jointly own the SDK Information, and each Party shall be entitled (without further compensation to the other) to use, share, market, license, sell, store, and otherwise exploit the SDK Information to the maximum extent permitted by law, which shall include using the SDK Information for cross-app, cross-device, and other interest-based advertising, analytics and market research.
2. Collect Subscribers Under your own Domain, Definitely not under the Sub-Domain of your Service Provider
In order to use web push notifications, browsers need to install a service worker, which is a script that your browser runs in the background. They require HTTPS setup on your server, by default. Today thanks to Let’s encrypt you can have a TLS certificate for free, and setup on your server not more than 5 minutes.
Moreover, browsers use the web push notification protocol in order to validate the ownership of the subscribers to that domain. In order to fulfill this, you had to add a file named “manifest.json” to the root folder of the website in the early versions of Google Chrome; but currently there is also public/private key encryption as an easier replacement.
But apparently, most of the service providers offer a totally contrary solution, that uses another domain they control as the base domain where the subscribers are technically collected at and bound to. It could be fair enough to offer this workaround solution only to the websites who don’t have SSL certificate. But most of the service providers, offer this as their default setup that you cannot change unless you request for it.
So basically, you are forced to collect your subscribers under a subdomain such as mywebsite.os.tc or mywebsite.myprovider.com instead of mywebsite.com. This might sound technical and trivial, but it is massively important.
If you collect your subscribers under a domain which you don’t own, all the subscribers from whom you asked permission WILL NOT belong to your website, they will belong to the website of your service provider. It will be impossible to migrate these subscribers to your own domain and it will mean the loss of all the collected subscribers if you’d like to change your provider. To sum up, you get stuck and stay desperately at the hands of your service provider forever.
If you are already using push notifications on your website, check which sub/domain is shown on the native opt-in box. If that’s your domain, it’s fine. If it’s another domain, change your provider ASAP before you collect more subscribers on somebody else’s domain.
3. Don’t Get Blocked by All Your Future Returning Users by Directly Requesting Native Subscription
There are some different methods that you can ask your users to opt-in. But here are the most common 3 type of methods:
A) Direct Native Opt-in Box: In this method, you basically show the native opt-in box of the browser directly without any other context.
B) Notify-Box or Similar: In this method, you show a pop-up to explain to the users why they should opt-in to notifications and if the user clicks on yes, then triggering the native opt-in box.
C) Custom Button or Event: In this method, you trigger the native opt-in box after the user clicks on a custom button or check-box that you created.
It is a fact that if you trigger directly native opt-in box of the browser, you get a higher opt-in rate in the short term because it requires just one click while the other methods require two clicks. However, for all other users who are not ready to opt-in at that moment, they would click on the negative choice on the opt-in box, which is to “Block”. As a result, you lose the chance to ask these users to opt-in for ever. This can be summarised as giving up a higher number of subscribers of the long term for the profit of the short term. That’s why for the benefit in the long term, it makes more sense to be patient and ask your users to opt-in after giving some context by using Notify Box or similar.
4. Choose a Solution Providing Dynamic Personalisation & Automation Capabilities
Sending the same push notification for large groups of users can be still useful for certain type of websites such as newspapers or digital media, who don’t have any customer information. However, there is a huge opportunity cost not using dynamic personalisation for any kind of website who have the information about their customers such as e-commerce, travel, B2B, etc. This is due to the fact that notifications which are personalised with dynamic parameters -such as customer name, product/service name, product/service category, etc.- have much higher Click Rate and lower opt-out rate.
The opportunity cost is even higher for the case of not using notifications triggered automatically by user behavior. Websites can at least multiply by 3x their revenue from push notifications by using triggered notifications such as cart abandonment or retargeting notifications. Moreover, there is a time cost of sending push notifications manually.
5. Developing an In-House Push Notifications Solution is more Costly than You Think!
Most of the service providers of push notification marketing have periodic subscription fees (monthly / yearly). Some of the companies consider if they should build their own push notifications solution in-house, just to get rid of this recurring cost. At first glance, it might sound like a very cost-effective option. But in fact, it is definitely not. Why?
– It’s not the expertise of your IT team and you have to allocate the time and effort of your valuable IT resources for months, and it will cost a lot of money.
– You will be late for months to start collecting subscribers and the opportunity cost of this is higher than the cost of taking the service from a provider.
– It’s also obvious that the solution to be developed is going to under-perform compared to your competitors and market average.
– It won’t be cost-effective for you to develop for other browsers. You would develop for only Google Chrome and you won’t be able to reach half of your users.
– It won’t make sense for you to develop state-of-the-art capabilities such as personalisation, automation, analytics, custom events for a single website.
That’s why it makes much more sense for each of your finance, marketing and IT departments, to use a service provider rather than building an in-house solution.
In terms of retention marketing, many companies rely on other traditional channels such as emails, social media and SMS. Even though all these channels have their own reasons of existence, overall web push notifications is the unique channel to be the most engaging within the retention channels for websites for these reasons:
– Web push notifications have x4 higher click rate than emails, with an average click rate of 8.5%, while emails have an average click rate of 2.4% according to Mailchimp.
– Web push notifications have >99% reach while Facebook average post reach is below 6% according to the survey published by Ogilvy and
– Web push notifications have x3 higher opt-in rates than emails, with opt-in rates ranging between 2–10% depending on the country, industry and type of website; while it is 2% for e-mails according to Sumo
2. Free to Start & Cost Effective
First, most of the web push notification providers, including Frizbit, have a freemium tier that you can use free, until reaching some specific number of subscribers. This gives an adequate time period to try and see the effect.
Second, the pricing of most of the web push notification services is based on monthly subscription fees based on the number of subscribers, just like e-mail marketing services. Except two major differences; the monthly cost is usually lower than email marketing and also there is no extra cost charged per message, you can send unlimited notifications within your plan.
Third, usually there is neither one-time on-boarding fees required to setup the solution nor forced yearly contracts which requires you to pay upfront.
Thus, absolutely there is no reason not to start using web push notification, from an economical point of view.
3. Easy to Setup & Build a Subscriber Base
You only need 15 minutes in total to start collecting web push notification subscribers: 5 minutes to create an account on a web push notification platform like Frizbit and then 10 minutes more to install the codes on your website. After spending these 15 minutes, you can start collecting web push notification subscribers directly and your subscriber collection pop-up starts appearing on your website real-time.
It’s very easy to build a subscriber base, because all you need is getting the permission from your users on your website to send push notifications to them. They can simply opt-in to your notifications with a single click to the “Allow” button on the pop-up that appears on your website.
On desktops, it appears on the top left corner of the browser screen, while it appears on the bottom part of your screen on the mobile devices.
Web push notifications is an opt-in based (subscription-based) channel just like e-mail or app push notifications. So, more subscribers you collect means a larger audience that you can reach by sending a notification directly within seconds. That’s why, easiness to opt-in is quite crucial on the success of these opt-in based channels.
4. No Personal Data Required to Re-Engage & GDPR Compliant
Imagine an end user -which all of us are- who would like to get updates, news or offers from a specific brand, company or media. I don’t have any other choice of sharing at least a type of contact information.
– in case of email marketing, I have to share my email address,
– in case of SMS marketing, I have to share my mobile number,
– in case of social media, I have to to share my profile, in most of the cases which have my full name on it.
That’s really bad! Not only because I’m forced to share my personal information with the advertisers, but also my personal data, my e-mail address or mobile number can leak to 3rd parties that I have no relation with.
One of the best things about web push notifications is that it absolutely doesn’t require any personal data from the end user, which is quite contrary to other retention channels such as e-mail, SMS or social media. Even when a random not-logged-in first time visitor just clicks on the “Allow” button for notifications, then you can re-engage with him/her whenever you want.
Also, if your web push notification provider complies with other requirements of GDPR as a data processor and as a data controller, you would have a new channel to retain your customers, still being GDPR compliant.
PS. Yes, Frizbit is GDPR compliant!
5. Highly Time Efficient
Before my startup, I was an ex-head of digital marketing at a large e-commerce company and I know how much time it requires to deal with tens of different digital channels to improve the RoI. So, I can hear you saying
“I’m busy enough and don’t have time for that. I don’t want to deal with another channel.”
I totally understand. But web push is really different. 1. Instead of writing manually each time, you can automate! If you are wise enough to use a web push notification service such as Frizbit, which has the real automation capabilities, you don’t have to type each notification manually any more, simply because you can automate! You can basically create template of notifications which will be triggered automatically and send to the users based on user behaviour. This means that you spend time at once while setting up the auto-triggering campaigns then you don’t need to spend any time. Of course except you would want to spend more time watching your analytics to see how much revenue and traffic uplift you created by spending no time at all, haha 😀
2. Notifications are super concise! Web push notifications are really concise and you just need to type a message of 3 lines, the maximum. What’s the time required for that? 10 seconds, 30 seconds? Something around that. Then you are already on the screen of your audience. You don’t need to spend an hour time writing and designing the email. 3. Response time is super short! It may take more time if you have much more subscribers, but usually notifications are delivered in a couple of seconds. Then, the reaction time of the end users is also a seconds. Within less than a minute, you will see new sessions are created on your website and users are engaging with the page on your notification on real-time analytics.
6. Reach Both Mobile & Desktop Users without Having an App
App push notifications are great. They are very effective and engaging. But, well, you need to have a mobile app for that. Let’s say you have already spent a lot of time, budget and effort to have an app designed and developed. But then, you have to spend budget to have it installed on the mobile devices of your audience. Even in that case, guess what, you have still most of your traffic on your website rather than your app.
Web Push Notifications on Tablet, Mobile and Desktop Devices
Overall, you can reach 74% of all the web browsing audience via web push notifications, including iOS and other browsers not supporting notifications.
7. Segment, Personalise, Automate the Web Push Notifications
Well, I can totally understand you, if you think web push notifications today as notifications which are written manually, sent as bulk without any segmentation and the same message for all recipients, which are not appreciated by the end users most of the time. That has been the usage for a long time and it still is, because of wrong usage of some marketers and incapability of the web push notification providers.
However, it’s not the case any more. I’m sure, you are fond of using personalisation parameters in e-mails, emails triggered with user behaviour such as cart abandonment or retargeting ads. Now, all is possible with web push notifications such as cart abandonment notifications, product retargeting notifications which are personalised with the name or product. But of course this can happen only if you choose a provider who have these capabilities, like Frizbit.
Click on the menu icon on the right side of the toolbar and choose Preferences.
STEP 2:
Click Privacy & Security on the left side of the page.
STEP 3:
When you scroll down you will see the Permissions. Click Settings next to Notifications.
STEP 4:
On the following page, you can see which websites have already requested to send you notifications. You can change your permission for each website to allow or block them to send you push notifications. Overall, there are 3 options that you can define for a website.
If you Allow, website can send you push notifications.
If you Block, website neither will send you notifications nor will be able to ask your permission to opt-in any more.
If you click on the name of the website and click on Remove Website button, that website can’t send notifications but can ask for permission in the future.
STEP 5:
You can also block new requests asking to allow notifications from the same window as Step 4.
If you tick this option, new websites won’t be able to ask your permission but the previously allowed ones will continue as is.
If you untick this option, new websites will be able to ask your permission, as the default option.
If you click on the URL and Remove Website, it will be the same as clicking Remove on the dropdown menu on the right hand side of URL.
If you click Remove All Websites, you will delete each website from allow or block section and all websites will have the possibility to ask your permission, unless the block new requests asking to allow notifications tick box is marked.
SECOND METHOD
You can click on the icon next to the address bar and click on the X button on the right hand side of the box shown, to easily access this option by one click only.Now this website can’t send you notifications any more, but is able to ask you for permission to send notifications.
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will set a new standard for how companies use and protect EU citizens’ data. It will take effect from May 25th, 2018.
At Frizbit, we’ve been working hard to prepare for GDPR, to ensure that we fulfill its obligations and maintain our transparency about communications with your users and how we use data. Under EU law, Frizbit is the Data Processor and our customers (you) are the Data Controllers. Frizbit will provide its customers with functionalities and guidance to help you become compliant as a Data Controller.
Here’s an overview of GDPR, and how we are prepared for it at Frizbit:
What’s GDPR?
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) is a new comprehensive data protection law. GDPR was adopted in April 2016 by the EU Parliament and will be effective on May 25, 2018. It will replace existing EU Data Protection law to strengthen the protection of “personal data” and the rights of the individual. It will be a single set of rules which govern the processing and monitoring of the data of EU citizens.
The scope of GDPR is any processing of Personal Data from EU data subjects.
This means increased Territorial Scope (extra-territorial applicability). Indeed, GDPR applies to all organizations processing the personal data of data subjects residing in the European Union, regardless of the company’s location. In other words, a company based outside of the EU but processing personal data of EU residents will be required to abide by GDPR.
Failure to comply with the GDPR could result in heavy fines: up to €20 million or 4% of worldwide revenue.
How is Frizbit prepared for GDPR?
Handling Data Subject Access Requests
The GDPR grants broad rights to individuals with regard to their personal information and who has access to it. The GDPR, therefore, provides individuals (known as “data subjects”) with the “right to be forgotten.” In practice, this means organizations must now comply with a data subject’s request for access to his/her personal information in order to correct, delete, or retrieve such information. As a data processor for our customers, we have defined processes that will allow us to assist our customers in complying with these data subject requests.
First, as the main channel of Frizbit is web push notifications, technical opting-out process is managed on the browser end. All data subjects who are subscribed for web push notifications can opt-out easily on the settings of their own browsers on their own devices.
Second, Frizbit can help you meet your data portability requirements for GDPR. We have developed permanent deletion and export-all procedures for your end user data. You are able to retrieve or delete a specific property for a unique user or all of the data for a distinct user id. User data export and deletion requests will be handled by our compliance team via sending an e-mail to the compliance@frizbit.com
Third, among other obligations, GDPR limits the time period in which an organization may retain data to “no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed.” We’ve updated our customer data retention period to a default period of two years for event data.
Updating Terms of Use, Privacy Policy:
Article 28 of the GDPR requires data controllers to have a written document detailing the obligations with respect to the processing of personal data.
We have also modified our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy to incorporate a GDPR compliant Data Processing Agreement. Our updated data processing agreement shares our privacy commitments and sets out the terms for Frizbit and our customers to meet GDPR requirements. This is available for customers who purchased a subscription to sign upon request.
Appointing a Data Protection Officer
We have a dedicated Data Protection Officer to help you with any requests or questions you have about your data. You can reach out to us by emailing compliance@frizbit.com.
Vendor Obligations and Subcontractors
We’ve reviewed all our vendors, finding out about their GDPR plans and verifying the GDPR readiness and making sure they are compliant.
Reviewing New Security Measures
Security is a priority for us. We have regular external audits, pentests and bug bounties. We’ve reviewed our internal access design to ensure the right people have access to the right level of customer data.
Reminders
As Frizbit, we are ready for the GDPR as a data processor. But, you are the data controller of your users. We kindly remind you that if you have any users who are EU residents and if you’d like to remain GDPR compliant, you need to update your own Privacy Policy to respect what kind of personal information you collect from your users and what you do with this information.
Regarding Frizbit, we use cookies to be able to track, control and manage the push notification preference of your visitors and we also collect and process some other visitor data for you to be able to send segmented and personalized push notifications. We recommend you update your Privacy Policy to include this collection and usage, unless you already have them in place.
Questions?
Feel free to reach out to us at compliance@frizbit.com, if you have any questions about GDPR.
However, it’s not the case any more. I’m sure, you are fond of using personalisation parameters in e-mails, emails triggered with user behaviour such as cart abandonment or retargeting ads. Now, all is possible with web push notifications such as cart abandonment notifications, product retargeting notifications which are personalised with the name or product. But of course this can happen only if you choose a provider who have these capabilities, like Frizbit.
