How Fortune 500 Companies Use Push Notifications

Ever wonder how Fortune 500 Companies use push notifications in their marketing strategies? OneSignal's Push Notification Specialist, Megan Patrylak, goes over different ways the biggest companies in the world use notifications to engage with their audiences. The transcript of the webinar can be found below. Register for our webinars today!

(Start) [00:00]

All right. Hi everyone. Welcome to the OneSignal webinar today. My name is Megan and we'll be talking about ways that fortune 500 companies are using OneSignal to power their notification strategies.

We'll just give everyone here a few minutes to still join us. Thanks to everyone who's joining today.

All right, let's see. We'll give people a few more minutes here. Just one more minute before we get started. And the other thing as well is if you wanted to send in questions, you can submit them and throughout the webinar here I can try to answer them as well. And then any questions we don't get to, we'll go ahead and have our support team follow up with you afterwards if there's specific technical questions about your account or if you have questions about our plans or anything else.

All right. So, for today's webinar, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen so you can see the version of the OneSignal dashboard that we're going to use for the webinar today. Let's see. Right. So, hopefully, everyone is able to see my screen and what it looks like. Essentially, this is probably very familiar to you if you'd set up your OneSignal account. It's kind of what the OneSignal interface looks like.

So, we work with tons and tons of clients who work with all of you guys in addition to 500,000 apps and websites today. Many of them are Fortune 500 companies. It really runs the gamut from developers to people at small stage companies. But today, we'll talk about how kind of these Fortune 500 companies are leveraging by push as a part of their mass marketing strategy to reach all of their customers, how it ties into their internal setup, their internal CRM systems, their internal databases, to really understand who those users are and how to best message those users.

So the purpose of this, I'll just go ahead and jump into our general account. And the main thing again today that we’ll cover here is going to be the automated messaging piece. So, we'll walk through that. We'll also walk through a new feature that we've started recently called List Upload. We'll walk through something called List Upload, which is a new feature that OneSignal has recently released, which essentially allows you to upload lists of customer data. And then we'll walk through some of the analytics as well.

All right. So, this is your OneSignal count at a high level. You can see all of the information that you have on your account. You can see all of the different users. You can see your specific messaging strategy. As you can see, we've been messaging people about how to get access to this seminar today. Usually, what I'm going to take you into is the automated messaging and the templates. So, first, we'll go ahead and create a segment of users.

Steps to Sending a Notification

So, there are really three steps when you're going to send notifications. The first step is to create a segment. For the use of this, I'll just go ahead and say, I go ahead and call it 'Webinar Participants', and that's people that have been less active in the past 24 hours. So, essentially 390 people, which is-- oh, let's see. Less than, we'll say 72 hours. It should give us a wider range of people. Essentially, this is the people that had been active on the site in the past 72 hours. So four, it's super low. But we'll go ahead and create that segment.

And then essentially, we can go ahead and create a template. So, the second step is to jump into your messaging tab and to create a template. When you're creating your segment, that's when you're able to leverage all of the data tag functionality. If you're not familiar with what data tags are, we can send over some information after the webinar, but essentially the data tags allow you to import information about your users. So, if you have, for instance, an email address you wanted to pass for, the customer is subscribed to notifications or they're subscribed to a specific service that you offer, you would want to know that information about your customer before you're trying to message them.

How Fortune 500 Companies Use Push Notifications

[04:58]

A lot of times, when we're working with these Fortune 500 companies, they're actually using push notifications as a channel to reach users similarly to how you might use your email systems today. So, if you think of all of the complexities that go into your email system, you might have an affiliate marketing email strategy that you use or email campaigns. You might have a cart abandonment email strategy when someone comes to the site and purchases something. Push works in the same way. The great thing about it is you're able to actually reach that user across their mobile device and desktop browser. So, you're reaching them in real-time. You don't have to wait for them to open their email inbox.

So, jumping back to this quickly, we'll go ahead and do a new push template. This is where you can create essentially what that would look like. So, 'Webinar Step 1'. The reason I say Step 1 is because with the automated messaging, you're essentially going to create a cadence of automated messages. So, the first notification that you're sending, for instance, would be to get more people to come to this webinar or to get more people to just spread awareness of your brand or whatever message you're trying to spread.

It's really just kind of like an introduction, thanks for signing up, that sort of thing. We can use a better example. We can say, thanks for signing up. Check out-- So, if you wanted to send a notification to users for 10% off on the first time that they received the notification, that's something you'd be able to do. You can set that up right here. Again, you can customize all of this, add images, customize the icon, that sort of thing.

So, for the sake of this, I'll just create a pretty quick template here. And then you just add your launch URL and we'll hit SAVE. And then-- oh wait, I think I saw-- I don't know what I saw. Anyway, let’s see. Participants. Okay. So, essentially, this is what your template would look like at.

The next step here is to really just jump into automated messaging. And then you're going to go ahead and create a new automatic message. So this is how you would create a new automated message and it would just say, "Welcome! Thanks for signing up." You got a welcome push notification. You can select the template. So, I think it was Webinars Step 1, deliver to users in segments, 'Webinar Participants'. So, this is where you're just going to go ahead and set up your segments that you're going to deliver the notification to.

So, again, this is really the first step of the automated notification strategy. You'll likely have a sequence of three to five emails or notifications that you're sending to users and you can really just think about it in terms of how the user is walking down the path to purchase or the path to becoming a more engaged user, that sort of thing.

After I show you this, we can delve back into some of the segmentation options. And then essentially, you can set the notification to be delivered immediately. So, as soon as users come to the site and opt-in to notifications, the last time that they're active in the past 48 hours, they'll receive this notification after their first session for 10% off.

You can also have other settings here. Wait a certain amount of time for a certain number of hours to have elapsed once the user is added to the segment. Or you could say only notify the user if they return to the app. So, this is kind of what that would look like and this would be the first step of the automated strategy.

If we go back here and go to total users, and if you wanted to do a new segment-- well, let's see. Users. Sorry, I'm just playing around here for a second. I want to go to ALL USERS. You'll essentially be able to see where all of your users live. There's a number of different fields here that you're able to actually create segments based off of.

I think one of the things that we see with customers that are super successful with notifications is that they have really robust segmentation strategies. So they're targeting users based on different attributes of their accounts, whether it's, again, they're super engaged, they're active subscribers, they're subscribed to some kind of like premium service that you might offer. They've given you their email. They've purchased something from you before.

If you're using any kind of customer data platform or if you're using a CRM system, once you actually connect to all of those systems, there's information on our site about integrations. So, it's really easy to connect your systems and essentially pass that information through something that we call an External ID, which is really just like an anonymized user ID. So, that's kind of how you'd be able to go about doing that.

[10:07]

Sending Targeted Notifications

And then in addition, there's all of these great things that OneSignal pulls in automatically through the SDK. So, things you pull in are user data around their timing whether users are active, how active they are. The number of sessions, which I always think is super indicative of how engaged your user actually is. You can create segments based on users that have been active five times in the past four days and actually create an automated strategy that has really small segments but really just pushes users towards the path to purchase.

Say, for instance, you are a retailer, like a large national retailer and you know that people that come to the site and maybe add something to their cart are more likely to purchase it within two days than within five days. You can actually target your notification strategy to reach those people as many times within those two days as you'd like. So, maybe you send them three to five different notifications as you would with an email campaign to say, "Hey, you bought this item in your cart. And now, before the price goes back up, it's on sale." Or if the price alternatively has dropped, you can send a notification to say, "Oh, the price dropped on this item that you've been looking at."

And also, it works really well for affiliate marketing. So, if you're more of a media publisher and you possibly work with other brands and you want to promote specific articles feature different categories. Prime Day is coming up. So, all of those of you that are in media, I'm sure you have a ton of stuff coming up on Prime Day. It's a really great way to promote some of those products. Especially if you know, based on your segmentation, that a user has looked at a tech article and they're possibly interested in buying an Amazon Echo and the Amazon Echo is on sale. That's a great notification to send to that user.

So, you can really start to build out targeted campaigns. That's what some of our most successful publishers are doing today in the brands that we're working at is they're trying to identify the patterns within their user history through the data that they store in their customer data platforms and CRMs and trying to understand, okay, how can we message segments of these users to make them take actions on our website or in our mobile app? How do we get them to come back? How do we get them to be more loyal to our app? How do we engage them?

So really segmentation is going to be the key to that. Again, it can be category segmentation, whether they come to your site and you want to tag them with specific categories of things they've looked at or if you want to tag them with their subscription status or something else that you might have.

And the really easy way to do that actually is to use our INPUT/UPDATE USERS tool. So, this tool essentially allows you to automatically update information about your users. So, using that external ID or using the ones like player ID, you're essentially able to download a CSV to the OneSignal system and then select the specific columns that you'd want to target based on. And then OneSignal will be able to match that external ID and automatically update those data tags.

So, for instance, my name is Megan. If you had Megan in your CRM and my external ID was User 110, you'd be able to say, "Okay, we know Megan is User 110 and she's been shopping on this free site or she's been shopping on these three pages, she's added this item to her cart. You can simply just upload all of that information to the OneSignal dashboard using this upload feature, and then you can create a notification and create that automated campaign based on this information.

So, it's really easy to do. I just drag and drop the CSV file from your computer that you have and then it'll prompt you to select the specific categories that you're matching. It's really easy to do, which is nice. Any questions so far? Feel free to type in questions if anyone has any questions about any of the segmentation or any of the automated messaging.

Okay. Let's see. The last thing that I'm really going to-- so, I guess these are the data tags that you're able to see here really easily. See? Very easy. And then this is where you can see actually all of the different columns that you can target users based on.

There’s a question from Max. It says, what level of plan do I need for the new upload tool?

So actually, the upload tool is available on both our starter and our pro plan. So, essentially, the way that the plans work is if you expect to have less than 200,000 subscribers coming to your site and opting in to notifications, then we recommend our starter plans. Those start at $99 a month for the first 30,000 subscribers. And then if you do expect to have more than 200,000 subscribers, you have a really large site and you want additional support, you want additional help, you want these additional features, the features are available on both plans. But you can really get additional support by signing for the pro plan as well. Okay. All right. I hope that answers your question, Max, on plan what you need.

[15:29]

Let's see. Can you update user data automatically from a CDP? Yes, you can actually update the user information from the CDP, so it's available via the API. There's some documentation on it, but essentially that's how you would do it as you would need to connect to your CDP or a CRM. It depends on what CDP you use. We actually have a custom integration with one partner. It might be easiest in the meantime to just use the List Upload or tool to test it out. But we can definitely send you some information on how to connect to the API to constantly automatically update that information. Because we realize that this, especially large brands, you have hundreds of thousands of customers and you need to make it really easy to constantly update information about those users. So, you can either do it manually or you can do it via the API.

Let's see. Okay. And then the other thing that I was just going to kind of talk about is delivery and how you're looking at analytics. So, actually, OneSignal is building out a few more additional features that actually allows you to ask specific actions. Like, did the user abandon their cart? Did the user come back after they received notifications? So, we're building out a dashboard view that will allow you to set specific goals rather than just looking at the total messages delivered.

However, this is a really great way for you to just look at your delivery at a high level. I'm trying to figure out how to optimize your notifications. Typically, a good CTR for notifications is anywhere from 3% to 5%. We usually think that's pretty good. So, depending on how large your audience segment is, you want to try to optimize the notifications towards that to make sure people are sucking in and engaging with these notifications. So, you can really start to tailor the notifications, creating smaller segments of users that are performing certain actions in the app or on the website. It has a specific user behavior like they're super active to really hone in on those target segments.