Push is generally the purview of mobile apps, but Vizury wants to give ecommerce players the ability to take advantage of browser-based notifications.
The Bangalore, India-based digital CRM company released a tool out of beta on Thursday that segments and retargets users with messages informed by a blend of in-app behavior and website visit data.
Each user is given a score based on three main factors: propensity to buy at a particular point in time using signals like site and app visits, seasonality and email and app opens; likelihood to respond by channel; and tendency to be interested in particular products, categories or services.
For users who opt in to see browser notifications, a message slides into view in the top right of their screen with a deep link back to a specific product page. E-tailers can push the messages even if a user has navigated away from their website.
“The web world needs a new channel outside of the website and outside of email, which has been, unfortunately, beaten to death, which we see reflected in low response rates,” said Vizury CEO and co-founder Chetan Kulkarni. “Browser notifications are a silent revolution.”
That might be overstating matters, but Vizury does claim that its browser notifications generate 70% engagement and a 7% click-through rate.
“We can do that because we start with the user rather than with the channel,” Kulkarni said.
Smytten, a luxury product discovery and shopping app co-founded by Unilever’s former supply chain operations chief, Siddhartha Nangia, and Swagat Sarangi, previously Google’s head of business marketing in India, has been using Vizury’s browser notifications to re-engage and retain its users.
“We believe in being as minimalist and as unobtrusive as possible,” Sarangi said. “Browser notifications are a great idea provided they’re done with the highest order or relevance and restraint on frequency.”
The same is true for mobile push. According to data from Localytics, conversion rates are three times better for personalized push notifications, but by the same token, 46% of people said they’d turn off push if they received between two and five messages in one week.
Smytten is well aware of the light touch – and high touch – it needs to take.
“We are a platform with a strong focus on curation, [so] every communications and every notification we send is tailored to a customer’s individual feed,” Sarangi said.
The app, which recently launched an online companion site, has around 10,000 users, 80% of whom return on a weekly basis. It’s looking to grow its engaged user base by 10 times over the next six months. But before engagement comes the install.
“The CMO is becoming the CGO, the chief growth officer, which is especially true at ecommerce companies,” Kulkarni said. “There is the growing expectation that this person will raise demand and show an improvement in the business and the bottom line.”
