190: Push Notifications for Bloggers with Josh Wetzel

In this episode, I chat about why it's important to diversify your traffic and then Bjork interviews Josh Wetzel from One Signal about using push notifications on your blog. Hello lovely listener. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Welcome. We are so glad you're here. Today's episode is sponsored by our wonderful friends over at WP tasty, the maker of popular WordPress plugins like tasty Recipes, Tasty Pins and Tasty Links. You can learn more about their plugins for food bloggers over@wptasty.com and for today's Tasty tip, I'd like to chat about a post that was actually recently published on the WP Tasty blog called Diversifying How Different Sources Perform Over Time. As you can probably tell from the title, this blog post takes a fascinating look into popular traffic sources for bloggers and how you can anticipate the traffic that those sources will bring a blog. They take a look at organic search, Pinterest, social media, email and content sharing sites like Food Gawker and I think you'll really find it helpful to anticipate traffic both in the short term and the long term. For instance, social media excluding Pinterest, can potentially deliver some impressive short term returns and it's also extremely valuable for evaluating what is resonating with your audience at a specific period of time. Traffic is grown through both short term and long term successes and this article will help you make the most out of both kinds of traffic. So you can head on over to wptasty.com diversify to learn more. And now the episode. Chances are that you've seen a prompt on a blog or two that says something like do you want to opt in to browser notifications? And pinch of Yum might be one of them. Those are called push notifications and One Signal is a company that helps you create those push notifications to increase user engagement on your site. Josh Wetzel, one Signals Chief Revenue Officer is here today to talk about the benefits of using push notifications on your blog and the results that you may see after enabling them on your website. It's a really interesting conversation and we really hope you enjoy so without any further ado, Bjork, take it away.

Josh. Welcome to the podcast Bjork.

Thank you. I really appreciate being part of this.

Yeah, super excited to talk to you. We were chatting a little bit before and kind of reviewing what we're going to talk about. I'm super excited to jump into this, not only because I think this is really important for our audience to be aware of and to know it's something that would fall under traffic marketing, just intentional business improvements. Improvement. But also because for us personally, on our food blog, Pinch of Yum, this is something that we're starting to do and we're actually using One Signal and we're going to talk about what One Signal is, what it does, why it's an important thing to be aware of. But before we do that, I always love to hear a little bit about the people that we are talking to. So would love for you to give kind of an overview of who you are, what you're about, and how you ended up at One Signal.

Yeah. Again, thank you for having me on. As I mentioned in the preamble, I'm a big foodie. I love traveling and visiting local farmers markets and cooking. It's meditation for me.

Yes, for sure.

There's many of these sites that I've been to in the past. So myself, I was born and raised in California, in Palo Alto, home of Stanford and right in the heart of Silicon Valley. So I like to think that I got hit by the lucky pitch. And I've been. My whole career has been kind of around this customer journey, kind of on the digital side. I've worked in E commerce, a couple stints at ebay, I've worked in kind of marketing technology, kind of software, and that's really how I end up. It's One signal is I feel deeply in that journey and constantly kind of innovating to find different ways to engage consumers, keep them understanding kind of what's going on and really finding ways to bridge and grow the your product. Right. So understanding how to kind of get to them in relevant, kind of timely ways. And so that's really what One Signals about is helping provide that conduit in this industry form as it relates to push notifications.

Yeah, that's awesome. What was it like to grow up in Palo Alto? I'm so curious to know. Do you feel like that has impacted how you view, like your thinking on business or startups or. We're in Minnesota, which is like, we love Minnesota and it's a great place for us, but it's definitely not Palo Alto. I've been before and it was like I'd sit at a Pete's coffee shop and just like listen to people talk. And I was so giddy to be around startups and people that were kind of speaking the same language, so to speak. Did you feel that growing up there, just out of curiosity?

Yeah. I mean, look, we could make a Whole other podcast just on this. But it was a very special time and I think it's changed a little bit. But I always like to say that it was very much about intellectual affluence. So most of my, most of my parents friends were, you know, some were in tech, but a lot of them were professors. They were, they were like very ambitious academics. So you were surrounded by this like kind of open ended idealism of like you could create something, you can think something you can be, you can be whoever you want to be. And I think one of the things both, both the, you know, definitely a blessing was growing up and going to high school here. People very much, you know, when I graduated it was sort of like you are going to go do something great. It doesn't necessarily need to be like you make a lot of money but you're, you're going to like have an impact on the world.

Yeah.

And there's a pressure that comes along with that. And I think when I look around my people, I knew around my era, like most people have gone on and done great things, you know, and great things may be like they're successful, known. Right. They've got a handful of kids and they're, you know, they're a doctor or they're working in high tech.

Yeah.

But I think it was a very special time and place. You know, it's become now very much about tech and everyone, the affluence has become more material than it was I think when I was growing up. And it's just, you know, it's time and place, people change. Like people, things evolve and, but it's, but to your point, I love, I mean I love going to the local coffee shop or I love that everywhere I go people are having discussions about like things that could materially change the world. Now 99% of those discussions don't ever mountain, but it's exciting to be around it and I think I find that energizing. I lived in LA for a couple years and it's very different there. There's a lot of idealism and talk about trading and art, but it's really in that confined of just art. Right. I think here people think about tech, but what tech really is enabling. Like I know people that are working on next generation electrical cars or robotics, medical devices, like so it's really pervasive across every industry and it's about approving kind of the human condition and whatnot. So that's really empowering. But the wealth and the money has definitely changed the environment quite a Bit for sure.

One of the things that I think is so valuable with any community like that are essentially the things that you talked about where it's like you are around these people that are ambitious and they have these goals and they would expect the same of you. Not in, hey, you have to do this, but you are fully capable of this. And what a awesome thing that is. And also to be around those conversations is so beneficial. I found that podcasting and like being artificially a part of some of those other communities that I'm able to get some of that. So hopefully able to do a little bit of that for the listeners. Today, as we were talking about one signal and a little bit of a background, I went to speaking of communities, I went to a conference and it was people who are building online businesses essentially and somebody gave a presentation strictly on notifications. And for me it was this thing of like, oh my gosh, you are doing such cool things with notifications and it's such an important piece of your business. And it was a website, it wasn't an app where we maybe normally think of notifications. And it made me think we need to be doing this. Like if we're going to be intentional about maximizing all of the different avenues of this valuable thing we've created, in our case our website, we need to be seriously looking at notifications. But before we could do that, we really had to understand what they're all about. And that's one of the things I hope we can do on this podcast. So for those that are listening, they have a website, they maybe are kind of familiar with the concept of notifications and how they work. Can you kind of do a high level overview of what those are and how a notification works? Just on a really ground level, like a really foundational level. What is a notification and how does it work?

Yeah, so the most people are probably intimately familiar with those messages they see on their home screen on their mobile phone. If you have a smartphone, Android, iOS, you get all these little notices that come on your phone and they're either in the lock screen or when you open up and you pull down your home, you'll see all these notifications. And typically if you use a ride sharing application, they're sending you things that are really necessary and timely, like, hey, your driver's almost here, or if you're ordering food, for example, it may be that it's coming, or here's the timeliness of it. That's fundamentally what push notification is. And I can walk you through the details, but Those started really around 2010, 2011. I don't know the exact date when Apple introduced them and then Android had them as well. And it's really critical to the functionality of those applications. And if you talk to and you have an application, you'll find that it really becomes an extension of the product and a critical way to engage and bring people back into your service or again to extend your product. So if you're a breaking news site or you're a blogger writing about recipes, it's a way to get that content out and bring people back in. Yeah, it was in about 13 or 14 where the browsers so the web browsers that you use on your computers realized that this was a great way to extend the utility of any website. So they opened up push notifications as well. Today we live in a world where essentially every browser supports push notifications and obviously the mobile environments do as well. And we're also seeing the push for things like Alexa. So if you have an Alexa skill, you can do audio alerts to drive engagement to bring people back into the skill within Alexa. So it's reserved for people who obviously built that. So it's extending itself into a bunch of different platforms and it's becoming a crucial way to engage with consumers.

Is that something that are the skills for the. We need to figure out a non. Don't talk about it. A ton of the podcasts. A non trigger word. We'll call it. How about Echo? We'll do that. The only problem is we have ours called Echo. So I might trigger them in the other room. But for the Echo devices we'll say that is that something that one signal is has tied into or will potentially down the line and idea being you create an app for that skill and then what can happen is you'll have a notification. I would assume it's just like the green ring that shows somebody, hey, there's something on this device that's waiting to notify you of something that's correct and.

Just to give the introduction on OneSignal. So one signal is a software solution that enables everyone from small single proprietor WordPress bloggers to very large organizations, major news organizations and entertainment companies and telecom companies utilize to bring in all their consumer information, segment them and send them messages, AKA push notifications. And we power it across all of those solutions, whether it's all the browsers, the mobile platforms and then now new emerging areas like Alexa and in the case of Alexa, for the select people who have built skills. Right. It's not an endless. Because It's a difficult thing to do and you would have to have a fairly large audience to want to do it. For the people that have built them, we support it. Where they would draft and create an audio message and then that would get pushed into the people who have opted in. And those people who have opted in would then see the thing would rotate at the top and then you would activate it and then the audio message would go through. Sorry. One thing you did ask that I didn't answer, which I think is important, is what exactly how does this work and what is it ultimately? And so just real clear and easy on that. Kind of like email, all of the various channels have their own rules and regulations on how people can receive messages, but universally they all have an opt in procedure. And so what that means is when someone visits Pinch of Young, for example, you prompt them at the top of the website. Would you allow messages from the site or not? And when you say yes, you've now opted in to receive messages. And that's where a one signal solution helps you then go message those people. One Signal manages all of the opt ins and then obviously all the ability to do the messaging. But you have to get an opt in from that user and once the opt ins happen, then you can send the messages. Very similar to email where someone has to actually give you their email and they're implicitly opting in. It's the same procedure flow for a push notification as well.

Yeah, there's actually some elements of subscribing or you know, accepting that are different than email in that number one, you don't actually have to enter in any information which makes it really seamless for people to say, yeah, okay, I want to be a part of this. The other thing that's interesting is, as far as I understand, and correct me if I'm wrong, the pricing structure would be a little bit different with like a tool like One Signal where, you know, email, it's like, hey, from here to here, this is how much it costs. And then if you go from 1,000 to 10,000, this is, this is how much it costs. Can you talk a little bit about how that works with One signal and what the different options are when you're signing up and what that looks like?

Yeah, that's a great question. So we're a young, fast growing company. We have a freemium service that allows you to use the product up to 30,000 subscribers and then we charge on a kind of basis above that. And the paid plans. Start off, the starter plan is $99 a month. And that includes that first 30,000 subscribers and bunch of premium features. And then above that, you pay on a per thousand subscriber basis, incremental fee. And that fee declines based on total volume. Got it. So I would actually say the pricing is very similar to email. The difference is because we have scaled so rapidly and grown and we have a large kind of base of overall users and customers on the platform, we've decided because it's part of our roots, that we want to be developer kind of startup, you know, blogger friendly, if you will. And so we have a free tier that we will, we will kind of maintain for forever. Whereas on email, most providers charge even for the sort of base product and whatnot.

Yep, great. So I think people would be for the most part familiar with that. So you go, you see a website, they say, hey, do you want to let this website send you notifications? You can either say yes or you can say no. And the same is true for what you'd see on a device. Now the difference would be if it's an Apple device, if you're using an iPhone, there's going to be restrictions with Safari, is that right? Or is it with iOS devices in general as to what types of notifications you can send? Or am I not understanding that correctly?

No, it's a little complicated, but you're on the right track. So Android has allowed notifications from browsers as well as applications. So Chrome enables you can actually send mobile web notifications as a, say, a blogger. Anyone who visits your site from an Android device could opt in and then would receive messages. IOS has. So Apple has made the decision that they don't support any browser notifications.

Got it.

So if you were to. You can't opt in, you can't provide this opt in or send messages to people if they're using an iOS device and accessing you through any browser, whether it's Chrome or likely Safari, the default browser. And who knows when that may or may not change. Given the growth of notifications and the importance and how much it's worked well on the Android side, our hope is that they will eventually change that policy to support it.

Yep, got it. Because that would be a big section of people, obviously people using Safari or just iOS device in general, browsing. If you could open that up, a huge chunk of people. But nonetheless, even for pinch of yam, as we started to use notifications, still have, you know, within the first month or so of turning it on, thousands of people that have said, yeah, we want to get Notifications. And so anytime a new blog post goes out, we notify people and then we also have this queue in that we built up where when somebody signs up, we're exposing, we're making sure that they're seeing some of our most popular content via the notifications. That's something that we've tried to be really intentional to do is say, hey, what are the shining stars that we have as a blog? And as much as possible, let's try and get those in front of people, whether that be via email for somebody that signs up to be part of the email list or now notifications and not only do they know about new content and we can bring them back with a notification, but also our best content. So that's kind of how we're using it. But. But I feel like it's maybe a little bit of a 101 version of notifications. And I'd be curious to know some of the other ways that content creators or bloggers or business owners because I know it could cross over into E commerce. Even some of the ways that we can be using notifications that are beyond just the 101. Hey, I have a new blog post into kind of 201. Being a little bit more intentional with. With kind of some cool ways to use notifications.

That's a great question. I think a big factor here is understanding your audience and what you're trying to accomplish and then devising what I like to consider a customer journey strategy and plan. In the case of a blogger or just traditional kind of media owner, I think the most simple kind of phase two, if you will, or step two in sophistication would be thinking about and segmenting your user base into kind of like extreme loyalists want to read everything to kind of general want to come once a week or engage and then devising a strategy where you are sending everything to the loyalists but you're not burning and wearing out the people that maybe want to come once a week and appreciate the content but. But they don't want to be bothered with notifications nonstop. And so what we've seen is there's companies out there who really understand that spectrum and some of them are very large. Like for example, if you were to use I'll use CNN as an example, if you go to, when you sign up for them, they actually engage you and they ask in the notification process. So after you've opted in, they essentially engage you on do you want to receive everything? Which by the way can be dozens if not more notifications a day, do you want to receive kind of like the headlines which are, and I think they actually listed out like six to 10 a day or do you want to get the summary kind of like once a week? And so what they've done is what they're saying is, hey, you opt in, but you should opt in to like the frequency you want so that you're comfortable and happy with what you're getting. I think from a media perspective, that's a really good example of how you can think about and make sure you're treating and customizing just the general experience to your customer.

Yeah.

If you were to go in just real quick, if you're going to E Commerce, the obvious thing would be figuring out triggers of okay, they're now at the cart page and they left. Why is that sending them and building a message sequence where you would be sending them a note saying hey, come back in, we'd love to have you back or things of that nature. Another thing, by the way, for any site or anyone using push notifications, it would be good to think about the frequency. So if somebody hasn't come in a week or two weeks or three weeks or whatever you want to define at the time, send them an automated message at that point when they haven't come back that says hey, we miss you, love to see you or whatever the message and the tone that you set within your experience to encourage them to come back into the experience.

And it's some pretty powerful automation type stuff that you can do. And the example you gave with, with CNN is that via the notification that they're doing that, or is that, let's say they sign up and they say yes, we want to receive notifications. And then after that do they go to some sort of page on the website where they say here is who I am. I am the person that wants to receive one update a day. And then that segments them in one signal.

That's correct. So they built that themselves, but they're tagging it and it's an easy thing within one signal where you would just send a tag saying hey, they selected one a day frequency or they sent the all frequency and then they're in that group and then every, every notification that goes out would be sent to that entire group or you know, vice versa. And I think the same thing is true for even the, the automated stuff. So just to touch on that for a second, you can set user has not been back to the website in X number of hours, days. You build a template and then you have the automated message and it would be sent when each user triggers that timeline. So let's just say you, you would set that. You'd have the template, you'd have the message. It automatically gets sent to that user that hasn't returned in those three weeks.

Yep, that makes sense. What I love about this is one of the things that we often think about is not how do we 10x something? I think that'd be great and obviously wonderful for any startup or business if they're able to 10x something. One of the ways that we think of businesses and the blog is how do we every day layer in another 1 to 2% improvement? And I think this is a great example of that because you are able to connect with and re engage people in a way that you weren't able to do before. And now we have, let's say I would have to check and see what this number is. Maybe 500 to 1,000 people who are coming back to the site because we send them notification when a new blog post goes out, or they're able to see a piece of content that they wouldn't have otherwise because we have this little queue that we've built out of our best content. But there's obviously some work that has to go into setting that up at the most basic level. For somebody that's just starting out, maybe they're not super technical, but they are interested in trying this out for their blog. They want to go for kind of that premium level or the freemium level where they're not having to pay. Can you talk about what's involved from a setup process? Do you need to be somebody who's super technical, or would somebody who has a blog, runs a blog, kind of understands the basics of running their blog, would they be able to get up and running with notifications for their site?

Yeah, it's a great question. So one of the values and power of one signal, quite frankly, and what's contributed to us growing so fast? So, by the way, in less than four years, we've gone from our first user, which was the original company that was building mobile apps or mobile games, to over 550,000 people who have used and installed the service. And we send about 4.3 billion notifications a day on their collective behalf.

A day. That's crazy.

A day? Yeah. So collectively, it's grown massively. And it really comes down to the setup. And I give you one example. People may not believe me since I grew up in Palo, think I'm technical, but I don't have a technical Bone in my body. And I set this up on a WordPress blog in about 15 minutes. And the way we did that was in the setup process. It's very simple. You sign up, you come into the platform, you name what your site or app is going to be, you click on whatever channel you want to set up, Whether it's an iOS app, an Android app or web push. And if it's a web push, which is the majority of the audience I suspect listening here, you come to this page where it says configure web push. You choose your integration. You could have a typical site integration or you can Click on the WordPress login or website builder and from there we have built in plugins that make it extremely easy and essentially automated for WordPress, Shopify, Blogger, Magento, Drupal, Squarespace, Weebly, Wix and so on and many more. You click on that. There's a couple things you have to fill out on both sides in terms of passwords to connect your sites and then you're off and running. Literally. You then would go in and define how you want your prompt to be and you can set up so it's easier to use and more user friendly, for example. And then once you start getting your opt ins, you now can start sending messages to users and you're off and running.

Cool. It's a great interface. So go to the back end and you're able to see kind of the different areas and it's super simple to navigate and understand. And one of the things that I think is really cool is the ability to do AB testing so sending a message and saying like hey, let's see which one of these has a higher click through and starting to learn more about effective messaging. But can you talk just a little bit about the different types of messages that you can send? And I'm thinking specifically of. So we have, you know, the automatic updates that go out when somebody. And we can speak specifically to web based. Whenever a new piece of content is out we have the queue for the automated messages I'm guessing we could do if we wanted to one off messages. What would you consider to be the most important areas in regards to web push notifications that people should look at right away and make sure that they set up?

Yeah, look, I always encourage people to start, you know, small, right. It's the whole crawl, walk, run approach. So I think first thing is just how do you want, what do you, what is your tone of your site? What's, what's your personality? And I would always bring that to like a welcome message. And I would, I would always make sure you're extending kind of if it's a new post or something that you're excited about, that you're pushing and you want people to come engage with, but make sure you're extending that within the notification. And I would just start small there. And then I think if it's re engagement, then it's like the person hasn't been there in three weeks. Set up that automated process. It's really simple. You just create a template, you build the automated message, and then you create a user segment for that automated message that would be tied to the amount of time that a user has not been back to the site. I would just start with those small little tactics in terms of what you can do in the message. You know, one thing that's really important for everyone to know is one signal enables you to send these. But every platform has their own rules. So there's things you can do with iOS that you can't do with Android and vice versa. On the web browser side, there's things you can do with Chrome that you can't do with Safari. So there's little nuances and you have to be. You have to be mindful of that. But ultimately it's about that engaging kind of copy creating really basic messages that are like, in, in line with your tone and starting with that and then building from there as you get more comfortable.

Yeah, there's something so true about that. Like, one signal can be the best hammer in the world, but if you don't put it in the hands of a skilled carpenter, like somebody who's going to actually craft the thing, then it's not going to be like this magic button. You have to be really intentional and say, okay, how do we create content that is engaging, that's interesting, that's helping people, and that being another really important piece to the puzzle. And that's something that we're continually trying to figure out, hey, what does engaging copy look like? That is not only going to encourage people to click, that's one thing. But then once they do click, actually deliver on the promise that was somehow communicated via the message.

So that's right.

One of the things that we talk about occasionally on this podcast is this idea of the. We call it the egg carton method. And for people who are thinking about being solopreneurs or building a business or building a blog and creating an income from it, we say, hey, just don't think about just one way that you can create an income you know, it's not only ads, it's not only sponsorships, it's not only affiliate marketing. There's lots of different things that you can do and the goal is to, to fill up each one of those spaces in the egg carton. And I think this is potentially an example of, okay, this could be another, I think another avenue to create income, not just through getting traffic back to your site, but there might be some other ways that I'm not even thinking about. Do you have any thoughts as you look at other content creators, as you look at other businesses and how they're using notifications? Do you have any thoughts for people that are listening to the podcast in terms of ways that they could be using notifications that would translate to income? Are there income producing ways that we can be thinking about using notifications?

Yeah, that's a good question actually. And kind of at the core of my earlier career I was heavily in web media monetization. So built a product at what is now ebay around kind of like shopping. Think about AdSense, but for shopping and been very close to this for a lot of my career. Look, it directly translates to your point. When you send out a push notification and you bring in an incremental thousand people on the site, you're generating incremental dollars from kind of your on site monetization. And I think one thing to stress here and one signal doesn't really have a formal policy on this, but there are some terms and conditions with some of the platforms that outlaw just outright ads in push notifications. There's a lot of people that are skirting this and they're starting to build kind of ad networks, if you will, for push and we're not against that. If someone wants to add ads into their push, that's great, but it's not going to be a core part of once you know, we are a software provider only and we're not trying to get into the ad space. So you have that, I think one of the most innovative or sort of the most like common ways I'm seeing this with larger media companies. And you could do this at a very grassroots level too. If you have kind of paid posts or you have things that are like co sponsorship with some kind of brand or product, let's call it like KitchenAid is doing something with one of the bloggers around using their product and then it's really like a paid kind of experience around this recipe. There's nothing. And actually I would highly encourage to think about leveraging push as an incremental value add or something that you would sell in that package to KitchenAid where you incorporate KitchenAid into a push that's driving people back into that paid post. Or what a lot of media companies are doing is they'll leverage push their audience around, push notifications to say hey, you're going to sponsor for this period of time this site or this category or whatever it may be and we'll incorporate X number of push notifications to that audience to bring them back into that experience. That's going to drive this many more engagements and things of that nature. And so in those ways it's 100% driving income. It's just not direct E commerce. Obviously there's a huge direct correlation, right, because they're sending out cart abandonment promos around discounts or coupons and all of that is allowed. It's the pure. Just like here's an ad for some service that's nothing related to my site. That it's a gray area.

Yeah, for sure. And it's interesting. I've heard of a couple of different people who are doing things like that and saying it kind of feels like one of those when I say say things like that, using their notifications from their website to create income from ads that they push through the notifications. And it seems like one of those things where it's so early on that people haven't formulated hard rules around exactly what that looks like. Do you know in terms of this was a question somebody on the team asked is it possible to do affiliate links in a notification? So let's say that we have a product that we really like and we want to recommend. Is is it if we're doing web notifications, can you include an affiliate link or would you have to link to a post that has an affiliate link?

I think best practice would be to link to a post that is promoting or editorializing the quality of a product or service. Otherwise it is a pure ad. Here's how I would, here's how I would think about it and I would encourage the audience to kind of think hard about this. To me, push notifications are really kind of a next extension or a new version of email. So it's not replacing email, but it's a new channel that a healthy percentage of the consumers it's hard to pinpoint exactly, but let's call it 30 to 50% of consumers prefer over email. And on your email list, would you just send an email to your list that says say you're a food blog. Right. And would you send an Email saying, hey, Sprint's got a great deal on a, on a prepaid plan. Click here to go to Sprint site. Right. Like, that's just a really, like a sort of not a positive consumer experience. And you're likely to get a lot of people to opt out of your email list from that.

Yep. Or in the same way, if you had Uber as an app and they sent you a notification that said, you know, McDonald hamburger is half off today, it'd be like, wait a minute, like this is a huge disconnect from what I thought I was signing up for.

Correct. That's exactly right. And so you really want to be thinking about it like, what's the best customer experience? Because that's what's going to ultimately win you your audience and loyalty and people coming back to your experience. So I would encourage people not to be really short sighted and say, hey, I can make an extra dollar today versus 10 or $15 over the next 15 years with the relationship with this consumer.

That makes sense.

Sense.

So when you think of crafting the actual message, do you have any insight for people as to what it looks like to write a good web notification message? You know, when we look at Instagram, we have an idea of what a good description is. Maybe some people have thoughts around how to write an engaging subject in a good email, but notifications are a little bit different and I would assume require a little bit bit of a different thought process around how the content is crafted. What would your advice be for people who've never written a notification in terms of creating one that's really effective at engaging and getting people to come back to their site?

Well, first I'm going to cop out a little bit and say, you know, I think every individual, you know, blogger or somebody who's amassed an audience, that they're amassed it because they have a voice that people are attracted to. And so I would keep that. Stay true to your tone, stay true to what you're about. The little nuances though, that are important to take into consideration for whatever reason, and I started to do it too in my versions of this. Emojis and kind of visuals in general are really important. So leveraging emojis in the actual headline are engaging, they attract attention and you can be fun with them. If it's a food blog, you can have kind of funny, whether it's fruits or vegetables or some kind of image for a mixer or whatever it may be that may be tied and relevant to the actual notification, like the message you're trying to send out Then when you can, adding images are key. And what I say by when you can, I mean you should add an image every time you send. But not all the browsers support them. So in one signal you'd be able to send it to everybody and the people, the browsers that support it and the users that devices support it would get there and the ones that didn't did. But you should always have an image and you should try to use emojis or visuals within the actual copy, but the copy itself should be true to your voice and what the message is. I wouldn't go against that because again, that's why people are already coming to your experience and why you gained their trust to opt in in the first place.

Super insightful. And I think people understand that in terms of the value of voice and having a voice that is similar across all platforms and how important that is. So how about some of the data, the metrics, the info as it relates to numbers? With web notifications, do you have any general norms in terms of if you set up opt ins for web notifications, here's on average, you know, the conversion rate of people that will accept those. And then when you send one out, here's the average that people would number of people that would actually click on it. And I know that that probably varies widely, but just for people to kind of crunch the numbers a little bit and think about what they might be able to do in terms of getting new people to subscribe and then converting those people back into visitors and any general numbers or percentages that, that you can share with that.

Of course, yeah, this does varies greatly by what the service is as you can imagine, if it's a food delivery or a ride sharing or something that's sort of mission critical and you're not going to get a lot of notifications, but when you get them, they're really critical. The equipment rates are going to be really, really high. But I would say for typical kind of media sites, it varies, but it's somewhere in the two to, you know, 8, 9%, 10% range. And it would vary based on the content, when you send it, how you send it, that type of thing. But it's always typically relevant or tied to what that site is about and what they're talking about and what is that post and the copy compelling. Those are all major factors that would play also segmentation, right? If you're sending a group to a very highly loyal group who really want to receive a recipe, the click through rate that's going to be Much higher than the automated message to the less active kind of re engagement group.

Yeah, so interesting to think about that. So let's say that you have 10,000 people that have subscribed to your notifications and we'll use something right in the middle there and say 5% click through. So that's potential of 500 people that would be re engaged with your content whenever you publish a new piece of content. And for bloggers that are a little bit more established or business owners that have kind of some insights into metrics on their own site, you can start to play around with what those numbers are and you can say okay, if I know that on average I make $15 for every 1000 page views, then I know that, you know, the value of a single notification could be up to $10 and I could get that back with the additional traffic that I get. And you can kind of crunch some of those numbers which I think is is helpful for people to know in in terms of how many people actually subscribe when they see that notification. Do you have a guess as to what that would be? So the initial prompt. So if somebody has let's say 10,000 visitors or a hundred thousand just to make it easy per month, what percentage of those would you guess would convert over into notification subscribers?

Yeah, similar to click through rate, it's going to vary so much by again established the brand and how much people rely on this stuff. But it's typically I would say we see nothing lower than kind of the 2% range and we see it as high as 10ish to 15% for kind of bloggers, media sites in general. Those rates are off the charts for things where people see push notifications as crucial to the service. So think like again I keep going back to these mission critical messaging apps or mobile games. Right. It's part of the game and to get warned about an activity or something that you're going to get. So those experiences see upward north of 50. So it's typically usually a little bit higher, much higher than email. And I think just to close off that kind of comparison, again, this is not replacing email, it's a new channel. But for the people that do opt in, we see much higher engagement here than email. One single does support email by the way. We're much more transactional. So it's one of our new beta products. So we do have some insight into that. And I think you're going to see higher opt in rates than email. And to your earlier point, you don't have to actually write in Your email, it's like the opt in is much easier. That's maybe probably one of the factors. And then the engagement higher because I believe it's a little bit more intimate. Right. You're getting this notification in your browser. When you're live on a website, it's a lot easier just to click it and go in versus I have to go into my email, I'm reading it, I have to click it. I'm already kind of in this laborious work mindset when I'm going through my email. So the engagement's lower. They're still both, you know, email's still very valuable. But I think Push is a much more engaging experience to bring people back into your audience. Last thing I would say about this too, with Push, it's really about awareness. So one of the things we see, particularly with media partners with, you know, larger sites is they see a ton more engagement in general on an article. Not necessarily from the click through, but like people will see it. They feel like, oh, I've learned that piece of news, news, I'm more engaged and they come more frequently. So there's a bunch of data on this out there, but people who have opted into push notifications actually come back to the site more often.

It's kind of like a billboard in the sense of you're not actually taking action on it, but you're top of mind. So next time somebody thinks of a recipe, if they're a pinch of yum notification, they receive notifications, it's like, well, they've maybe had in that week three different notifications. And so there's a higher probability that they think, oh, I wonder what pinch of yum would have for this certain type of recipe.

That's right. That's right.

Got it. And I think that is something that is, it's, it's hard to quantify and it's hard to track, but there's inherent value in brand awareness that also needs to be factored in, which I think is an important point. So specifically with one signal, are there things or maybe just notifications in general? Love that you talked about, you know, these devices that we have in our home, Echo devices and those starting to become integrated with notifications, but other things that are coming down the line that you think that we should be aware of, even if it's, you know, kind of little feature or functionality that's being added to one signal or notifications in general?

Yeah. So like at a high level, we are a very nimble, fast team. So we're adding every Time a platform adds a new functionality allowing you as a website to send, whether it's more rich imagery or whatnot, we add that within days. In fact, we're typically on the developer side, so we're fast on that end. I think what we're focused on is we see so many consumer devices and users every day and we want to provide. A lot of people talk about artificial intelligence, kind of AI, machine learning, but that's a really big area for us because we want to make these things easy for people to use. So one example of a feature we already have out that's driven by this today, and it's an example of features you're going to see in the future is what we call intelligent delivery. And intelligent delivery is as simple as instead of saying send the message right this minute or send it in three hours, it will actually in the next 24 hour period send it to that each individual user based on the best time that most likely they're going to be on their computer engaging with your site or sites in general. Send it to them then because the likelihood of them engaging is much higher. And so we see much higher click through rate in that using that product. And that's really a big focus for us is like how do we leverage kind of all of the information and knowledge we have about users in general and just aggregate it so that we can automate some of these workflows, automate and improve engagement and make it easier and more efficient and just better product to use overall for all of our users.

Cool. Yeah, it's fun to think about some of the. And I just love the idea of a tool becoming smarter without you needing to train it. And it sounds like that's kind of some of the stuff that's currently happening and on the horizon. It's starting to create a better experience without anybody being directly involved, which is so cool. Last question that I have for you. I would be curious to know when you think of websites that are maybe in a similar space as to the things that we're talking about, rather recipe, it wouldn't have to be food content, but it could be, you know, media in general producing content that you'd have an audience and the main driver of the business is the content. Can you think of sites you had mentioned cnn, but other sites that are using notifications really well, that are smart about how they're using notifications. So we could go out and say, hey, these would be good examples of what to look at and what the potential would be so we can understand as Creators, here's some ideas for how we could be doing similar things at a high level and being really strategic about it.

Yeah, that's a great question. Some of them I can't talk about.

Sure, yeah, yeah.

I think there's a ton. I mean we have examples on our website of sites where they've done a good job or existing customers. But I think overall there's examples where CNN is a very active user of push notifications and there's actually an article out that Columbia Business or journalism school did analyzing newsrooms in particular and their use of notifications and the frequency and habits and how that works with brand loyalty, which I encourage people to look at and I'm happy to send you a link to it.

Yeah, that'd be great.

But I think that, you know, I would say I would encourage people to think about. You want to make sure that you're being smart about and customizing the prompt. So that's something that you and I could talk about offline in terms of a pinch of yum. So when people come in, they see your brand and they're like oh, I get what it's going to be and it creates two prompts, it creates the yes, I accept it. And then you have to do the browser one. But there's this more synergistic like oh, I get what they're doing versus I think some people see that the base browser prompt is like a. That spam. What is that? So that's one example. And then I think the things we already talked about, which is visual, when you send a message, trying to constantly think about what is going to be the best thing for the consumer because that's going to drive that loyalty, that's going to drive higher click through rate and even the people that don't click, it's going to be people like oh, I really love that site and I love that they did this. And I'm not going to click on this recipe right now, but when I'm thinking about my next X thing I want to cook or bake, I'm going to be thinking that can be top of mind. And that's when it comes back to the ads. If you're pushing out push notifications and essentially just an ad for some random product that has nothing to do with your site, you're likely to burn some of those bridges. There'll be people who see that and say wait, that's not what I. This is kind of a spammy experience. Right? So I think those are the key things is that and Then there's nuances behind around segmentation. But again, going back to the crawl, walk, run, I would crawl and then I would start experimenting with the walk. And then once you start building and scaling and it's working, you can start running and getting much more sophisticated with how you automate messages and the different ways you approach it.

Yeah. And to explain what you were talking about with Pinch vm, when you go right now it's just the default message. It's like, hey, can we send you notifications? And what you're saying is sometimes it's helpful to have a first notification that a little prompt that says, here's what we're doing, are you interested in it? And kind of selling and explaining what it is. So then people understand it, say, yeah, I'm interested in that. And then are more likely after that to accept the second stage, which is can we now integrate in with your browser to send these notifications?

Yeah. Yep, exactly.

Got it. Cool. Super helpful insight. Really great advice and we're really excited to start using this for print of yam and hope that some of the listeners are able to implement it as well and see kind of those continual improvements for their site, which I think is so important to be thinking about. Josh, if people want to follow along with One Signal or you personally, what's the best way to for them to take the next step and to learn a little bit more about what One Signal is up to? And I don't know if you guys have content channels that would be good for them to check out, but what's the best way for people to pick things up and to stay connected with One Signal and what you're up to?

Yeah, you can come to OneSignal.com and opt in to push notifications.

There you go.

You can follow it. You can follow us on Twitter at One Signal. And then I personally am just letter J Wetzel W E T Z E L for Twitter. But I really appreciate you having me on. It's great and I love food. So I'm actually getting hungry now. I think I gotta go find a good spot to get something to eat. But I appreciate you having me on and love what you're doing and continue to do what you do.

Yeah, thanks, Josh. Really appreciate it.

Take care of.

And that is that, my friend. We hope you love this interview with Josh and learned a lot about what One Signal can do for your blog and business. But before we wrap up today, it's time for our reviewer of the week. And this review comes from a listener with the username Crackers and Cabernet which sounds like a delicious way to spend a Friday night. And it says this is an amazing podcast for new and seasoned and food bloggers alike. Bjork is a wonderful interviewer, very professional and witty. He asks tough questions and has explored a variety of food blog topics. The podcasts cover everything from SEO, which is search engine optimization to recipe development to social networking. Everyone would be able to take something away from this podcast. Very well done. Thank you so much for that review. We absolutely love reading what you all think of the show and if you'd like to leave us a review and potentially get featured in an upcoming episode of the podcast, all you need to do is leave a review for us on itunes with your name and blog name. So thanks again for tuning in friends. We'll see you here next Tuesday. And from all of us here at fpphq, make it a great week.

Sam.