“Things go wrong when you do not understand them. Same happens with push notifications when you start irritating your customers with irrelevant notifications”
What Are Web Push Notifications?
Web Push Notifications are short messages, alerts or pop-ups that you receive through web browsers on your computer or mobile devices. Mobile devices could be anything from smartphones, tablets to smartwatches.
The main motive of these browser-based web push notifications is to deliver a message in real-time, regardless a user is actively browsing the website or not. Your subscribed users won’t miss out any notifications if their device went asleep, the push alerts will be delivered when they are back.
How do web push notifications look like?
For computer users, a browser-based web push notifications appear next to the taskbar. These notifications are actively supported by web browsers like Firefox, Chrome & Safari across Windows, Mac OS & Ubuntu-based devices.
“Web Push Notifications: Timely, Relevant, and Precise” by- Joseph Medley
Developers, as well as the marketing professionals, prefer to use web push notifications more than any other communication channel. Just to allow users to opt-in to timely updates from sites, they love and allow you to effectively re-engage them with customized and relevant content.
For mobile users, these notifications appear as the floating banners and then get piled up in the notification tray or notification panel.
To receive web push notifications, your users need not downloading any new mobile app. They just have to opt-in for the specific push notifications from their favorite website. The motives behind subscribing to push notifications from a particular website could be anything, such as:
- News, sports score alerts on their lock screen
- New published article/blog from their favorite website
- Change in flight schedules, checking & connecting flight information
- Stock Exchange, weather & Snowfall alerts
- Product delivery, Sales & New Stock arrival alert
Web push notifications include the following elements:
- Title: Attractive Title
- Content: Short and Crisp
- URL: Website URL or Call To Action button
- Logo: Brand represent
- Image: Attractive Image
What are Web Push Notifications Service?
There are various companies and software vendors who offer different tools and services for sending push notifications. These vendors are called push notification service providers.
Why do you need web push notification service provider?
Consider the web push notification service providers same as your mobile network providers like AT&T, Verizon or Vodafone. These companies offer different channels for your mobile phones to make voice calls or send SMS. In return, they take rentals and other charges.
Similarly, in web push notification services, there are service providers. Push notification software or tools are your mobile phones, which require a service provider to make calls or text.
Sometimes, you choose a mobile phone from different brand and service provider from a different brand. While sometimes the mobile service provider offers you’re the mobile phone with their service already enabled on it. Web push notifications service providers are the later ones.
Generally, the software vendors who offer the tool also provide the service for notifications delivery. PushMaze is one such a push notification tool cum service provider, which offer a self-hosted solution to send and then track notifications through FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging).
How PushMaze is different from other tools?
Majority of the push notification tools on the market are SaaS-based. That is, they take monthly rentals plus the charges on per notifications sent by you to your subscribers. As PushMaze is a self-hosted solution it does not charge any recurring amount. That means you can purchase to own this push notification tool. That also means you won’t have to pay for sending push messages to your subscribers.
Pay once and own this tool for a lifetime. Of course, you will have to pay extra if you need and customization or for software updates after the free updates period is finished.
What are Mobile Web Push Notifications?
The notifications received by mobile phone users through the web browsers are called as mobile web push notifications. Based on the RAM and background app management of a mobile device, mobile web push notifications can be delivered in real-time as be scheduled for delivery in a future time-frame.
In order to trigger web push notifications to a mobile device such as iPhone and Android web browsers, the website must ask the users to subscribe to the notifications through an opt-in box.
Additionally, the mobile device must also be configured to allow push notifications from the subscribed websites. Be informed that registration can be done only through the website. Once it is registered, it sends the authorization token to the particular server that can be used along with the authorized certificate. This is used to provision the native client in sending the notification to his/ her mobile.
Why should you choose Pushmaze?
As it is a ready-made solution, the Integration is reasonably easy and fast. Just copy the generated script, paste it in your website and API will be up and ready within a few minutes. You can use the tool to send and track the performance of the push messages. The tool also possesses various audience segmentation options to allow marketers to send only relevant messages to a specific segment. You can create, edit, update and schedule your messages without any hassle and save your time and money with PushMaze.
PushMaze is a web cum mobile push notification service cum tool. It is a self-hosted solution and allows marketers to send traceable push notifications for free via FCM. If you are a startup, you can save a lot of money at the beginning itself. Take for instance push notification service cost of 10000 notifications from Pushcrew is $105, Aimtell is $ 200 and PushMaze with FCM is $0.
Indeed, you might have to compromise with some advanced features that you would get in Pushcrew and Aimtell but not in PushMaze. However, it is a safe bet for the beginning of a startup as you would get all the ‘necessary’ features to run and track a successful push marketing campaign for your company.
Features:
- Scheduled notifications at a specific time
- Provides you with versatile JS and RESR AOIs and is a self-hosted software
- Segmented and targets the group of users and sends relevant messages
- Adds images in your notifications that increase engagement with the topic and its easy job with PushMaze.
- PushMaze has multiple user support
- Sends push notifications that expire after a set time
Pricing:
A self-hosted service where you can send unlimited notifications to desktop and Android browsers with HTTP and HTTPS support, RSS to Push, API access via JS & REST through unlimited users and fanatic customer support with just $129. No recurring costs involved.
Requirements:
You need an Apache server, running on a UNIX OS or similar (like Linux) having MySQL and PHP support.
- PHP version equal to or greater than version 5.5.9
- PDO PHP Extension
- OpenSSL PHP Extension
- Tokenizer PHP Extension
- Mbstring PHP Extension
PushMaze- the best supplement to your email marketing campaigns
Email marketing is has been widely used for digital marketing for a long time already. Till now, this channel has proven to be one of the most efficient ways of reaching out to the customers. Email marketing with a wide-scale usage by many businesses has reached a figure of approximately 2 billion emails being sent per day.
However, there is a disappointing fact that more than half of these emails end up in the spam folders of the users. It ultimately reduces the efficiency of email marketing over time.
An alternate channel of marketing was required to tackle this downside of email marketing. Web Push notifications came out as one such channel that has got strong roots in today’s world of digital marketing. They do not fall in the pits of spam filters and receive instant delivery to the subscribed users.
Web Push notifications are new to the world of marketing and have marked their significance in a very short span of time. Indeed, we cannot by-pass email marketing with push notifications yet, but can effectively use as a supplement to the same considering its superiority to the traditional email marketing in many instances.
If you have any doubts or concerns, feel free to drop a line or two in the comments section. I shall reply in a day or two. Subscribe to our newsletters to know more about web push notifications and mobile Keep watching this space for insights on web push notification services. My best wishes are with you and your venture.
Leave a Reply