Web notifications are nothing new. And frankly, the way many websites immediately serve up cookie consent forms and notification opt-in prompts before anyone can possibly make an informed, value-based decision is tiring at best. At its worst, it makes saying “no” instinctual, even when saying “yes” offers significant conveniences and real value. All of these concerns become even greater on our most personal, pocket-sized screens. 

The good news is that Apple is enabling mobile web push differently. iPhones and iPads, or more specifically iOS and iPadOS, will control the experience — not browsers. Another big, unexpected and essentially historic change occurred recently with Android 13, which now requires explicit opt in for mobile app push notifications. Moves by both platforms make the mobile experience more consistent (and some would say respectful) for both customers and brands. 

First, why in the great big world of things-to-do, are web notifications something brands should focus on now. 

Websites reach the masses, but hanging on to them is hard

Search engines, social media and most advertising are all more likely to drive customers to websites, rather than trying to convince an immediate app download. By sheer size, many brands have bigger audiences on their websites than their apps. Yet, the challenge of encouraging repeat and frequent use is much greater on websites than apps. Marketers’ go-to-fix has been email marketing, which more than three-quarters of global subscribers ignore at least half the time or more and younger generations are more likely to actively avoid altogether.

In contrast, push notifications don’t get caught in spam filters or sent to junk addresses. They arrive on the most visible real estate on the planet — smartphone lock screens — reaching people wherever they are, and ideally at the exact moment it matters most. As a result, notifications regularly see direct open rates that are more than twice as high as email click throughs. And of course, more push response drives more interaction and use.

Mobility is what makes Apple’s move compelling

The ability for customers to reliably receive web notifications on their mobile device opens up a highly visible, real-time communications channel supporting a wider range of use cases that don’t presume customers are currently on their desktop/laptop or checking their email:

• Curbside and in-store pickup notifications
• Shipping and delivery updates
• Financial updates, suspected fraud alerts
• Breaking news or sports scores important to individuals
• Location-based offers, events or product drops
• Travel and itinerary changes

Apple Enables Mobile Web Push Differently Than Android

According to a recent post on the WebKit blog, Apple first requires that a customer add the website to their home screen. 

Once added, the website (or rather now, the web app) can request permission to receive push notifications in response to a direct user action, like tapping subscribe. Following acceptance, users can manage permissions per web app in Notifications Settings — just like any other app on iPhone and iPad — and apply Focus modes that could include multiple versions of a web app with different settings to separate personal and work time. Notifications from web apps will work exactly the same as notifications from native apps: displaying on the Lock Screen, in Notification Center, and on a paired Apple Watch.

What Brands Need to Do Now

According to WebKit, this is the same W3C standards-based web push that was added in Safari 16.1 for macOS Ventura last fall. If you’ve implemented standards-based web push for your web app with industry best practices — such as using feature detection instead of browser detection — it will automatically work on iPhone and iPad.

Not all websites are set up to operate as web apps. You need to add both of the following tags to your website to get it to run as a web app:

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">

<meta name="mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">

You’ll also want to consider providing the icon that Apple will use for your home screen web app. 

Airship released support for Safari 16 web notifications in January and is ready to support you in enabling web push to iOS devices.

Are Websites Now Equivalent to Native Apps? 

The short answer is no, not by a long shot. However, customers being able to receive real-time, highly visible push notifications specifically tailored to their preferences, behaviors and in some cases location, does close a massive gap preventing greater use and utility. Brands will need to be disciplined and practiced in driving customers through the various steps to enable mobile web push. 

Functionally, native apps can access devices’ internal hardware and specific operating system features such as touch gestures, device tilt, split view, ARKit, HealthKit, CarPlay and more, while offering better security via app store review policies, fingerprint scanning and face recognition. Web app UI design is also comparatively harder as each browser and device varies in screen size and definitive guidelines are lacking unlike mobile operating systems. Because native apps are specifically designed to run on a specific operating system, not only is performance faster, the experience can feel more integrated, intuitive and streamlined.

Mobile operating systems also have increasing capabilities around accessibility, including everything from adjusting the size of text to spoken content, offering a better user experience for all people. Giving users choice in how to interact with your brand captures more audience and the best customers will gravitate (and can be pushed) toward your native app. 

The post Websites on iPhone Just Got a Whole Lot More Useful with Web Notifications appeared first on Airship.

Outside of the U.S., Android is the most widely adopted mobile operating system (OS) by a long shot. According to Airship’s decade-plus analysis of notification opt-in rates and their downstream impact on app engagement and retention, Android’s move has serious ramifications for brands.

In this blog, we go further into those ramifications and then suggest what you should do about them. 

The Challenge for Brands
Last quarter, medium-performing apps on iOS averaged a 51.6% opt-in rate, according to Airship’s platform data. In contrast, Android apps in the 50th percentile saw an average opt-in rate of 80.3%. This substantial difference has been relatively consistent for years, during which time Android opt-ins were by default and users were required to navigate to OS settings to opt-out.

Similar to other permissions, such as location or microphone access, apps on Android 13 must now serve a system prompt to solicit notification permission. Without modification by the brand, this prompt will display when an app is first opened. This will be a challenge for brands because users won’t yet have an idea of the value of the app or its notifications. It’s akin to meeting someone for the first time and immediately asking them out on a date.

What Brands Need to Do Now
In response to Android’s shift from its default opt-out experience to an opt-in model, brands should follow the 6 best practices below to protect and grow the value of their Android app audience.

1. App publishers should immediately implement Airship’s latest SDK 

Given the substantial hit brands are taking with the default opt-out, it’s all the more important that they implement the Airship SDK to maximize engagement with customers.

Once someone has downloaded your app, there are many experiences vital to sustaining their engagement and growing app loyalty. The Airship App Experience Platform (AXP) goes far beyond message-centric approaches, enabling product, digital and marketing teams to create, adapt and publish no-code native app experiences on their own — without ongoing developer support or app updates. New innovations give business users full control to rapidly onboard app audiences, build first-party and zero-party data collection, and accelerate monetization goals.

2. Modify the timing of Android’s system permission prompt

Android 13 gives apps total control of when and where the opt-in system dialog can be displayed, which means that brands can decide when and where they want to trigger it. However, once a user selects “Don’t Allow,” that prompt cannot be triggered again. Apps that are targeted to earlier versions of Android will also need to manage this prompt once users’ devices are on Android 12 or 13. Therefore, it’s vital for brands to think carefully about when and where to ask users for their permission to send notifications.

Users should have an opportunity to familiarize themselves with your app first so they can understand the value that notifications could bring them. You also don’t want to dissuade your users by sending a lot of notifications too quickly. 

Users opted in to notifications prior to Android 13 will have notification permissions pre-granted upon updating to Android 13. Similarly, users tapping “Don’t Allow” on a notification opt-in prompt from apps that are not yet targeting Android 13 will be opted out and can’t be served the system prompt again until the app is updated to target Android 13.

3. Create an onboarding tutorial flow and make Android’s system dialog subservient to it

A thoughtfully curated onboarding flow is a great way to showcase your app to users, while also demonstrating the value of notifications and encouraging users to opt in. AXP Scenes allows you to create a rich and interactive multi-screen onboarding experience, including the ability to request user permission for notifications. Ideally, you should serve the Android system prompt only to users clicking “Yes” within the onboarding flow, making most of the one time you are able to serve it. You can measure, assess and continually adapt AXP Scenes, all without developer support or app updates.

4. Give users granular choices for the types of notifications they will receive

In your onboarding flow, reinforce for users the fact that they will have total control over the types of messages they receive. Describe the various types of potential notifications so they can decide which ones they would value the most. 

AXP Preference Center, a critical component of the Airship App Experience Platform (AXP), can allow your non-technical teams to continually modify the types of choices offered to users to encourage more relevant communications and allow for opting down rather than the full opt-out. We surveyed 9,000 global consumers and found that the top reasons people opt out of notifications are that they are too frequent or the messages were not personally relevant. Furthermore, users are more likely to remain opted in if they have control over the reason, frequency and channels.

5. Continually look for the right moment to request opt-in within the user’s context

Given the out-sized impact notifications have on app user engagement and retention, brands may be tempted to ask new users to opt in right away. A better approach is to ensure that they understand the value of opting in before you make the ask.

For instance, a media company might serve a tailored opt-in request after users have read 3-4 articles on a specific topic, while a retail brand might decide to serve the opt-in request after a user has added items to their wish list or viewed a couple of products within a category. With AXP Scenes, you can create an opt-in explainer with options “Yes,” “No” or “Maybe Later.” This will give you the opportunity to follow up with the “Maybe Later” group at a later time and serve the one-time system prompt to those who say “Yes.”

6. Use all the tools in your arsenal and don’t give up

Getting users to opt in to notifications from your brand is a challenging task, but remember that you can send highly targeted in-app messages and in-app inbox messages to users without requiring opt-ins. It’s the perfect opportunity to remind them of the value of opting into notifications that can reach them proactively outside the app experience, particularly when it’s things like delivery notifications, airline gate changes, subscriptions set to auto renew or a whole host of items the user would want to know right away. Even if they’ve previously selected “Don’t Allow” from Android’s system prompt, you can deep-link them directly to OS settings to enable the opt-in.

Airship supports Android 13 on Day 1 via our updated Android SDK 16.6.0. Now is a good time to get it, not only due to Android’s permission changes, but for the no-code native experiences we now power, that enable app teams to be much more agile and successful.

Contact us to learn how you can create the best onboarding experience for your users. Remember, serving the standard system prompt to “opt-in” your users to notifications is significantly easier for them than being deep-linked to settings later. First impressions matter, so make them count!

The post Brands on Notice with Android 13 Default Opt-out appeared first on Airship.

Here are a few handy guidelines for adding media to your messages with Airship, so you can be confident your audience will receive your messages quickly and as intended. 

The Basics

First things first, you should keep all of your images, videos and GIFs under 1MB. In fact, for most JPGs and PNG images you’ll want to go with even smaller file sizes of less than 200K.

While users can receive larger files (and Airship accepts larger uploads), those big files can take longer to download, increasing the chances your message renders without the media.

If you host your own media, make sure your media URLs use HTTPS and are accessible by your audience. You’ll also need to add those URLs to the allowlist in the Airship SDK. Our iOS and Android documentation provides more information on these important steps. 

And of course, always test for multiple device types so you can be extra certain that those beautiful, media rich messages have the desired effect. 

Push Notifications

Adding media to your push notifications is a great way to grab customers’ attention. Rightsizing those media will help ensure your image doesn’t get chopped or cropped. 

For Android/Amazon devices, using a 2:1 aspect ratio will prevent cropping and make certain that your image displays properly. 

For iOS, we recommend an aspect ratio of 1:1 or 1:2. If you use a 2:1 ratio on iOS, or 1:2 on Android, the image will zoom. 

Web Notifications

For web notifications, you can add either JPG or PNG images. We recommend keeping them under 200K. 

The ideal aspect ratio for web notifications is 2:1. But keep in mind that if you use a 1:2 aspect ratio, the image will zoom and crop accordingly.

Check out this blog post for more on how to create great web push notifications.

In-App Automation

When you’re taking advantage of our automation capabilities to deliver personalized messages to your app users, use images that are less than 200K and videos smaller than 1MB in size.

Email

Similar to other channels, it’s best to keep email images as small as possible, no larger than 200K, whether that’s a static JPG or PNG, or a static or animated GIF. 

It’s a good idea to use compression to decrease the size and balance quality. You should also consider making your images twice the size of the space you’d like to fill, so they look great on all screens.

With Airship, you can adjust the dimensions in the WYSIWYG editor or with <img> tags if using HTML. The width of the image will depend on the space you are trying to fill. For reference, the standard practice is to plan for 600px email width.

SMS

For SMS messages, you can use somewhat larger file sizes, but we still recommend limiting them to under 650K for optimal performance.

Message Center & Landing Pages

For Message Center messages, try to keep your file sizes under 200KB. However, it’s also important to consider that your total hosted content can’t exceed 1.5MB, including both your HTML and images. So, be sure to factor in other included images to ensure you don’t exceed the limit. 

Responsive design 

When using images for responsive HTML content such as landing pages, it’s essential to design for and test that content on multiple devices to confirm that your content looks perfect on a variety of screen sizes and orientations.

Double check that your images are wide enough to look good on a wide desktop screen, while also knowing how your content will appear on smaller screens, in landscape mode or while scrolling.

For images with text, your font should be large enough to read even when the images are resized down to smaller screen sizes.

For more information about how to rightsize your media, visit our media guidelines documentation. And remember, the best way to make sure your media looks amazing on all of your customers’ devices is to test on a real device. 

To learn more about how to use media to rev up your customer engagement, get in touch!

The post Media Guidelines for More Engaging Notifications appeared first on Airship.

Web push notifications deliver messages to opted-in users on their desktop and mobile browsers. Businesses with or without a mobile app can now engage web visitors with instant, high-value, notification-style messages to meet specific customer needs using Airship Web Notifications.

With use cases ranging from transactional messages (like confirming an order has shipped) to promotional messages (like highlighting the latest product or service offerings available), web push is a channel you’ll want to add to your marketing toolkit. (See more ideas and examples in our Web Notification Inspiration Guide.)

Ready to get started with Web Notifications? Get in touch and we’ll help you get your newest communication channel up and running.

In this post, we offer a tutorial for creating a web notification using our web notifications solution in our Message Composer. You’ll see how easy it can be to create and send web notifications that engage web visitors with relevant and timely messages.

Let’s get started.

Web Notifications: Six Steps to Sending Your Own

Step 1

To begin, create a new message in the Airship Message Composer. We recommend giving your message a name to make it easier to find later in Messages Overview. To do so, click the gear icon in the top navigation bar. 

To send a web notification, select “Web” as the channel. (Note: If you want to send a notification to multiple channels at once, such as Web, App, and Email, enable all your channels on this step). 

Define the audience for your web notification. If you want to send your web notification in multiple languages, you can enable Localization in this step. You can also enable “Generate retargeting segments”, which will automatically create segments that can be used to easily retarget users who did or did not interact with your web notification. 

Next, choose your message type. If you are sending your message to multiple channels, you’ll notice you have a separate tab for each channel, allowing you to customize the content of your message by channel. 

Step 2

Next, it’s time to write your message. Because maximum notification length varies by device, we recommend writing your text in a way that makes sense for all users, including those who will receive your notification on a desktop device.

Web notification character limits vary. If you’re sending to Chrome, we recommend keeping the character count to 180 for the best experience across desktop and mobile devices. Firefox and Opera will display up to 30 characters.

Remember, you can include handlebars in your message to personalize the content your user receives. You can also create your message using a stored template.

Step 3

Next, select where users will go when they tap or click on the notification. For web notifications, you have three options. You can:

1) Send users to the webpage you’ve designated as “Home” in your settings (usually your website home page), or

2) Send them to a different URL — a product page on your site, your Twitter or Facebook page, a form page — any URL will work. To do that, select the “Web Page” action and enter the URL.

3) Send them to an adaptive link to open a Mobile Wallet pass (for mobile web users).  

Step 4

Now it’s time to configure the optional components of your web notification! Here are your options:

Buttons: If you want to add some interactivity to your web notification, you can add up to two buttons. We provide some button pairs out of the box such as “Yes/No”, “Buy Now”, and “Follow”; or, you can create your own custom button(s) on the fly! 

Title: If you want to include a custom title with a web notification, you can add it here. (Otherwise, the title will be the default you set up — usually your company name.)

Media: Make your web notifications richer and engaging by adding a large image. Note: Image support varies by browser and OS. See documentation for details. 

Icon: If you’d prefer to use a custom icon instead of your default logo, you can add it here.

Step 5

The next step is choosing your delivery date and time. You can send your notification right away, schedule it to be sent later on a specific day and time, or set up a recurring message that repeats on a specific cadence (such as, once a week on Friday at 4pm). Our Message Composer also allows you to customize send times for different time zones.

You can also specify certain delivery options on this step as well, such as campaign categories for reporting, ignoring any channel message limits that may be set, requiring interaction on your notification, and more. 

Step 6

The final step is to preview the notification on each channel  with our built-in preview window, review your selections , and send or schedule the notification! If you are sending your message to a subset of your audience, such as a specific segment or attribute, you can also generate the audience count for your message on this step. 

Engage More Customers with Web Notifications

Now you know how easy it is to compose a web notification, to add it to your engagement strategy on the web. You have the tools to deliver timely, relevant messages that surprise and delight your customers — and see higher engagement rates.

Ready to begin? Contact us to get started!

The post How to Create Web Push Notifications appeared first on Airship.

It’s All About Privacy

Given all the privacy changes happening in the mobile ecosystem right now, it was no surprise that privacy was a big theme for Google I/O this year. Google is making their stance on user privacy known with their tenets of Secure by Default, Private by Design, and You’re in Control. 

Two years ago, Google announced their auto delete feature which gives user’s control over the storage of their activity data, and last year they made this 18 month auto delete window the default for all accounts. On Tuesday, Sundar Pichai announced this auto deletion is now active for over 2 billion accounts.

There were many privacy update announcements, including updates in Android designed to minimize the scope of data that Android apps can access and how this data is processed and protected. The new privacy dashboard allows users to see which apps used different sensitive permissions on their device, such as Location and Microphone, in the last 24 hours and why they used it. From this dashboard, users can manage their permission settings as well to ensure they are in control of what data is being accessed and why. These settings can be revoked for specific apps and all apps at once, including Google apps.

Google Partners with Shopify 

Google’s new partnership with Shopify will allow merchants to showcase their products across Google’s Search, Maps, Images, Lens and Youtube. Online retailers can sign up easily to have their products appear across Google’s 1 billion “shopping journeys.” 

Google also made quotes updates to their shopping experience, including a summary view of all your abandoned shopping carts as well as options to opt in to promotions and price drop notifications. Loyalty got a “coming soon” feature that will let users link their Google account to loyalty programs. 

Work-From-Home Inspired Google Workplace Improvements

After over a year of working from home for many of us, Google is making some welcomed updates to Google Workspace. Smart Canvas is a new experience in Google Workspace that encourages users to collaborate and do better work together. Highlights include a brainstorming component, the ability to present directly from a google doc, sheet, or slide; customized views to arrange people on a video call, as well as inclusive language recommendations to encourage the use of gender neutral language such as  “chairperson” instead of “chairman.” Good news if any of these features sound exciting to you, Workspace will be available to everyone, not just Google customers. 

Upcoming Android Version 12 Changes

There are many changes coming to Android in version 12 that we can’t wait to try out. The most noticeable of them all is Material You, the new design language for apps on Android. This update, a shift from Google’s Material Design approach, is all about giving user’s control over how their device looks with the ability to change the color palette for their apps. For the first time, users will be able to personalize how their device appears, and the best part is, they can do so across their devices from their phone to their watch to the TV. 

Users can also expect new widgets, a clock that gets larger when there are no notifications, dynamic lighting, and a simpler settings menu. Google is also bridging the gap between mobile devices and smart TVs (and recognizing that we all lose the remote at least sometimes) by bringing remote control settings directly into the phone. This is part of their larger goal around ensuring all of your devices running Android work better together, with your mobile phone at the hub. 

The Latest AI Updates

It would be remiss not to touch on some of the big AI capabilities that were showcased during the keynote. There was a clear focus on language processing and understanding through AI, which Google highlighted with their LaMDA model. LaMDA is an experiential language model for dialogue applications and it is designed to be able to have a conversation on any topic. In the demo, we could see the way in which the model allows these applications to respond to and carry on a more open ended dialogue with the user, setting it apart from other chatbot experiences many of us have had. Ultimately, LaMDA seeks to improve the overall abilities of Google’s assistance technology while also improving the conversational nature that users can expect. 

Google announced another natural language processing model, Multitask Unified Model, or MUM for short. This model will aid in the search process, allowing users to receive responses to more complex, conversational type queries such as the one asked by Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan during the demo “I’ve hiked Mt. Adams and now want to hike Mt. Fuji next fall, what should I do differently to prepare?”. Not only can the model understand text, but it can also understand images and videos (think showing a picture of your hiking boots and asking if these are acceptable for your next hike) and it can process information in other languages and respond back to the user in their native language. 

And Everything Else

There were many more updates announced yesterday at I/O, ranging from improvements in Google Maps with the addition of crosswalks and sidewalks; new additions to Google Photos such as Little Patterns (an ML derived feature that identifies and resurfaces smaller moments within your photos) and ways to make looking back on photo memories more inclusive, allowing users to hide photos of certain things or people from their photo memories.

Included in those updates was wearOS with its biggest update ever with a new unified platform between Google and Samsung and some love from Fitbit, a new addition to the Google family. The Google / Samsung partnership is focused on 3 areas: battery life, performance, and making it easier for developers to build apps for wearOS.

The experience may have been a bit different this year but there was no shortage of new features and capabilities to keep us engaged and excited for what’s to come. To learn more about all the changes Google is bringing us throughout the rest of this year, check out the keynote. 

LEt’s Connect

We can help you put together a winning messaging strategy

Contact us today!

The post Privacy Updates, Shopify Partnership, AI Improvements & More: Google I/O 2021 Highlights appeared first on Airship.

With Airship’s recent advancements of event and attribute segmentation, there are now many options for when and how to target your customers. That’s why we’ve put together some helpful tips on when to use events, attributes or tags in your audience segmentation.

Segmenting by Tags

Tags are simple user characteristics that are intended to capture a user’s current status and can be grouped by common themes using tag groups. This data type relies on true / false logic to query users based on whether or not a user has a particular characteristic, interest, or preference such as users who do or don’t like sports, or who do or don’t want to receive promotional messages.

Attribute Segmentation

Attributes are, essentially, a more advanced version of a tag. They are key value pairs that are stored as specific data types, such as text or dates. They can be used for more complex segmentation queries due to the additional operators available, such as greater than, less than, contains, and more and they can also be used to personalize message content. 

One great way to increase engagement is to segment your messages based on stored customer attributes, such as their demographics, loyalty level, or for more in-depth user preferences such as a favorite food or musician. For example, a restaurant may want to send different kinds of promotions to customers who are loyalty members versus those that are not to try and drive that first purchase. 

Another great thing about attributes is that they support different data types, so you can store things like the user’s birthday, their anniversary, or even their subscription sign up date and build segments based on this information, such as targeting a user who has a birthday coming within the next 30 days, or users who signed up for your product within the last two months. 

And, of course,  we make it easy for marketing teams to set attributes on their users directly from our UI, no development work required. 

Event Segmentation

Event segmentation is a powerful tool that allows you to segment your messages based on behavioral events or actions that your users complete, whether it’s directly within your app, website or in an other 3rd party system. You can use custom events to track any number of events, either using one of the Airship SDKs or by sending events to us through our custom events API. 

For example, a retail company might send different push notifications about a sale to customers who have purchased from the app in the past versus those that have not. Event properties help you take your segmentation to the next level by allowing for even more granular targeting. If the upcoming sale is for a certain product or range of products, the retailer could fine tune their segmentation even more by targeting users who have purchased that specific product or a similar one in the past. 

You can even segment based on user location events. With Airship location partners like Radar, not only can you trigger automated push notifications every time a mobile app user enters a specific location, you can also create a segment based on those historical events. This makes it possible to accomplish use cases like sending a message to users who visited one of your stores in the past 30 days, for example. 

However you segment your audience, Airship makes it easy to create robust segments in our redesigned segment builder, allowing you to combine attributes, tags, events and more into a single segment to allow for more in-depth targeting when you need it.  Learn more about how to take advantage of Airship Segmentation and make it easy to more accurately segment and target customers via rich user-level data to increase message relevancy and engagement.

Let’s Connect

We can help you send the right messages to the right audience.

Contact us today!

The post Creating Relevant Customer Experiences with Attributes, Events and Tags appeared first on Airship.

As we mentioned in our WWDC recap blog post, we’re particularly excited about App Clips this year. Here’s what you need to know about this new feature and how you can use it for your iOS marketing strategy. 

What Are App Clips?

Think of App Clips as a miniature version of your app. They are designed to offer users a subset of functionality to your app, allowing them to open the clip quickly and perform important tasks in the moment. They are meant to be fast, lightweight and easy to use for all sorts of transactions, such as making a reservation or renting a scooter. App Clips are a great way to get users familiar with your app without requiring them to download a full app. 

Sending Messages with App Clips

You might be wondering how you can start sending messages to users who download your App Clip. What if a user books a table and you want to send them a confirmation message? Or, perhaps a user orders take out and you want to let them know their order is ready? Airship has you covered. 

The most exciting part about App Clips is that they support push notifications with a new ephemeral notification permission setting. We’re happy to share that starting today, Airship customers can send notifications to App Clip users directly from the Airship platform. Remember, when a user adds your App Clip to their device, you now have automatic permission to send them notifications for 8 hours. 

How Does It Work? 

Depending on your business, you may have one instance of your App Clip or multiple instances. Take a restaurant reservation booking platform as an example. If this was your brand, you would likely offer an App Clip for each different restaurant that a user can reserve a table for, and thus users may have multiple instances of an App Clip on their device.

When it comes time to send notifications to a user, you want to make sure you are sending your notifications to the correct instance of your App Clip. In addition to updating our SDK to support App Clips, we have also added support to our API, giving customers the ability to send notifications to a specific instance of an app clip using the target content ID field. 

At this time, Apple limits notifications for App Clips to transactional use cases. Customers can utilize our Push API to send one-off transactional notifications to specific users, or set up an automated campaign that will trigger a notification to a particular app clip when a specific event occurs, such as a user placing an order. 

We’re really excited about the possibilities App Clips unlocks and how our customers will start using this new feature. To get started today, check out our documentation.

Our product team is always looking to hear direct customer feedback, so if you start to use App Clips and want to share feedback or discuss your use cases with our team, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line or reach out to your Account Manager. 

The post What You Need to Know About iOS 14 and App Clips from Apple’s September Event appeared first on Airship.

This year we’re getting a new App Library, a more compact design for Siri, a new Apple silicon for Mac, updated widgets, big updates to Swift packages for developers and much more. Let’s dive a bit deeper into some of the updates that we’re preparing at Airship. 

Mini-Apps That Can Deliver Notifications? Sign Us Up!

Here at Airship we’re particularly excited about the potential behind App Clips, a new feature from Apple that will give developers the opportunity to introduce users to their apps without requiring a full app download. Even more exciting? App Clips will support notifications. 

App Clips are essentially a subset of an app, designed to be fast and lightweight so users can open them up quickly and in the moment to meet a particular need. They are meant to be easy to discover and provide a subset of app functionality to a user. Some of the uses that Apple highlighted include being able to order take-out from a restaurant or start renting a scooter. 

App Clips support push notifications with a new ephemeral notification permission setting. When a user adds your App Clip to their device, you now have permission to send them notifications for 8 hours. This is a prime opportunity to get them hooked on your app, whether through sending informational notifications about your app, educating them about a new product or incentivizing them to download your full app with a 10% off coupon. As a bonus, you can also ask your users for their permission to continue sending them notifications for a week. 

At Airship, our mobile team is busy at work digging into all the possibilities App Clips open up. We’re excited to share more about our plans for this new feature in the future. 

Apple Users Get More Location Control Over Their Apps

Last year, Apple introduced a change to its location sharing with the addition of the “Allow only once” option. This year, they’ve added another new location permission to give users more control over sharing sensitive information with apps. With this new setting, users can choose to only grant an app their approximate location, rather than their exact location. 

This will be particularly useful for hyper-local app experiences, including breaking news and weather alerts, where an approximate location is sufficient to deliver your users a meaningful experience within your app. Privacy-conscious users will appreciate the fact that they no longer have to grant their exact location with an app to benefit from its utility. 

Apple Offers a More Transparent Privacy Policy

Privacy is at the forefront for many of us these days when it comes to our behavior and interactions online. With iOS 14, Apple is introducing transparency for users regarding when apps can access what data, across both apps and websites.

Starting this fall, when developers submit to the App Store for review, they will have to fill out a questionnaire answering questions about data use. Users can, in turn, see how your app is going to use their data directly on your app store page prior to downloading. This will inform the user as to how much sensitive data you link to them, such as financial information, location, contacts, and browsing history, and whether or not that data is used to track them across apps and websites owned by other companies. 

macOS Notifications Get a Refresh  

To quote Craig Federighi, the newest version of macOS is powerful and beautiful, just like its namesake Big Sur. MacOS 11 brings some big changes to the computing experience, including a redesigned menu bar, new app icons, the addition of the control center, major updates to Safari like redesigned tabs and a customizable launch page, as well as a much needed update to the notification center. 

The new notification center UX is a single view that brings all of your Mac notifications and widgets together in one place. For those of us receiving countless notifications from our most commonly used Mac apps throughout the day, the new notification grouping feature will be a welcome change, creating a more simplistic, easier to navigate interface. In addition, the new notification center allows you to expand your notifications, or clear them all out, just like on your iPhone or iPad. 

We’re really excited about all these changes coming to the Apple ecosystem later this year. Whether you’re a product owner looking to make your apps more accessible and discoverable, a developer seeking to help your users feel more safe and secure, or a marketer aiming to provide them with a consistent notification experience across devices, we think there’s something for everyone. 

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The post What Marketers Need to Know from Apple’s WWDC20 appeared first on Airship.

To get started, simply fill out this form by May 31, 2020 and we’ll be in touch with all the details you need to get up and running. 

We’re also offering a series of live “Office Hours” sessions to answer any questions you might have about implementing or leveraging web notifications in your strategy. Once you sign up for the free web notifications offer you’ll get details on how to join those sessions. 

Web notifications do something no other communications channel can: reach your customers with a direct message on their desktop or android mobile device while they’re online — whether they’re actively using your site or not. Web notifications are also simple to implement, and easy to integrate into your overall customer engagement strategy. 

Not sure whether web notifications make sense for your brand? Here are some handy links to help you understand the opportunity, and get inspired by the possibilities web notifications hold. 

• Get ideas and inspiration for the types of web notifications you could be sending in our Web Notifications Inspiration Guide. 
• Learn how web notifications helped  ASDA’s George.com boost traffic and grow transaction value by 7.2% and helped public media network OPB boost audience retention. 
• New to web notifications? Here’s a cheat sheet to get you up to speed. 

We truly hope that this offer will help brands strengthen their connections with customers, especially during the pandemic when timely, direct cross-channel customer communications are more important than ever. 

Questions? Get in touch anytime. 

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The post Get Web Notifications Free for 90 Days appeared first on Airship.

Web Notifications are a critical piece in a marketer’s tool belt. They allow brands to reach their audience in real-time, whether they are on your website or anywhere else on the web. Oftentimes, a brand’s website audience is its largest, surpassing users opted-in to emails and/or users who have downloaded an app. 

With this power comes great responsibility. Until recently, brands had free reign over how and when they displayed web notification prompts to their website visitors. This often resulted in a user receiving a prompt to opt in for notifications as soon as they landed on a website and before they had taken any action to demonstrate their interest in opting into this channel. Chrome & Firefox are looking to improve this experience, and Airship is here to help you prepare for these changes. 

Here’s What Changed for Firefox

With the latest release of Firefox (v72), website visitors will notice some changes to the way they are asked to give permission to notifications. If a visitor lands on a webpage that prompts for notifications as soon as the user arrives, they will no longer see the browser prompt appear below the address bar. Instead, they will now see a small speech bubble within the address bar that will quickly shake, signaling that there is a prompt requesting their permission to send notifications.

Visitors have a choice to ignore this or click on the speech bubble to reveal the browser prompt asking them if they want to “Allow Notifications,” or “Never Allow” for that website. For websites that don’t prompt users right away, if a visitor takes action on the website, they are eligible to be shown the notification prompt (pending their browser settings). Safari released a similar update in 2019 requiring a user gesture on a website before a notification permission prompt could be displayed.

Here’s What Changed for Chrome

Chrome has made similar changes with its latest update (v80). There are a few different ways a website visitor will be enrolled in the new quieter notification permission UI, and it will vary a bit depending on the visitor and their individual behavior. 

First, any Chrome user can enable the quiet notification UI manually in their browser settings. Second, If the visitor is someone who typically blocks web notification prompts from the browser, Chrome will automatically enable this new setting and will stop displaying these prompts in a prominent way. Instead, they will see a bell icon in the notification bar along with a message saying “Notifications blocked.” If a user clicks on this icon, they will be given instructions on how to enable them if they so choose. 

Lastly, Chrome will also enable this setting automatically on websites with low opt-in rates, meaning if visitors often block notification permissions on a website, fewer visitors will be shown the request in the future. This is something that Chrome plans to enable gradually as they gather feedback from users and developers. Visitors will also have the option to opt-out of this quiet notification permission setting entirely, allowing any website to prompt them for notifications at any time. 

Here’s What You Can Do

Now, more than ever, you need to ensure you are conveying the value of your website and associated messaging to your visitors before asking them to opt into notifications. It is crucial that your visitors know what to expect from your notifications before asking them to grant permission.

With the Airship platform, we recommend always including a “soft-prompt” prior to asking a user to opt into notifications, as well as giving careful consideration to the point at which you ask a visitor to opt in. Rather than sending a prompt immediately, consider waiting until they’ve taken an action such as reading two articles, or adding something to their cart. 

To make this easier to accomplish, we’ve released an update to our Web SDK. Our SDK now includes an option for a custom opt-in prompt that can be displayed to visitors to give them context before asking them to grant permission for web notifications. This feature includes the ability to customize the messaging on the prompt itself, the position of the prompt on your website (eg top right hand corner), as well as settings to control when the prompt itself appears and when to re-display it in the event of a user dismissing the prompt. If web notifications are one of your core messaging channels, it’s crucial that you adapt to this new world and improve the opt-in experience for your users.

For more best practices, check out this article from Digital Commerce 360 that has seven best practices you should be doing for your web notification strategy.

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The post Web Notification Best Practices to Get the Opt-In for Chrome and Firefox appeared first on Airship.