The Right Way to Use Push Notifications for Maximum Growth on Shopify - With Arvind Subramanian, Head of Partnerships @ Pushowl

Jay Myers: Arvind, can you tell me a little bit about who you are and what is your role at PushOwl?

Arvind Subramanian: Ajay, thank you for having me over here. So I'm Arvind. I lead tech and revenue partnerships here at PushOwl and Brevo.

Jay Myers: And okay. So let, well, what is PushOwl? Do you, do you call it Brevo now? Oh, or do you still refer to it as PushOwl?

Arvind Subramanian: We still call ourselves PushOwl. So let me let me go with a monologue about how PushOwl started, where we are at the journey and what we do over there. I think if we dial back probably in 2017, right, the founder, Shashank, who's a good friend of yours He was dabbling on a bunch of side projects and push notification.

He was building an app on the weekend. So that kind of caught some attention of you Shopify merchants and he listed it as an app on the app store. And when he noticed the revenue he was making on a side hustle, overtook the full time job he had in Microsoft. That's when he switched the gears and took push hour full time.

So ever since then, PushOwl is focused on helping brands drive revenue through push notification. So the journey fast forwarded from 2017 to 2022, they're onboarded close to 30, 000 merchants with zero sales and zero marketing people. It was all product led growth. We did that, we scaled it. In early 2022 we were at a pivotal point trying to figure out what's the next game that you wanted to play with push notification.

Of course, push notification falls under the bigger umbrella of marketing automation or retention marketing. So the strategic move is to venture into a suite of products, either build your own email, SMS, WhatsApp, so on and so forth. But there was a quick inflection point. We're thinking that, Hey. There are established incumbents in the space who have been building products under the retention marketing space, of course, with a lot of capital and a lot of experience because they are headroom at it.

So we were thinking how we should go and how we should navigate that either go to a VC because Up until then, PushOwll was a bootstrap company, just 10 employees, two dogs, running a 4 million ship with zero marketing, zero sales. So that's when the parent company, Brevo, they came up to us with a strategic offer.

They were like, Hey, we've been building everything else except push notifications for the last 15 years. We have an infrastructure. We just, the missing piece of a puzzle is push. Of course, you want to complete your puzzle with the other products. Push Why don't we merge our products together? We take push from yours, plug into our ecosystem, and we focus on every vertical outside of e commerce, outside of Shopify.

While you, on the other hand, take a tried and established 200 million product, plug into your product suite, focus and double down, go to market, penetrate further into Shopify. Now that gives us a direct edge. We're getting a headstart or probably we are put up in the same place as the incumbents, right?

If you take a 20 million product. Try not by half a million retail stores. Big names like your Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Tissot, eBay just take it out, plug it into your system, go to market. So that did sound interesting. I think the cusp of it is when I joined Pushout. So I was building the product, the Web Push Notifications product.

That's when I joined So my job was to integrate both the company's products together and make it work. So, yeah it took a year for us to test the water. It is not as easy and rosy as it sounds. So the first year was all about testing it, making it aligning teams, so on and so forth. The acquisition went through in 2022, 2023 was all about stabilizing.

Internally, the product connecting all the dots. And right now, Pushout is still an independent company. We have an independent PNL. We have an independent CEO where we are sent Bravo in the Shopify e commerce space. While Bravo focuses on customers outside, which is why in the App store you see only one app push all by Bravo.

Everything is consolidated in a single app. Not sure if my monologue has this, but yeah, that's a little bit of

Jay Myers: No, that's good. That's super helpful context. And I think let's maybe just go a little bit, step back just for any listeners who maybe are unfamiliar. I think most people probably know, well, I, you know, I actually thought, and I spoke to you the other day and you, I had an idea of what a push notification was.

And then you actually mentioned that actually, no, that's much more. So what is a push notification

Arvind Subramanian: If I have to give you the textbook definition of it, right, I'm gonna say that it's a short message that shows up right on your screen. Not on a separate email inbox, not on an SMS queue, but right on your screen. I mean, before that's the textbook definition, but before I delve deeper and probably explain a lay person's term, I want to ask you something, Jeb.

Jeb, what do you think is the most expensive currency in today's day and age?

Jay Myers: attention?

Arvind Subramanian: Perfect. Spot on. Spot on.

Jay Myers: Is that right? Is that it?

Arvind Subramanian: Yeah. Spot on. Right. Everybody is vying for attention. Right. We all do uploads. We all do content. The reason is that we want the views and we live in a world of instant gratification, right? I mean, there's a reason why four seconds videos are getting more traction than a full length YouTube film or something.

Right. So, and how do you grab an attention? The easiest way is pings and dings. Right? I remember that right before we started recording you were like, Hey, ensure all the pings and dings are locked up, right? The reason is it's so easy to take the attention off with a pings and dings and personal helps brands do that.

It helps you send your message right where your users are active at, not on an inbox, not on a separate queue, but right on their screen. So it's applicable both on mobile phones and on desktop. So yeah, that's. Oh

Jay Myers: so then this is it's when you're on someone's site in the browser, a push notification shows up or is it more than that?

Arvind Subramanian: yeah, I mean, everything works with consent, like how it should, so push notification also works with consent. Assuming you land on a site of your choice you get a small Permission prompt, or it says it has two action buttons which ask you to allow or dismiss. Right. So without collecting any personal information, all of us on an average, we visit somewhere between 10 to 50 sites on a normal working day.

Right. And randomly, if you just visit a website for the first time, you don't feel comfortable sharing your phone number or your email address in the first visit. Right. But you're curious. You're curious. Which is why you landed on the page. So you want to know the brand, but you don't want to like get too acquainted with him.

It's like going on a date, right? You don't meet your crush to ask for their phone number on the first time. First time you meet them, right? You kind of build up conversation and then you ask for your phone number and your address or not. Push notification does exactly that. It helps brand bridge the gap between their first time visitors and about the brand without asking any personal information.

All it says, Hey, I'd like to send you a notification. You're interested or not. That's about it. And once you can send to it and then they receive notification. Yeah. Please go ahead.

Jay Myers: Yeah, a couple questions on that. Can you control all the text in that, like the Chrome notification that pops down or the Safari notification? Is that a default or can you control what's said in there?

Arvind Subramanian: So, you can't control that in a nutshell, if I would just say so, but you have layers on top of it because that permission prompt that has been generated by the browser itself, be it Chrome, Safari, Firefox, so on and so forth. But of course you can have a step before that. You can have a custom prompt which says that, hey, set the context before that.

You can have an overlay button which just points a finger over there and says that, hey, click on it to get 10 percent off of sorts. So you can have additional pop ups. as a staggered flow, but you can't control the actual prompt that comes in. So it works. It doesn't work in few cases, but what we have seen work across is that there's no cookie cutter answer especially in Europe.

What we see is setting a context works really well. In Europe, let's say a local visitor is coming up. You have a permission prompt before showing that permission prompt. You have a custom prompt in the native language that increases the propensity of someone to click the browser prompt are in, in all the English speaking countries.

We see that you don't need to set context. I think it's pretty straightforward. Directly, whatever the default prompt shows up, people convert. So there's no cookie cutter answer. But to answer your question no, so you can't change that default one, but however, you can set up context or you can layer other pop ups before the permission prompt.

Jay Myers: Yeah, I think setting up like when I think about everything I accept permission in an app, like when you install an app, you know, how the app always asks this app would like to track your activity across other apps. And I know that's just to be able for to deliver advertising, but sometimes I get a really good message from the app prior to accepting that it'll say, you know, this app would like to deliver a more relevant.

Messages and from our partners who often have relevant and help us deliver relevant offers by allowing this app to track activity or location services. Like, and if, if it's not for those prompts, I often just say no to everything. And then in my head, I think I'll turn these on when I feel like I need to, like when I bump up against a wall, like the location services, like I kind of turn them off by default because I don't see the value in it, but then I think.

When I actually need it, like, you know, an airline app, but then when I'm at the airport, I'll, I'll turn it on. But if I understand the context first, like this app would like to send you gate change notifications when you're allow us to know when you're at the airport by turning on location services.

So I think that I imagine. It's a similar thing for push notifications, right? Like if I, some, some websites I go to, I just see the thing pop up this app, allow this app to set, to push notifications. I usually say no, but sometimes there's a very compelling reason to turn them on. Do you find, what are some of the good reasons you see brands use to convince merchants to enable, or sorry, not merchants, shoppers to enable push notifications?

Arvind Subramanian: Interesting question, Jay. So if I may have to talk about push notification in the context of e commerce in general, right? I mean, brands end up collecting a lot of subscribers in general. Right. Be it my phone number, right? That happens by default to make the website visitors do all kinds of things.

Right. Spin the wheel, play the game, do the quiz. I mean, if you have a high intent user. It was landing on your website, the message, which says that, Hey, I would like to send you a notification that about our offers or about latest news, or when we drop a new product, would you like to receive a notification?

I think a crisp, simple message works for high intent audience. So what I would highly recommend brands do that. Someone who's already established where there's a strong recall for a brand. Don't focus on all the jazz and the cosmetics, right? Get to the point. Your users know who you are. They are there on your website for a reason.

I mean, it's a funnel, right? They don't start at your website. They probably the zero step is maybe the Instagram story. Or a meta ad or probably a blog or a content that you've put out over there, or their friend would have brought the product. They would be referred. So their journey does not start on the website.

It starts actually before the website. So, for established brands with strong recall value. Let's get to the point. Tell them why they subscribe in a crisp way that works. Don't make them do the jazz, which is actually a deterrent than a promoter. So that's for high intent users. But of course, when you have users who are first time visitors or window shopping for the first time, context matters a lot.

They don't know about your brand. And without knowing a brand, again I'm going back to the dating analogy, right? Without knowing who the person is, I'm not going to ask the person out on a date or I'm not going to get on a date, right? So context setting is very, very important. And the timing of it's very important.

You don't ask a person to allow a notification within three seconds of them touching on your website, right? Let them play around. Let them do the journey. Let them understand your brand. Time it properly. So that's why in push, we have really, we constantly keep improving our propensity for helping a brand improve the propensity for conversion.

So we focus a lot on targeting almost every second sprint of ours has a release, which helps brands increase the conversion because there's many channels to increase email subscribers, SMS subscribers. But push, it's an adjacent channel. So we focus a lot on driving conversion on that. So for brands, which doesn't have recall value, context setting helps a lot, but again, keep it, keep it to the point and time it, right?

Don't show it within three seconds, space it out. Keep like a key core action, which the user need to do like a milestone based stuff, right? Hey, I've clicked on the product page, I've viewed a particular collection, now ask for permission. Like an education is already done, now ask for context. Now ask for permission.

Right? The context is set up, now ask for it. Yeah. So that, that's how I would bucket notifications.

Jay Myers: So what are some of the things you can target? I haven't been inside the PushOwl UI for a little bit, so can you set triggers based off of time, page hit,

Arvind Subramanian: Absolutely.

Jay Myers: products, like what are all at the disposable of a merchant, like to the level of detail that they can control a push notification?

Arvind Subramanian: Well, that could be a podcast on its own, but if I have to crystallize and say,

Jay Myers: sounds like you can get as granular as you want.

Arvind Subramanian: absolutely. I think, I think at this point, brands are getting smarter, but in fact, users are getting smarter, right? Like personalization, right? Catch them. You need to give them that a moment of wow, right? A wow experience is when they're going to hit on a love.

They're not just going to randomly come and hit a love just because you're giving a 10 percent off. Right. So of course, targeting is a key. That's probably one way in which we drive up pricing also. If brands have a lot of subscribers, they will be able to send more push notifications and push out pricing is.

You pay only for what you use. So that's our pricing model. So we help brand increase their subscriber base. So targeting, if I may say so, you have the default one. You have the number of time. You have a device based targeting. There's separate settings for mobile versus tablet versus desktop. You have based on the scroll depth.

You have it on a particular web URL. Let's say the timing for a product page can be different from the timing for a collections page. Or for a landing page, assuming you have a landing page, getting users on that, that could have a separate stuff based on country. It's something that we have noticed a lot.

Brands who have different country websites, right? Let's say if a user is probably coming from Canada and purchasing something in US, have a separate landing page. Pop up or an opt in experience for them. Or if someone was coming from Mexico and probably buying in us, have a separate pop in experience.

So we can categorize by country. We can also categorize. That's something that's work in progress. Categorize based on if they are subscribed to other channels. Let's say if Jay has subscribed to the email channel of the same brand, I would like Jay to subscribe for push notification because each channel serves a different purpose.

You can do that targeting. Of course, these are just tip off the icebergs. But yeah, the answer to it is I mean, it's up to the creativity of the brand on how they can drill and experiment and drive the conversions.

Jay Myers: Makes sense. And then once someone is subscribed, where they're allowed, they, what do you call it? Subscribed to push notifications or innate, they've given the permission, yeah, subscribe. Now they, the, those push notifications, when is there, what, what are the limitations on how much, where, when you can push notifications to someone?

Mm hmm.

Arvind Subramanian: honestly, there's no limitations, but of course none of

Jay Myers: practices, of course, but you can you so does someone have to be on your website? Can you be on another website and push a browser notification?

Arvind Subramanian: Oh, yeah, it was, it does work.

Jay Myers: So as long as the browser is open,

Arvind Subramanian: even if the browser is closed, you do get it under your notification center panel. As long as you're connected to the internet, you can receive push notifications. Even on your phone, let's say you have your screen, phone screen locked, you can, you can still receive push notification.

Jay Myers: okay So outside the browser just a regular iPhone push notification.

Arvind Subramanian: IPhone has its own checks and balances before you send notification. Apple has Apple has put a lot of hoops that brands need to jump before reaching their user. But assuming, but in a long story short, yes, it is possible. Even if I have my phone screen locked I can get a ding or a ping and that can be a push notification.

outside of the browser as well. It can be on the notification panel, so on and so forth. But the prerequisite is you should be subscribed. You shouldn't have cleared all your cookies or you shouldn't have flushed out all your history. And step three is that you should be connected to an internet. So these are three prerequisites for receiving push notifications.

But having said that dialing back to your question, right? What are the best practices, right? As a rule of thumb, we say that a brand again, it changes from month to month, right? Now, as we're recording, I'm not sure when the podcast is going out, but let's say in a sale month, right? Like a BFC a month.

Or a Father's Day or Mother's Day sale. Users have a higher intent to receive push notifications because it's a sale month. They want to be updated about the latest offers. So increase your frequency over there. But on the off season, a good mix of, let's say, two notifications a week, two to three notifications a week.

It's a comfortable space. It's a crisp message, right? 45 characters in the title and over a hundred characters in your body. And there's a clear call to action upon clicking on it. You get redirected to a page. So it's to the point it's crisp and it kind of, the notification is clear. And we just swipe up and remove a notification.

So, on a non sale period two to three notifications per week, it's perfect, but during a sale period. You can go as up as high as, you know, sending a notification every single day. Yeah, that's what we usually recommend.

Jay Myers: And what are the what are you allowed to put in a push? Notification is it just text? Can you put images HTML what can be in it?

Arvind Subramanian: So the elements of notifications are pretty much if you, as you see your email, but just like break down the competence from an email is that like you have a subject line, you can have a title for notification. You can have about a body with about a hundred characters. You can add your images of your choice.

The images can be dynamic images also. Let's say you abandoned cart, right? The product that you abandoned, you get a dynamic image on your notification. That's possible. You can have your discount code embedded on the notification. Upon clicking on it, a user gets redirected to their cart, where the notification auto applies the discount code.

Okay. You can, you can have buttons to it. There are two action buttons that's possible on a push notification. If you're working on adding GIFs also to the push notification, that's something that's worked in progress. But yeah, if I have to come, if I have to comprise and say, these are the top competence of a push notification.

Jay Myers: Yep. That abandoned cart push notification is interesting. Does that, is that something that PushOwl does out of the box or is it integrated with abandoned cart tools? Or does that, can you do that with just PushOwl?

Arvind Subramanian: Oh yeah. You can do it just with push out. So push notification, like every marketing channel can be broken on into two categories. One it's one time campaign, which is very contextual for that particular period. Let's say. Like 21st of November, Amazon announces Black Friday, send a campaign, right?

That's something that's well particular for that particular period. So you send out campaigns. Automations are something which happens time and again. You see the behavioral pattern happening. So we have some automations, top use cases that seem to work pretty well is, of course, the number one on the list is abandoned card series.

The reason for abandoned card and why push notification is the best is because assuming a Black Friday is going to kick in and brands are going to be adding a lot of products to carts from multiple brands. And pretty much the common thumb of rule, all the marketers and all the you know, e commerce gurus, they say that have your abandoned cart set up, right?

But just imagine a brand's inbox during a peak sales season, it's going to be a bunch of emails. Brands would have the time to actually click on every single email and read, I don't think so. But push notification. It's a simple message. No jazz. Nothing shows up on my browser. Let's say I go to my favorite brand, add something to a card.

I see a TikTok reel or a YouTube. I flip the page and I jump out over there. I receive a notification on my screen. That is compelling enough for me to go back to my. Card and buy and checkout. So clearly abandoned card is a top notification, which is out of the box and inbuilt within push notification.

You don't need multiple apps for it to work. We are tightly integrated with Shopify. So Shopify is API gives us that information and we have built that. Next up is browsing abandonment. A lot of window shoppers come up, they browse and they bounce. So again, that's an inbuilt solution that works like a charm.

Next up is shipping notification. Hey, you've sent something. All I need to know, is it in transit? Has it been dispatched or not? Simple

Jay Myers: Mm hmm.

Arvind Subramanian: Another key stuff which works great during sales season is back in stock. Price drop, low in stock. So these are some, again, out of the box stuff where users can specifically subscribe for one particular product, which they like, which they want back in stock requests.

So these are some inbuilt templates that we have. Again, the use cases can go beyond this because push all is integrated Shopify flow. Again, it's just to the creative of the merchant. They can use all the Shopify data and use push notification as a communication layer, intelligent. All the data is there on Shopify.

Push all is just communication layer. You can do that by a Shopify flow, but these are a few stuff, which is already inbuilt. You just need to enable it, set and forget. That's how we say most of our customers

Jay Myers: I love it. I have two thoughts I wanted to run by you that are going through my head right now and tell me what you like, if you think these are good ideas or not. But if I'm a brand, again, I don't know exactly what the date of this will get out. But even if this is, even if this is after Black Friday, which, which is coming up very fast now any, any holiday event or any sale, there's New Year's Day sales, there's Valentine's sales, whatever. Do you see brands? Like, let's say this is three weeks before Black Friday, running some, a campaign where a pop up comes up or some notification saying get early, get first access to our biggest sales, subscribe to push notifications to essentially make sure you get notified as soon as something's on sale.

Don't miss out on our fast selling sales and things sell out. Do you, is, is that a good use or is that a good way to drive people to sign up? Do you see brands doing that?

Arvind Subramanian: Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, I have some data to actually back that up. We built that use case with Shopify's marketing automation team. Push all is one of the three apps. If you actually navigate onto your Shopify admin panel, go under marketing automation, and you click on a template, and PushOwll has a template within Shopify's marketing automation, which does exactly this.

Inform users when you drop a new product. That's a use case. There are about three apps were picked up. I think PushOwll was lucky enough to be picked up. And every month, close to thousand merchants try this out. Every single month, new merchants try this.

Jay Myers: That's amazing. Okay. So when you drop a new product and you said back in stock is also,

Arvind Subramanian: Back in stock is an inbuilt one. So users can subscribe for a particular product. Let's say that goes with runs out of stock. And once the product comes up, they receive a notification. So it's a behavioral based one. Yeah,

Jay Myers: got it. Okay. And then the second thing I was thinking was like, if I'm listening to this podcast right now, and I'm a merchant and I, I might think, okay, yeah, you know, push notifications sounds good. But I, I got a lot going on right now and I don't know if I can implement this, but like something I always tell brands, like as far as email collecting, you know, sometimes you'll hear people say, well, we're not really doing a ton with email right now, or we're not doing a lot with SMS.

So I'm not collecting emails, but then I always think, well, when the time comes, when you want to send emails, you're going to wish you had been collecting them for the last year. So even if you're not sending SMS campaigns. Start collecting now, because then in a year when you want to send them, then you want to have thousands of, of subscribers.

And so I right now, given that it, the holidays are coming up, it's probably the most traffic a lot of stores are going to have. Maybe it's just a good idea just to turn it on, like just to install it and have it running and saying, get notified when I don't know something gets subscribed to get notified when our biggest sales go live, at least.

You know, because one of the biggest things is that you get a ton of traffic over this time of year. And we know that only 20 percent of that traffic ever comes back to buy again. So at least getting them subscribed to things is like, just let it run through the holidays. Don't even do a push notification, but just start getting them enabled.

Like, is that a strategy? Like, I know it's, you would say, of course you want to do more, but like at bare minimum, at least do that. Right.

Arvind Subramanian: Absolutely. I think that's the type of, you know, when brands reach out to us, that's what we recommend. So we have a freemium plan. We say that, Hey, listen, We don't believe in selling. We believe in building a good product. Let the product do the selling. I think that's what been the ethos of a company. So what brands can do is that like, perfectly, like you mentioned, they spent a lot of money attracting new traffic and a small fraction of it's what's going to come back to it.

So I recommend brands that, Hey, a push notification is completely different channel. In fact, a fun fact, Jay, if I may say so the overlap. Okay. The overlap between push notification, subscribers. And an email or SMS subscriber, it's actually less than 10%. So

Jay Myers: different people are subscribing to different channels.

Arvind Subramanian: Exactly. Exactly. So intent is different across different channels.

You're not going to have the same person because there is an overlap, but that it's, it's minuscule. It's not significant yet. You have a huge chunk of audience, which don't overlap between. So if I may have to split, I'll say that known users versus unknown users, right? Push notifications, you know, they are subscribed to it, but you don't know the email address.

You don't know the phone number, but they do actively engage, which is like a top of the funnel and the middle of the funnel. Email or SMS. It's like your bottom of the funnel. You know, the user just go ahead and drive sales, right? So that's how I would face that. So coming back to the question during the sales season, brands are going to spend a lot of money in the top of the funnel.

They're going to be attracting this. All you need to do is just set the app, let the permission prompt, keep running in, which is for free. You don't need to pay anything. You don't need to pay a dime for collecting subscribers. You don't need to pay Collect as many subscribers as you want. You pay only for the notifications you send.

That's how we have structured our pricing. So we let

Jay Myers: Love it

Arvind Subramanian: we let the brands collect the subscribers. Then we probably do an automated nudge saying that, Hey, look at your audience, X percentage of people we've seen top brands, which has high intent, right? See, for post notifications to work, brands should attract a sizable amount of traffic.

Now the average conversion rate is somewhere between five to 15%. Five to 15. That's a wide range of conversion. Now, if a brand that's spending a lot of money in getting traffic or probably have a good brand recall are doing pretty well in social media, just tap on, get them as a subscribers, collect that base.

Once you have a base, it's as simple as 19 for you to send a notification, send a notification, see if it's actually helping you with the ROI. And as we mentioned about the abandoned card, that's what we usually recommend. And we be like, Hey. Campaigns, it's something, you know, push notification is something a little esoteric.

It takes a beat or two for brands to kind of understand and wrap their head around what is push notification because not enough education has been done on push notification yet. Most of our attentions has actually been grabbed by these notifications. So it's kind of ironic to see that people don't know push notifications, but they engage the most when they get the pings and dings, which is notification.

So going back to your question. That's a brilliant strategy. Collect your subscribers, have the pool ready so that when the push comes to the shelf, you have everything ready in your arsenal to just go and fire.

Jay Myers: Yeah, I love that you let merchants have customers subscribe without charging them. I think of like so many email providers, like MailChimp, just as an example, there are a lot, there are almost a lot like this is if you, if you have 10, 000 subscribers, you're paying just to have subscribers, whether you're emailing or not, you're just paying to have them on your list.

So someone can have push all installed, have. Thousands of people subscribe, but you're not paying unless you're actually pushing notifications.

Arvind Subramanian: same thing applies for email. Also, even when the parent company Breville, the advantage where we offer.

Jay Myers: that's right. You Bravo is the email. So do they have the same model for billing?

Arvind Subramanian: yep. Same model for emailing as well. So that differentiates Breville on the market, right? The

Jay Myers: Amazing.

Arvind Subramanian: why we're able to do that. I think the unit economics that helps us is that we have an in house infrastructure.

Most of the income dimension, they outsource their infrastructure, usually run by a third party that kind of takes care of the infrastructure and to manage the unit economics is why, I mean, you, you need to pay for the data, right? End of the day, a contact is a data, though, as tightly as it is, if it sits in your database, you're paying for a database cost.

Now, when you outsource this, you have to pay the third party, which is why the billing of most of these incumbents based on contacts. While Bravo or Push Notification, we own the infrastructure. We take care of the deliverability. You'd be like, Hey, collect, let's say, even if you collect a million contacts, you don't need to pay anything for it.

But if you're sending just about a hundred thousand emails, pay only for the emails that you're sending, not for the contacts you're collecting. So yeah, that's a differentiator.

Jay Myers: Awesome. Well, I love it. Can you share some, like, if someone says to you, Hey, what, what's one of your favorite stories of a, of a Shopify merchant that has used PushOwl in a really great way and seen success. What's like, what's a case study. That's one of your favorites or one that you refer to a lot.

Arvind Subramanian: Multiple, multiple, multiple case studies. But if I may have to think in the top of my head Okay. Again, we have some NDA with few brands to not they, they, they feel that personification is there you know, a tool in their kit. They don't want to let that secret out, but I'm just thinking of what ones can I say without me getting into a trouble.

Jay Myers: I can, I can rephrase it then. What are. What kind of results are some of the best brands seeing? So don't even worry about naming the brand, but like, are they seeing X boost in revenue in conversion? Are they seeing higher LTV or repeat purchases go up X percent? Or like, what are some of the results, some of the brands that are using it, the best scene.

Arvind Subramanian: Perfect. So one of our one of our favorite brands, I think most of us know if I dropped the name, but again, due to the NDA clause, I'm not dropping the name. It's a nine figure brand. So for them, it's been working pretty well. They've been using their email. They've been doing their SMS. Things have been doing business as usual.

It's been working pretty well for them. What they were actually missing out From the current set of audience, it was working pretty well. They were growing their business at probably 13% 15%, 20 percent month on month, but they were not able to get back or improve their returning users. They were not able to do that.

Of course, they have sent enough and more emails, have exhausted SMS. That's when push notifications came into play. That enough and more subscribers, they sent out messages and notifications. We actually crafted out a plan saying that, Hey, the user who last engaged with you in the last six months. Drop a notification to them, get them back, give them a separate offer or not.

Again, everybody's still going to be using their browser, right? Everybody's still going to be using device though. They might change their mobile number or they might change their inbox, but the odds of them changing an entire device is lesser. So we did that. We actually improved their return rate from the existing 13%.

We moved the envelope to all the way up to 33%.

Jay Myers: Wow.

Arvind Subramanian: Played that within a time frame of I think six months, I think we were able to do that. So that was a consistent stuff. That's one thing. Another, if I may quote, is that abandoned cart recovery. We noticed this during the Mother's Day and Father's Day sale this year and

Jay Myers: hmm.

Arvind Subramanian: Abandoned cart brands were actually able to save from the existing baseline of 93 percent to all the way up to 80%, right? They were actually able to drop that down to push notifications. Again, sending Crisp notification right on the screen. So ROIs have been through the roof, like every BFCM, right? We have our own data team.

We sit and we crunch the numbers. And literally when we're looking at the numbers, the ROIs were like 50 X, a hundred X. And the first thing that me and my team, we sat and we were like, Hey, there's something definitely wrong with the math that we're doing. Right. And my engineers, they come back and they're like, No, no, no.

The math is perfect. The math is fine. Right? So literally we actually did the reconciliation, the old school way of adding numbers one by one. The numbers were there. And the fun part of Push out attribution is that the merchants get to control the attribution. So we don't be like, Hey, we have a complex attribution model where we come and say that, Hey, we improve this for you.

Actually. No, we give the control to the merchants and they be like, Hey you get to control what type of attribution you want. Is it click based or is it impressions based? So it's totally at the disposal of the merchant to figure out how they want to structure the attribution. So the number that we are showing or the number that we are claiming, it's not something that we throw up and open in the air.

It's actually quite transparent. It's upon the settings done by the merchant, we actually track and show those numbers.

Jay Myers: Fascinating. That's amazing. I guess flipping it to the other side there's always a lot of brands doing a lot of amazing things. What are some of the biggest like mistakes and things that you see brands doing wrong with push notifications? Cause I think it's probably just like anything. Like we see emails sent horribly wrong.

We see SMS used horribly wrong. The tool is. Sometimes only as good as the person using it. And so what are some big mistakes people make with push notifications to avoid?

Arvind Subramanian: Oh I think the basic fundamental mistake is that we have these template or default automations that we have set up with something that we use. Brands tend to miss out on personalizing those automations. They just take up those default copies and they just activate it. They just let it flow. So we have to nudge them and be like, Hey, I mean, we do know that our default copies work well, but go ahead, start fine tuning it, start personalizing it, you'll see better conversions on that.

So that's a I'd say a low hanging fruit, what they can walk and that's something they can fix. Second mistake is not clubbing push notifications with their marketing stack, right? That's something which like I know open rate is a vanity metric. People don't want that. People want click through rate.

Why will I go and click on a particular email? The subject lines, right? Subject lines is how they can actually use push notifications for it. Right. I can try out different subject lines or my title of my push notification. So

Jay Myers: hmm.

Arvind Subramanian: you can try and mix all the channels together. It just needs to fit in. I don't need to think of a separate strategy for push as a channel, right?

Which is what we do. Unified experience of push and Bravo products, which are push notification, email and SMS. We actually draft out. a unified strategy. Hey, club, all of them together, all of them, though they have a different intent, but the copy of the creative that you're doing can actually work across channels.

So that's something that we see brands missing out, spending a lot of time on each and every channel, hiring a different point of contact for each and different channel. I mean, it's just about optimization. If you just use it, correct. You can just mix push notification with the existing marketing stack.

That's the second one. Third, not sending push notification after you've collected subscribers. Hey, you're sitting on a gold mine. You've collected subscribers. Go ahead, test the waters, understand what's happening, right? So just because the user interface is relatively different from what they're used to, right?

We use a lot of SMS, all of us text. All of us use email. That's something that's ingrained onto us much before we start a word. But push notification, it's a new behavioral, right? So, there's a small behavioral bias we see in people from using push notification, but once they get used to it, They just keep going on.

It's like you walk into an ice cream parlor, right? It's one of those flavors that you're not used to. You go to your basic, you go to chocolate, butterscotch, strawberry, vanilla, you go to your basic, but you don't know. You just probably go into, you'd be like Hey, Oreos and cookies. Right. I don't know though.

It just gives you a taster of it and you'd be like, Hey, now that's my favorite I need to go do. Right. So that's something you notice when it comes to push notifications. You'd be like, Hey, there is a bias or there's an entry barrier. drop that entry barrier, send a push notification. Once it works, take it from there.

So that's a third mistake that we see. Last one is not having a clear strategy for push notification. I mean, campaigns are not a spray and pray. segment your users, right? Again, this is a thumb rule across all marketing channels. We have the same thing. Every push notification has purpose, has a unique purpose because when you click on a notification, it's going to do an action.

It's either going to redirect you to a sale page or a cart page or checkout page. You want a discount to be auto applied. It's not like an email where you just read it out and you go, there's a clear call to action, like a notification, right? Let's say if Jay gets one notification from Instagram, he clicks on it, he gets redirected to Instagram.

So the purpose of push notification needs to be clearly defined. It's not just for education. It's like, Hey, here is something. It's just a crisp and a timely message. Click on it and the user be redirected onto something. So that's which we miss. We see a lot of brands confusing between educating, which is what your email does versus nudging people to take action, which is what push notification does clearly craft out your strategy on what push notifications need to do for it.

So yeah, these are some common mistakes we see brands make.

Jay Myers: Yeah, super interesting on using it after they subscribe. Cause I think with email, a big mistake is not emailing for long periods of time. Like if you, you know, you're collecting emails and yes, fair enough. If you don't have a campaign, it's still good to collect them because eventually you will want to use them.

But then as you start emailing, what what's not an effective strategy is sending a big blast to everyone and then not emailing for three months and then sending another big blast. They have to get used to a cadence.

Arvind Subramanian: Absolutely.

Jay Myers: Versus, versus just getting like spray and pray like big one here, big one there. And so is, is it similar with push notifications?

Do you see more unsubscribes when it's just a random campaigns versus a little bit more consistency?

Arvind Subramanian: If I have to break down the answer to your question in two parts, one biggest advantage of push notification is It's a no filter channel. It's an unregulated channel. Now, what do I mean by that is I mean, given 2024, a lot of red tape has been slapped on us, even providers, right? Even in Bravo, we face that brands can't just go purchase a list, plug it into a system and blast.

They're going to get suspended, but push notifications. On the other hand, you collect your subscribers through the push notification service provider, right? Once you've collected subscribers, you can actually go and blast push notifications. You're not going to face spam rate or landing in on promotional tab or, you know, unsubscribing to it, right?

The odds of it is much lesser. So brands fail to take advantage of it. If you have a huge cyber base, let's say a hundred thousand users, go ahead, send a notification. You don't need to worry about it landing on a spam or promotion or getting unsubscribed because it's already there. It will get delivered and you pay only for what gets delivered, right?

You don't get paid for anything else. So that's one big advantage of ramping up. But it's a double edged sword, of course, you know, with the, as Spider Man quotes, right? With more power, more responsibility. So if I yeah, you do want to send push notification, but you don't want to send. Which has no purpose to it.

Keep it timely. This should be a purpose. This should be an intent. There should be a message behind the notification. I don't want to say that, Hey Jay, what's up? Right. I don't want to drop a notification. I'd be like, what the hell, what did I subscribe for from this brand? Right. Swipe left. I'd be like, Hey, here's a 10 percent off.

I mean, 10 percent off for what? Is it a new product? Is it a new release for a sale? So the other edge of the SWOT is, While you do have access to unregulated channel of blasting all to your subscribers, but if you do it without intent, you're falling on your own sword.

Jay Myers: So I hadn't thought about this, but then that's such a good point. It's an unfiltered channel. So. We always look at open rate with other channels, but is it, what is the most important metric with a push notification? I guess open rate isn't. The most important metric. Is it like, what is the key thing that brands track?

Is it, is it click through? Is it, or what is the most important metric then?

Arvind Subramanian: Again, again if I may ask you, right, you get a lot of notifications on your device, right? Like we discussed, the biggest currency is attention. Now, how do I get Jay's attention? If I only have Jake clicks on a notification, I get his attention, right? You get your messages on your, I message your emails, your Instagram, so on, so forth, you click on it is when it converts.

So every notification has a purpose. So as a rule of thumb across all the channels, click through rate is the number one metric that we track. The second metric, of course, open rate comes in and there's usually a revenue that's attached to a notification. Most of the brands that we see, they send a purpose driven campaign.

Be like a new, a new product. So the metric that we track is actually at par with the open rate is the revenue after the click. So that's something that we track as well.

Jay Myers: Interesting. Okay. Now what can a brand customize and tailor? Can it, is it, if I send a campaign. Can I tailor personal information, like, Hey Jay, sales on, or can I tailor it by language or location, or what, what options do I have for personalization

Arvind Subramanian: Everything, if I may say so, right? So you get to add all the personal variables. Like you just said that you can add if it's a known subscriber,

Jay Myers: it's a known, right,

Arvind Subramanian: no one subscriber as in J as subscribed to both email. And if a push notification or a J has made a purchase, right? When you finish your purchase you do actually record your first name and your last name.

So you can actually run a segmentations and you'd be like all the users who are subscribed to push notification and have purchased something in the last X days, send a notification and you can have a variable placeholder be like, Hey, first name come back and buy your second product of sorts. You can have that.

Another placeholder, like I mentioned, if you're abandoning card browsing, you can have your image, which is custom. Yeah. Please go ahead.

Jay Myers: Well, I was just going to say that'd be great for anything that's a replenishable, like a or even pushing, pushing one time shoppers into a subscription model where they buy something one time in the last 30 to 60 days, Hey, it's almost time for a refill time to time to refill or subscribe and save 20 percent or whatever.

Arvind Subramanian: Perfect. Now that's a use case between bold and push out. Right?

Jay Myers: There you go. There we go.

Arvind Subramanian: you go. It's again, very intangible, right? You see a number of people are subscribing the odds of people one time shoppers pushing them onto subscription, right? I'm sure you have your people who has been scheduled email, your email templates, you nudge people on through that, but push notification, again, a separate channel, which can just be like, Hey.

Looks like you've just purchased a product, let's say a coffee of sorts, right? Would you like to subscribe to it? A simple push notification, to the point. Cut out all the fluff. In fact, if you actually do analysis of all the email that goes out, anything that's more than 150 words is actually fluff. You can actually get down to the crisp message, right?

And the user just wants that. They don't want all the fancy jazz and heavy loaded email. Like, hey. Get to the point, right? Push notification helps you be like, Hey, you purchased a sachet. Here's what you can subscribe for 12 months. Here's a notification, click on it, take to the subscription page, thumbs up, voila.

Right? So it helps people get to the point and capture the high intent users pretty well. So that's something that works like a charm, but going back to your question, yes, pretty much. Everything is personalizable. You can personalize the product image. You can personalize, you can add personalization variables about the user. In fact, a fun fact is we have a bunch of pre configured Shopify flows where you can add these personalized variables. Those are some templates that's up in life on Shopify flows library. You can actually go search for push out a bunch of stuff, which is put up over there where you, where we use these personalization.

Jay Myers: Now, do you see personalization make a significant impact on conversion? An engagement.

Arvind Subramanian: Absolutely. It comes under the bracket of once you have the basic discipline and behavior set up, which is sending a purposeful push notification personalization, like a cherry on the cake, right? It's for improving efficiencies for improving conversions. Like, only when you have your basics set up, you know, the right kind of audience to send.

When do you send your push notifications? How do you segment your users, your basics in place? Then you can add your personalization, be it images and stuff. And like how it works across all the marketing channel. I think the same fundamentals apply for push notifications as well.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Is PushOwl leveraging any AI in notifications or automation? Are you doing anything in that space yet?

Arvind Subramanian: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We do have a couple of things again. That's the need of the hour. It improves the efficiency in which we ship Creatures and code be it helps brands reduce the friction in which they send push notifications, right? And it think of templates that think of different messages, right?

They can use a co pilot. Of course, the user needs to make a conscious choice. They have a co pilot. What that co pilot does is it actually checks on all the previous push notifications they have sent and then suggest the best push notification that works for their audience. Of course. This is for established brand who've been using push notification and has historic data, but for brands for the first time they're using pushout, they can actually use our AI feature for generating new content, right?

If they want to ideate. Is it sale? Is it announcing a new product? Or is it about giving some information about the company, right? So those are a few tags that we have. They click on it. It auto generates the title, the description, and the image for it. These are something which has on the content side of things to help.

But the pretty interesting part that we have is smart delivery, right? So, hey, When do I send a notification for Jay who's sitting in Canada versus Arvind who's sitting on the eastern side of the world? It's not going to be the same timing, right? So we have a AI smart delivery system that actually matches sending the notification to the time in which the user had subscribed.

Simple. Let's say Jay has subscribed. Yeah, if Jay has subscribed 10 a. m. in the morning, so the model kind of predicts that The probability of Jay clicking and viewing a notification. It's higher at 10:00 AM sent a notification. J 10:00 AM his local time. If Arvin Arvin likes it at 9:00 PM in 9:00 PM in the night, right?

So it sends a notification at 9:00 PM for Arvin extrapolating the probability that I might open it better when I have subscribed it. So that's something which we work about. And it runs on AI engine.

Jay Myers: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Can you track when a user is active or not? Like, if I leave my desktop up. And running all night long. Can it sense that I'm it's inactive and not send push notifications or just based off of previous usage

Arvind Subramanian: interesting use interesting use case, definitely interesting use case. So technically, if I have to summarize and say, right, push notification works on a script on a JavaScript, which you just add it to your website. Of course, when you install our app we are enabled with Shopify, automatically a script gets added.

When you uninstall, the script gets removed. That script is very similar to what Google Analytics does. So the possibilities of push or push notification is that we can replicate a Google analytics off a framework within a dashboard. If you actually talk to your Google analytics, you can actually see active users, inactive users, the users active right at the moment.

That capability is there. Of course, it's not live on a product yet. That's something that's INs are at the works. And that's something that we are tinkering. Hopefully we roll it out soon.

Jay Myers: there you go. Well I want to ask two more questions cause we're already at time, but this, I mean, I got a long list. This is I, I think the whole world of leveraging push notifications is probably underutilized and, and people might just, you know, You know, it's like, it's like email pop ups. People just say, Oh, I hate email pop ups.

But when it's done, well, man, do they work? And say, I think it's the same thing with push notifications like, Oh, it's annoying push notification. But when it's done well, like, it works. And so I think it's a huge miss to just say, Well, it's a it's a it's a pop up. I don't want to pop up or, you know, it's a notification.

I don't want a notification. So What advice would you give to someone just getting started right now in, let's say they listen to this and they want to go install, install PushOwl or get started with push notifications. How, what advice would you give to them? To get started.

Arvind Subramanian: The, I think the basic step would be like, first every brand requires different type of channels to speak to their customers. Right. Well, of course the over abused channels are email and SMS. Now, if you want to stand out as a brand, you need to have a unique marketing strategy. That's not just hiring a top B school candidate, but it's actually deploying a new channel, right?

So the, the basic advice to get started is test the waters. install the app, collect subscribers, see if your subscribers like to be communicated by push notification. I think the conversion rate from your traffic to your subscribers should say that. And if you're an established brand, if you have a strong recall value, and if you're the top 1%, highly recommend for you to have push notification because your brand has been established, people actually come to your website, right?

So you need to be active on all the channels where your users are actually landing. So push notification, enable it, check out the conversions. Now, once you have the conversions, I mean, all it takes is 19. If you're a top 1 percent brand, 19 is probably a chump change, right? It's probably a rounding up an error.

You're not going to, you're not going to scoot into, you're not going to have a board meeting to discuss, Hey, I'm, where am I going to use this 19? So 19 for a month. It's not, it's not much for a top 1%, but the ROI you get out of it will be huge. Again, look at your user where you're coming at, right? If a user comes and purchases from a top 1 percent brand, the user is going to be premium.

And the premium user will have multiple brands, which means multiple brands are competing for the attention on email inboxes, SMS inboxes. For you to stand out, open up a new channel, define a category for you, right? So that's where push notifications comes into play. So simple advice is install it, check if your users want to be convert, check if your users like to be communicated on push notifications go ahead, drop some push notifications, see some conversions, and then improve, optimize, experiment, repeat, so on and so forth.

Absolutely.

Jay Myers: I love it. Test, learn, iterate, experiment.

Arvind Subramanian: Absolutely.

Jay Myers: that's how it's done. This has been such a fun conversation. I've learned a lot. I think I know our listeners probably have as well too. Where can people go if they want to get started with PushOwl or maybe get in touch with your team or what are, what would be next steps for someone who's, who's interested in learning more?

Arvind Subramanian: Oh, simple. Go ahead to Shopify app store, look out for pushout. You find our app go ahead and hit install. Once you've installed, feel free to there's a small chat icon on the product. Just go ahead, click on it and just say, Hey, I think we have a stellar support team. Folks are right around the corner and they would get back to you in a jiffy.

And yeah, we take it forward usually. And if you want to learn about push notifications, there are tons of literature available on the docs. PushOwll. com. Feel free to go look it up and help you. And of course you want anything in particular, my email address is Arvind, A R V I N D at pushhull. com would love to learn how we can help you improve and how this podcast has helped you also.

Jay Myers: Amazing. I love it. Arvin, thank you so much. This has been a ton of fun.

Arvind Subramanian: Absolutely, Jay. Thank you so much for having me. I have one quick question for you before we

Jay Myers: Oh, okay.

Arvind Subramanian: Okay. What pushed you to start this top 1 percent podcast?

Jay Myers: You know, in life, everything is, you know, you always hear the saying that the top, well, you know, on Shopify, in fact, the top 3 percent of stores make 95 percent of all the revenue on Shopify. It's always the top. You know, 10 percent of people are making 90 percent of the, the income or 90 percent of the success.

Right. So, and the difference between being in the bottom 95 percent and that top couple percent is usually small incremental things. And it's just a little bit of extra effort in each area. And so being. Instead of just an average at push notifications being great, instead of just average on paid advertising being great.

And if you can take each area and then step up, you'll be in that top 1%. And so that's, that's why I had you on here. And that's why I have others on as I, each, each expert can help stores get to that top 1%. Thanks for asking that.

Arvind Subramanian: Yeah, no, no, I love it. I love it. Right. Usually when people kind of, we speak to a lot of agencies and we speak to a lot of these e commerce experts, right? Everybody talks about one silver bullet that just changes brands from the bottom 95 percent to the top, you know, 3%. I like how you painted the reality, right?

It's those small habits and steps that actually get you there. It's not an overnight success, right? So I love it. I love it, Jay.

Jay Myers: every overnight success is a 10 year journey. Right. So it's

Arvind Subramanian: Oh, yes. Oh,

Jay Myers: yeah.

Arvind Subramanian: Amazing, Jay. It was a pleasure chatting with you.

Jay Myers: You too. Thank you so much.