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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.

1. The consent should be given explicitly. It cannot be collected in silence or pre-ticked boxes.
2. Separate consent boxes should be used for accepting to receive emails and accepting the other terms of the service.
3. 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.

1. Most Engaging Retention Channel for Websites

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.

Via web push notifications you can reach both mobile and desktop users, and that rocks. But keep in mind that iOS still doesn’t have support for the web push notifications, but the large majority of the mobile devices are Android. So you can reach the 68% of the mobile devices in the world with web push notifications as of September 2018.

Currently web push notifications are supported by almost all the major browsers including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera, Microsoft Edge. So, you can reach 89% of all the browsing audience not using iOS.

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.

Even though we still can’t use Push Notifications on iOS, many MacOS users use Safari as their browser. Here below explains how to disable push notifications on Safari. You can also find out about how to disable push notifications on Google Chrome and how to disable push notifications on Mozilla Firefox.

STEP 1

From Safari tab, click Preferences

STEP 2

On the older versions of Safari & MacOS, click on the Notifications button,
On the newer versions of Safari & MacOS, click on the Websites button and then click on the Notifications button on the left menu.

STEP 3 

Now you can see the websites that have previously asked for permission to send you notifications. You can Allow or Deny each website from below.

• If you click Allow, they will be able to send you notifications.
• If you click Deny, they won’t be able to ask your permission to opt-in.
• You can always click Remove for each website. It will remove the website from this page even if they were in Allow or Deny section. The website will be able to ask your permission.
• If you click Remove All, all the websites will be removed and they will all be able to ask your permission to opt-in in the future.
• You can also decide to allow or block websites to ask for permission to send notifications from the bottom of the screen. If you click and tick the box to blue, new websites will be able to ask your permission to opt-in.

STEP 4 

You can click on Notifications Preferences to go to Do not Disturb settings for advanced settings. Even though you allowed some websites to send you push notifications, you might be busy or might not want to see notifications for a specific time period or in specific situations. You can choose to not to be disturbed by notifications for some period of time;

• For a specific time period that you can choose below
• When the display is sleeping
• When mirroring to TV and projectors

↓

We all know that push notifications are so useful both for the sending and receiving parties. Still, some websites don’t know how to use it efficiently and they disturb their subscribers a lot. Disabling Chrome push notifications is so easy! Keep reading and if you are wondering you can also check how to disable push notifications on Mozilla Firefox and how to disable push notifications on Safari.

 FIRST METHOD

STEP 1

Open Google Chrome and click on the three vertical dots icon on the right side of the address bar. Choose Settings.

STEP 2

Scroll down and click on the Advanced button to go to Advanced Settings.

STEP 3

Go to Privacy and Security part and click Content Settings.

STEP 4 

In Content Settings, choose Notifications.

STEP 5

At the top of this screen, you will see a toggle button, which allows you to govern if you would like to be asked by websites for notification permission or not. This toggle button gives you two options: Block OR Ask before sending (recommended).
The effect of this toggle button is for all the websites that haven’t asked for permission yet.

If the toggle button is ON, as it is by default, you allow all websites to ask your permission for notifications.
If you change the toggle button to OFF and block it, no website can ask your permission for notifications.

Also, you can add or remove websites to both Block and Allow sections. The websites under the Allow section are the ones you gave permission. You can always change it by clicking on the three vertical dots icon on the right. When you click there, you will see three options: Block, Edit and Remove.

• If you click Block, the website will be removed from the allow section and be in the block section. They won’t be able to send you notification or ask your permission.
• If you click Edit, you can edit the website’s URL.
• If you click Remove, the website will be removed from allow section and will have to ask again for permission to opt-in.

If you click on the three vertical dots next to the Block section, you will see Allow, Edit and Remove.

• If you choose Allow, the website will be removed from the block section and will be allowed to send you notifications in the future.
• If you click Edit, you can edit the website’s URL.
• If you click Remove, you will remove the website from the block section and let them ask your permission to opt-in in the future.

When you want to add a website to block section, if you write the URL as ”domain.com” it will not work. You should go to that website and copy the full URL, paste it to block section, delete the ”/” from the end and add ”:443”. (Ex: https://www.facebook.com:443)

SECOND METHOD

An easier option is, clicking  More and then Settings when you receive a notification. This will take you directly to Step 5. You will see the website in Allow section. You can always change it by clicking on the three vertical dots icon and choosing Block.

THIRD METHOD

You can also click on the button left side of the adress bar to disable notifications. After clicking, you will see Notifications section. Right side of it, there are three options: Allow, Ask, Block.

• If you click Allow, the website can send you push notifications.
• If you click Ask, the website will ask your permission to send notifications.
• If you block, they won’t be able to ask permission or send notification.

Today, push notifications are one of the most popular digital channels via you get information from websites. But maybe you have opted-in for too many notifications, for notifications that are not useful anymore or you don’t want to be asked for permission to opt-in. If so, here is a simple guide on how to disable Firefox push notifications. You can also read how to disable push notifications on Google Chrome and how to disable push notifications on Safari.

FIRST METHOD

STEP 1:

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.

For more details and the legal source by the EU and the translations in different European languages, you can read the source European Parliament on General Data Protection Regulation 4.5.2016 L 119/1

Does it affect me? 

Yes, most likely.

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?

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

What is the big news on rich notifications?

As Google Chrome rolled out its version 56, from now on websites can send rich notifications with images to their web notification subscribers. This is quite big news, since web notifications got richer and more attracting. Rich notifications with images can be almost 3 times larger than standard. This increases the interactions and CTR’s of each notification significantly. Along with the action buttons, images are one of the most important elements in web push notifications.

Can I add image to web push notifications on other browsers?

Unfortunately, not. This is limited to only Google Chrome and its versions 56 and above. But this shouldn’t be a big problem as it has the largest audience.

Are images shown on both Windows and MacOS?

Currently yes. However, as Google Chrome announced to move to native notifications on MacOS starting from Google Chrome version 59, push notifications on MacOS won’t have images.

How can I send rich notifications with images?

On Frizbit interface, on the first step of ‘Compose’ you will find the section to add an image to the content of push notification. You can easily drag and drop the image to this area and your notification will be sent with the image.

What should be the size of images on Chrome rich notifications?

On Chrome Desktop:

The most critical part in order to make use of the potential image area is the width : height ratio, which should be 1.5 : 1. Please note that if you use another ratio, the images will still be shown but they won’t be shown as large as it would.
The minimum size for the images to be shown is 360px wide x 240px tall. Any other image larger than this size is also OK.

On Chrome Android:

Besides the best aspect ratio of Desktop, for Android the use of 2:1 aspect ratio is recommended to have the ideal appearance on mobile devices. Android does not have a limitation in file size, but we recommend:
Minimum – 512×256
Balanced – 1024×512
Maximum – 2048×1024