Push notifications have become all the rage lately on many websites. It is another way to increase our traffic and make users who have already visited us return to our page.
Therefore, today I want to show you what exactly these types of notifications are, how they can help you increase your audience and how to install them on your WordPress website through a very simple to use system.
What are push notifications?
Push notifications are messages that we can use on our website or app, to notify users that we have launched a new offer in our online store, to notify our blog readers that we have published a new entry, or simply, to communicate any news to the people who are subscribed in a fast and direct way .
These messages can appear as one more notification on our mobile phone, along with the typical What Sapp messages, or on the side of the browser while browsing the internet.
In order for these notifications to reach users, we will make sure that the first time they visit our site, a very simple message will appear asking them if they want to receive these small notifications.
It is enough for the user to click on the allow button and we will have one more subscriber.
Summarizing:
- User visits our website.
- A small message appears in which we ask if you want to receive notifications from our website.
- The user accepts without having to enter any personal data or email.
- Whenever we want, we can send all users who have allowed it a push notification.
Cool, huh?
Why use push notifications on your website?
Today there is brutal competition in almost any sector, which means that it is increasingly difficult to attract visitors and that they remember our site and come back often. One of the best ways to keep them coming back is by inviting them to subscribe to our Newsletter. In this way, we can notify you by email each time we launch new content on our blog or we want to communicate a specific offer.
However, due to the large amount of spam that we receive daily in our email inboxes, many users do not like to leave their data and email anywhere. This is where push notifications play an advantage, as there is no need for users to leave any data. They just have to click on allow and we will have them signed up.
Another advantage of push notifications is that, unlike an email marketing campaign, the user receives the notification right in front of their eyes. With emails, the user has to access their email and then go to the promotions tab.
In addition, many times to get users to subscribe, we need to show the form even in the soup, causing the design of our website to get dirty. And sometimes pop-ups with forms inside are used, which makes navigation very difficult and forces us to close it in order to continue seeing the rest of the content.
The push notification system allows us not to interfere with the user’s navigation or the design of the web.
And finally, with these types of notifications we can remind any user who has visited our website of our presence, so we are doing a small branding campaign almost without realizing it.
Thanks to push notifications we will be able to communicate with our customers and visitors as many times as we want without waiting for them to return to our site or visit their email inbox. We could say that we are facing a new type of Remarketing.
Of course, before getting down to work and activating push notifications on your website, you have to bear in mind that these types of messages can be perceived as intrusive elements for certain users. So I recommend you monitor with Google Analytics if you have downward variations in traffic.
Like everything in online marketing, the good thing is that we can do tests and measure the results to see if the strategy works or not, and act accordingly.
How to activate push notifications on your website with WordPress?
There are dozens of options to enable push notifications on your WordPress website. However, I want to show you one that I have tried and it works like a charm. In addition, it is completely free and very easy to configure. I’m talking about One Signal.
One Signal is a free plugin that you can find in the plugin repository of your own WordPress administration panel. To install it go to Plugins > Add new and put One Signal in the search engine. If you prefer, you can download it from here.
When you have installed and activated it, a section called One Signal Push will be created in the left side menu. Here go to the Setup tab and create a free account on the On Signal website as requested by the plugin.
Now choose the Web Push option and click next until you reach a screen where a button appears that says something similar to Add new app. Give it a name, such as WordPress push notifications and create it.
Now you will have to choose the platform or platforms where you want the push notifications of your website to appear. For now, we are going to select Web Push.
Now the plugin will ask you what type of website you have. If you use WordPress, select Website builder and then click WordPress.
Next, a window will appear asking you which website you want to link to. Put your web page, the URL of the image that you want to appear in the notifications and click Save. If you don’t have the HTTPS protocol on your website with an SSL certificate installed, click my site is not fully HTTPS and continue.
Now, One Signal will give you two keys: the APP ID and the API KEY. Copy them and return to your WordPress, specifically to the plugin configuration section. That’s where you have to paste the two keys that you just got.
I show you in this image:
With this we will have configured push notifications for browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. However, to activate push notifications on your WordPress website and have them go out to people who use Safari as their default browser, we have to do one more thing.
Go back to the One Signal website and in the Settings section you will see that you can now activate the Apple Safari platform.
Enter the full URL of your website, the title of your page and attach the image you want to appear in the message. When you’re done, click Save and it will be active.
Now go back into Apple Safari and you will see that you have now obtained a Web ID. Grab it and go to the plugin configuration and just below the App ID and the REST API key paste it.
Next, if you want that every time you publish a post on your blog, a notification will arrive to the subscribed users automatically, activate this option as shown in the screenshot:
Finally, you need to activate the option that says “Automatically prompt new site visitors to subscribe to push notifications” and that serves to automatically display the message so that new visitors who come to your website are subscribed.
You already have Push notifications activated on your WordPress website! Open a tab in your browser and check it out. You will see that the message appears so that users can subscribe to them.
Now the users who subscribe will be accumulated in a list that you can see in your One Signal account, in the Users section.
In addition to displaying the typical message, One Signal gives you the possibility of adding an icon of a floating bell so that users can subscribe by clicking on it. It even lets us put a pop-up message prompting the subscription. The latter is quite intrusive from my point of view.
Track and measure clicks
Now that you have configured it, I recommend that you do a follow-up that allows you to see if these types of alerts work well and users return to your website or, if on the contrary, your users ignore them.
For this we will use the UTM parameters of Google Analytics . This type of parameter allows us to add metrics to the links that contain push notifications, so that we can know how many people click on them.
For example, to identify visits through push notifications, we can use the UTM parameters of Medium and Source as follows:
Https: // yourdomain. Com /? Ump _ medium = push & utm _ source = notifications
These types of parameters are added in the Configuration tab of the plugin, as I show you below:
In this way, from Google Analytics you can segment those visits and see if users return to your website thanks to the notifications.
Customize and send messages
Now that you have everything configured, you can go to the One Signal website and, in the Messages section, you can create your first messages and start sending personalized notifications to your users.
First select your audience (you can create several according to language, browser, type of device, engagement…) and personalize your message.
Now you just have to try the tool and send a few alerts to test its operation and effectiveness.
