WEB NOTIFICATIONS, ROLE IN YOUR SUCCESS

WHAT IS WEB NOTIFICATION?

Ting, "Don't Miss Out These Trendy Products" or "Enjoy 50% On Your Favourite Coffee". Every smartphone knows what these are. Yes, these are web notifications most commonly used by many successful e-commerce brands around the globe.

Well, modern problems required modern solutions. While today, a brand's success is related to the website's success, web notifications are the effective tool for website promotion backed with its ability to deliver instant, brief, and personalised information to prospective customers.

Web notifications are the alert messages sent to a user via desktop web and mobile web and used by websites that want to update the users about the recent updates, be it news or cart update.

I am sure as a consumer you must have pulled down the notification bar on your mobile phones or seen the alerts slide in at the top or bottom right-hand corner of a desktop screen, depending on the operating system and even clicked on them, ending up on the website or webpage.

We have curated a guide for you to know about the most effective information delivery and action generating tool, web push notification:

Are web push notifications and app push notifications different?

Well, as we have discussed, many brands which do not have a mobile application but have a website with web push code installed in it, use it to leverage many of the benefits of push notifications (real-time, personalized, in-the-moment communications) to offer the same user experience even if they don't have an app.

While the app push notifications are sent via code installed in an app even if you are not on the application or not even operating your phone but your internet connection is on.

WHAT DOES A WEB NOTIFICATION LOOK LIKE?

A web push notification that might pop up on your mobile screen or your desktop may include the following elements:

Notification Title: This title can be inclusive of the brand name or the recent update say 'Summer Fashion Sale'.

Notification Content: The message sent by the website includes a brief about the topic mentioned in the notification title while the character count may vary between browsers, a crisp and captivating message should be crafted to get the user to click.

Notification URL: While it is not a dominant part of the whole notification, it does highlight the domain sending the web notification.

Notification Icon: This is mostly the brand logo or any image related to the message.

Browser Icon: The logo of the browser sending the notification. While generally browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer are focused displayed in the browser icon, this is included on notifications sent to Apple desktop or laptop computers and cannot be altered or removed.

Working Of Web Notifications

The elements of a web push notification remain the same while its appearance varies by operating system and browser and they work the same as well. Having said that, let us go through the working of the web notifications.

The browser-based notification has different stages crucial to understand how web push notifications work. These stages of the web push notifications are as follows:

Seeking Permission: Well, you must have been the pop-up asking for permission to come on your mobile or desktop screens while operating the websites as users.

This pop is the first step in implementing a push notification while it requires sending them with a push message and getting a push subscription from the browser through Subscription Dialog Box or Opt-in box.

A Push Subscription is done with a Push API that gives web applications the ability to receive messages pushed to them from a server and they become a 'subscriber'. Once Push Subscription is received, the user details are saved at the back-end and are later used to send push messages to that user.

Sending a Push Message: You can open the dashboard or you can use an API call to a respective browser cloud manager to send notifications. While the cloud manager validates and delivers the message to the right browser, Push Subscription helps you get the appropriate URL to trigger the push message.

Push Message arrives on the User's browser: Once the browser comes online, the push service delivers the message. This is followed by the browser receives the message, decrypts the data, and sends push event to your service worker.

The customized website notification will arrive real-time even if the browser is not open at that point of time on the user's device and it will lead them to URL specified.

Adding Web Notifications To Websites

Well, there are many providers offering web push notification service for your website, a standard procedure of these providers have is signing up, adding your website URL, your brand logo for your customised subscription request, adding generated code for your website which you have to add and then you can start monitoring users and creating campaigns as well.