CASE STUDY
How We Made $40k in 6 Months with PushOwl Push Notifications
Brand Story & Challenges
Our client works in the e-commerce pet industry and caters to mid-budget dog owners.
Their request was simple: grow their email list and make more revenue. They had their SMS and email marketing all set up, and it was time to take things to the next level.
We used PushOwl, a Shopify web push notification app, to generate over $40k in-store revenue within just 6 months.
Push notifications share many principles with Shopify email marketing and SMS marketing. That is, they are divided into flows and campaigns. Flows are triggered by a customer action, campaigns are sent at the e-commerce store owner’s discretion. We’ll explain our flow and campaign strategies below.
6 Months of Web Push Notifications
Before Budai Media
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No web push notifications for desktop
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No push notifications for mobile browsers
After Budai Media
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Push notification strategy implemented
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Over $40k made in 6 months
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Over 14k new subscribers in 6 months
How We Helped
We began by downloading PushOwl for our client’s Shopify store. Whatever stage you’re at with your e-commerce, we highly recommend PushOwl for its user-friendly interface, performance analytics, and budget-friendly pricing.
Check out this newsletter by our CEO, Daniel Budai, to find out more about PushOwl and other great tools for Shopify marketing: 3 Must-Have Software Tools to Scale Your E-Commerce.
For this client, we chose PushOwl’s $57 a month business plan.
Over 6 months, web push notifications with PushOwl cost $342. They made over $40,000. Now that’s a good return on investment (ROI).
If you are new to e-commerce, or you want to ‘try before you buy’, PushOwl also offers a free basic plan.
We may upgrade to the Enterprise plan ($149 per month) soon so that we can start segmentation. With the revenue our client is generating, the Enterprise plan continues to offer an excellent ROI.
Currently, we send push notification campaigns to all 14K subscribers. As that list grows, segmentation will become increasingly important. Take a look at this Shopify marketing case study to see when and why you should start list segmentation: Over £90,000 Generated in 90 Days.
Site visitors sign up to push notifications via an opt-in prompt. We recommend using your Google Analytics to calculate the average time visitors spend on your website and schedule the opt-in prompt to appear before they leave. It’s always best not to bombard them with any prompts as soon as they arrive on your site.
For this client, we set the opt-in prompt to appear after 25 seconds on a desktop, and after 20 seconds on a mobile browser.
The opt-in prompt for web push notifications looks like this on a desktop:
And like this for a mobile browser:
You can also customize the placement for your opt-in prompt. We went for top and center - no need to choose anything unusual here.
Now that we’ve established the basics, let’s look at flows and campaigns.
Flows
Much like email and SMS marketing, push flows are triggered by customer actions.
Take a look at The Big Bible of Implementing Email in E-Commerce for a more extensive guide to marketing flows.
We set up two push flows:
1. Welcome Flow
2. Abandoned Cart Flow
Welcome Flow
The welcome flow begins with the opt-in prompt for push notifications. A site visitor is offered an 11% discount for all products in store once they opt in.
In 6 months, this generated over $19,000 in sales and captured 412 email addresses. Naturally, when a customer makes a purchase, they join your email list.
Abandoned Cart Flow
These are triggered when a customer places an item in their cart without purchasing it. The notifications are sent as follows:
1. 20 Minutes After Cart Abandonment
A reminder that the customer has left an item in their cart.
2. 6 Hours After Cart Abandonment
Reminder and 10% discount offered.
3. 24 Hours After Cart Abandonment
Reminder and discount increased to 15%.
In 6 months, abandoned cart notifications recovered 382 carts from 408 clicks, generating over $19,000.
In total, revenue from two simple flows generated $39,527.33.
Once you have set up your email marketing strategy, we recommend implementing push straight away. This way, once emails are captured via push notifications, you will already have your welcome flow email and subsequent campaigns set up and optimized.
Campaigns
Push notification campaigns are sent at the e-commerce owner’s discretion. As you have limited space for copy, they’re similar to SMS campaigns. Push, however, also allow for images.
Here’s an example:
Campaigns include product promotions, sales, an invitation to read customer reviews (trust campaign), or a blog (content campaign). For example, a campaign push notification can have two Call To Action (CTAs), one to make a purchase, and another to read more about the topic.
We send out 1 - 2 campaigns a week. They’re a great way to capture your customer’s attention, boost engagement, and further increase store revenue.
CONCLUSION
Push notifications are highly undervalued in Shopify marketing. The right push strategy can easily generate as much revenue as Shopify email marketing, if not more.
In just 6 months, push generated $40,000+ in revenue.
Push notification flows and campaigns automate customer engagement with immediate results. Here is our client’s subscriber gain in 7 days:
And from December 25 to January 24:
Beyond almost engagement, push notifications to create a new and highly lucrative stream of long-term revenue.
When combined with SMS and email marketing, your e-commerce business will be unstoppable!
Want to learn more about push notifications but are tired of reading? Check out Daniel’s episode on The Ecom Show podcast: Scale Your E-Commerce With These Three Digital Marketing Tools.