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A podcast dedicated to helping businesses improve their customer engagement. Covering growth, retention, technical, and industry trend topics, brought to you by OneSignal, the world's most popular customer engagement solution used by 1+ million businesses sending more than 10 billion daily messages.
Welcome to the OneSignal podcast,
where we aim to educate listeners on
product industry and best practices
to retain and grow your customer base.
This is your host, Josh Wetzel.
We've got a great guest today for
you, John Fishman, director of
customer support here at OneSignal.
He is a product implementation and
usage specialist, an awesome guest.
Before John comes on, the episode is going
to be about the power of mobile web push.
And just how you can increase customer
retention and how to implement it.
And John will really touch on
implementation best practices.
But I just want to highlight why
this is crucial to your business
and why you should be utilizing it.
I think everyone understands
mobile push, but they don't
understand the web component.
Look.
I've seen different data stats on
this, but somewhere between 60 and 90
percent of all browser traffic is now
coming through what we consider mobile.
And keep in mind, iOS iPad is
considered a mobile device in terms of
technology and how the browsers look.
So you can access a ton of users.
And for a lot of sites out there,
you're not going to have a, an app.
It's just difficult to manage an Android
and iOS app or target for discoverability.
If you're not a utility that people are
using every single day, people forget it.
And so the web is important
for discoverability.
It's important for scalability.
And this is a really important way to find
your most loyal users and engage them.
And highly mostly utility based
product oriented messaging
to keep them coming back in.
Examples of that today would be the
Google suite, if you turn on your email
or calendar reminder or Google task
reminder, you're getting those slide
prompts on your desktop while you're
working to remind you, Oh yeah, I've
got a new meeting coming up in five
minutes or I got a meeting come up in 10
minutes or an email came through and you
can customize how often, how you bring
those in, what services you do or don't.
So if I think about.
Financial services, desktop based
games, obviously e commerce any
web application, where it's an
application that's based in a browser.
Those are all great examples
and news sites, sports leagues.
And we see this, the people who have
implemented, they're able to collect.
A large sum of loyal users and keep
them engaged and grow their usage
and loyalty with their business.
So really important.
I'm excited to talk about
this on the flip side.
There's also a bunch of
customer case studies on this.
One example, I'll call out bet Chris
as a online betting service they
use it to drive up both adoption
of customers, drive engagement.
Drive bets engagement on game
day, before events during
events with another case study.
A link in the show notes
is tribune publishing.
They were able to add 6M incremental
loyal customers to their CRM list and
then grow their utilization engagement.
And then upsell them to subscription.
So there's that really good value here.
It's an important piece
of functionality to add.
So I highly encourage you.
So on that note, we'll bring John
in to talk specifics on how to
implement and best practices.
Welcome to the OneSignal podcast, John.
Yeah, awesome.
Thanks for having me, Josh.
So you've been at OneSignal
coming up on six years.
Obviously, you're started off as initial.
Is it seven?
It'll be seven in April.
Seven in April.
That's amazing.
You created the customer support team.
You were the initial member
and built out the team.
You personally know as much of
the product than anybody in the
organization, in my experience.
And so you've been wonderful
on the customer things.
What I wanted to get to today was web
push in general, but specifically as
we think about mobile, I'd love for
you to talk about how easy is that
to set up and how do you set that up?
Yeah, loaded question, but
we definitely jump right in.
Web push has just changed so
significantly over the years.
So back when I started, it was
a little bit of the Wild West.
You could basically set up web
push on your computer HTTP website
or HTTPS website, people could be
just prompted with this sort of
required native browser prompt.
And they just people don't
know what it is, right?
So there's yeah, sure.
Allow get out of my face.
I'll subscribe.
And then they start
getting push notifications.
And they're like, what are these
things popping up on my browser?
Over the years people have
started to like, understand
what push notifications are.
And behavior has become
more sophisticated.
People are more understanding
of why would I want these?
Does this website actually provide
me the content that I want?
And things have actually changed
a lot since back in the days
when people would just subscribe.
That being said, it's also been a
lot easier to get Web Push set up.
It used to require a whole bunch of
Files to be uploaded to your server, a
whole bunch of like code and sometimes
some workarounds depending on what
kind of site you're using, if it's
like a site builder, stuff like that.
But with all the new changes in, web
technology and requirements, browsers
really pushing websites to be, get that
SSL certificate and HTTPS websites, which
are required for web push, by the way.
It's gotten a lot easier.
So you still just got to upload a
couple files to your browser, add
10 lines of code and you can start
prompting users to get set up.
So it's much simpler now.
Okay.
And there's a difference though,
between we just isolate mobile web push.
There's a different process for
Android versus iOS mobile devices.
Can you walk us through that?
Let's start with Android.
Yeah, very good question.
Historically Android mobile
devices, tablets, phones, they've
always just supported web push.
Out of the box, basically.
So you just set up our SDK like you would
for prompting on desktop, and it will just
work the same way on Android, regardless
of what kind of device you're using.
As long as you're visiting the website
in a browser that supports web push,
like Chrome, Firefox, most of the big
ones, the Samsung internet browser,
you'll get prompted and you'll just,
you'll be able to subscribe and
start getting web push on your phone.
And then for the longest time that's
never was never supported by apple.
And so we just constantly got questions on
the support team how come i'm not getting
prompted on my iphone for my website?
So now you can so You know apple being
apple likes to make things a little bit
different So they do require your website
to be a progressive web app kind of thing
basically what that means is that when you
go to a website On your iphone, there's a
little like share button, there's a little
options basically button on safari or any
browser really that you click and it says
there's a bunch of different options and
one of them is add to your home screen.
So it basically takes your website.
It gives it like a mobile app
type of feel where it puts an
icon on your actual device.
And when you click that icon,
it just opens the website.
It's called a progressive web app.
That's really becoming the norm.
A lot of websites are doing that
nowadays, you know This could be
anywhere from a recipe website, Or
you know if you provide really good
recipes and somebody's you know what?
I really like this person's food,
their choices They want I might I want
to add your website to their phone or
if it's a news website or a news blog
they might really want to stay up to
date with your content and add your
website to their phone so you do have
to Have that functionality on your
website for it to work on iOS and the
user does have to add the website as
a progressive web app to the device.
But once that's set, they'll get
prompted just like they would
for desktop or for Android.
Okay, and what's in your estimation,
because you're talking to hundreds,
if not thousands of users of one
signal, what is the reason why people
don't implement web push for I.
O.
S.
Probably just lack of awareness.
Getting set up is actually very easy.
You just have to add a few lines of
code to your manifest file, which
you probably already have one.
And if you don't, we have some
examples in our documentation.
And in fact, our documentation
is full of examples.
So if you're ever stuck or have any
questions, it's probably in there.
And if you don't just reach out to
me or my team, we'll, we're happy
to assist you support at once.
com, but really maybe
just lack of awareness.
You do have to create that little icon.
So like we just talked about earlier,
when you add the website to your
mobile device, it shows an icon.
For your website.
So you have to follow Apple's
specifications for what that
icon size is, and then you
just have to in your manifest.
You just have to set a couple other
options, but it's all documented.
It's pretty simple to set up.
But yeah, I would say it's just lack of
awareness is why people aren't doing it.
Okay.
And what are the common support
questions you get pertaining to web
push, either implementation or usage?
Yeah one of the beauties of
OneSignal is that anybody can get
started quickly and get set up.
We've had such great market
penetration and such great word
of mouth referrals from customers.
It's like as soon as you
get set up, people love it.
People see the results instantly.
And then they go tell their friends
and they add it to their sites.
Okay.
And the other thing I would ask, too,
is, what are the best practices if
someone's going to implement web push.
What are the essential things that you
would want to convey that they should be
incorporating into their implementation?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So it really does have a case
by case basis based on what kind
of site you're running, right?
So if you're doing some kind
of like recipe website, right?
You would probably want to send messages
based on when new recipes come out, when
new maybe like ideas, like you want to
trigger the notifications maybe before
dinner, before maybe on the weekends,
grocery lists, things like that.
There's a lot of cool functionality
that you can think about and set up
with the push notifications and our
journeys functionality is great for that.
So you don't need to write any code.
You would just create the content.
We have a lot of, again,
back to our documentation.
We have a lot of great use cases and
example content you can set up and use.
Also with AI, you can pull up chat GPT and
ask it, Hey, I want to create a message
campaign, give me some ideas there and
it'll tell you, but you could set all that
up with journeys and just start sending.
And what's really nice is that
you can send those notifications
like before dinner, right?
An hour before dinner,
send a rescue notification.
Or if you have like a news blog, you
must send breaking news articles.
You can, use our API and just really
quickly update customers when, breaking
news happens and keep them updated.
Or if you're running like a, just
like a blog about certain topics, send
notifications when new articles come out.
We have teachers that.
Called intelligent delivery that also
uses some artificial intelligence type
functionality where it will send a
notification to users based on that
user's viewing habits of your site.
So if they're, usually on your
website around 3 o'clock, sometimes
7 o'clock around 3 o'clock,
it'll send a notification around
3 o'clock when the user is most
likely active online to get it.
So in terms of sending notifications,
there's just a lot of easy out of
the box functionality we provide.
But one like interesting thing
is that getting people to
subscribe, it's a little trickier.
Browsers have changed behavior where
like I mentioned earlier in the past,
people would just show this native
prompt as soon as you visit the site.
And it led to a lot of opt ins.
But those weren't necessarily
valuable customers, right?
They're just people that just wanted
that prompt out of their face.
So they clicked allow or block or X and
they just got that prompt out of there.
So the people that did allow
maybe weren't actually engaged.
They were just people that were
just browsing the website and saw
that and just said, okay, sure.
Nowadays, you don't want that.
I know it's nice to see a high amount of
web push subscribers, but if they're not
driving any revenue, it's not necessarily
something that you probably want.
What we did was we added the
functionality in the dashboard to
set up when to show the prompt.
So you don't have to
write any code anymore.
You can actually just tell our browser.
Hey show this after 20 seconds on the
third page view or something like that.
So it gives your users more time
to, review the website, I like to
consider it like dating, right?
You don't want to just ask
the person out right away.
You want to...
Get to know them a little bit.
Make sure they provide value.
Maybe check a couple different pages,
have a few conversations with them.
And then you go in for the,
hey, do you want to make this
like a long term commitment?
You want to send messages, you
want to receive my messages.
So that's a way to think about it, right?
If you're If your analytics maybe show
that users are doing, two, three, five
page views then you might want to wait
and not prompt them immediately when they
visit the site, but again, the second page
view or the third page view or the maybe
the 10th page view, depending on your
users analytics so you can do all that
functionality without writing any code.
Just once you add our initial
setup, you can actually change that.
You can update the prompts, you
can add new prompts, and you can
really customize it as you need
without having to write any code.
Yep, that's well said.
I'd also add, you can do once
you're on a paid plan, you
can do what we call journeys.
And I would encourage,
we see it in the data.
Every real business out there should
have a true user onboarding that
incorporates push ideally email to
get them to those inflection points.
So they're filling out their profile or
their They're giving you their preferences
or they're subscribing to your newsletter
or you're they're buying a product or
whatever it may be your business is about.
And those things are great because to
your point about send a message at this
time or send a notification at this
time it's architected to the user's
experience with your website, right?
So when they come, they're engaged.
They're now in this sequence where
they're going to see, receive
messages that are different.
Timeline than somebody else.
Yeah.
You mentioned like onboarding
campaigns with journeys, right?
That's absolutely every website,
every mobile app should have that,
push notifications are designed for
engaging customers, telling them
who you are, what you're about,
what you offer and making sure that
they're understanding that, right?
If you have new features.
How are your customers going to know
that, you can send emails, you can send
push notifications, you can send SMS,
but not only like educational purposes,
but also reengagement purposes, right?
That's the whole key of push
notifications to get customers
reengaged with your app or website.
So if somebody's not returning
to your app or website.
You want to know why you can send
them just like a bump kind of
message, basically saying, Hey,
did you check out this new feature?
Or, Hey, did you read this article
about whatever, something that's
engaging, something that provides
value, something that actually gets the
customer, like wanting more, sometimes
I see customers sending out like.
We miss you notifications and that's bad,
you don't want to send that kind of stuff.
You want to send actual
Informative helpful content
that customers want to receive.
Now again, it depends
on the use case, right?
If you have a game that is, you're
training a puppy and the puppy misses
you then Yeah, maybe the puppy misses you
you can send those types of notifications
but if you're You know, actually trying
to provide helpful content like again,
it depends on what kind of, app you're
running, but, just contact support.
We're happy to help.
We're happy to give you ideas.
Lots of great stuff you can do
with chat GPT asking about, what
are some good campaign ideas
for my type of business, and.
Reach out to support.
We'll be happy to help you get
set up, review your content and do
what we can to make you successful.
So I just wanted to throw that in there.
No, I appreciate it, John.
And I personally witnessed it.
You go above and beyond.
Do the reason why and G2
we're a leader and the number
one pro is customer support.
So nice job there.
Anything else you want to impart?
Yeah.
I just want to say that
even if you're not.
Maybe you don't have enough resources to
set up web push or maybe you don't have
a lot of technical resources or even, you
don't have a lot of time to send messages.
Push notifications are
just such a great way.
It's just a great avenue to add
regardless of your budget or your,
technical market or resources.
They're so easy to set up, you
don't have to be technical to do it.
Yes, it does require a little bit
of code, a little bit of files to
be uploaded to your server, but.
Once you get that done, it's
very low maintenance to continue.
You can handle everything
through the dashboard.
Like I mentioned, just getting the
prompt set up, changing the prompts.
You can create these journeys to get
customers re engaged, educate them.
It's almost like a no brainer why
anybody wouldn't want to do this.
If you have an app or website,
you definitely want to have
some form of communication.
And so using one signal is
just such an easy way to do it.
And then on top of that, we You know,
provide you support to get you out there.
Even if you want to set up for
free and get started, great.
You start to see the benefit of it
and you want to add more features.
Great.
We're happy to help you, but it's just
such a no brainer solution for getting
your customers educated on your product,
even if you forgot that you added
it, and then you come back and you're
like, Oh, wow, I have 5, subscribers.
There's so much research out there that
shows that this functionality can help
drive revenue and, we have that as well
as you talked about on previous podcasts.
So I'm happy to, continue
talking about that or help your
business set that up if needed.
Yeah, and actually, it leads me to
1 last question in your experience.
How long does it take to get the basic,
the web push SDK set up and then maybe
like architect 1 onboarding message.
It literally could take 15 minutes.
All you need to do is just upload
a couple files and add the code
we provide you into the site.
That's really it.
There are additional things
you can do, obviously.
You can start collecting user data with
our data tags, collecting outcomes,
which will help you measure your
return on investment with OneSignal.
There are certain functionalities
that do require some additional code
work if you want them, but just the
basic setup to just add OneSignal.
Start collecting subscribers
and then send them messages.
You can literally do that in 15 minutes
and start seeing the benefit of it.
So yeah, that's awesome.
John, I really appreciate
you taking the time today.
It's awesome having you
finally on the podcast.
We got to do this more regularly.
Yeah.
Happy to do cool.
Thank you.
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In the meantime, have a great day.
I appreciate it.