PushBots Review: Entry level push notifications and in-app messages

PushBots features you’ll love

• 📲 Mobile push notifications

  Loud, proud and on the homescreen, push notifications are main driver of repeat app usage. These tiny nudges are normally either sent when there’s an interaction or transactional event the user needs alerting to, or to broadcast a breaking story to all users. Neither requires the user to be in the app to receive them.

  PushBot enables you to send both types – to all users or a subset – but without any automation. Meaning you have to do the filtering and scheduling yourself. However, PushBot’s analysis of millions of push messages can offer some suggestions for the best delivery time for each user. It’s still quite a blunt tool, but a simple solution for anybody getting started with notifications.

  One feature I’d love to see here is a permission pop-up. It’s taken as given your users want to receive these alerts, however other services use dedicated prompts to explain to users what you plan to send them before they decide to grant permission, keeping customers happy and response rates high.

• 💬 In-app messages

  PushBot’s in-app messaging feature engages users when they’re using your app, suggesting the action you want them to take. Use them to onboard users, explain new functionality, encourage referals, dish out special offers or complete a poll.

  You decide who, what and when the message is received but, again, PushBots doesn’t let you trigger automated messages based on user behaviour. This is made up for with beautiful, customisable messages that are a breeze to send. Tweak the design to match your brand, choosing colours, button types, blocks of texts and images in the simple builder.

  There’s a few of the extra thrills of other providers missing here. For example, you can’t yet send carousel messages with PushBots but something has to give with such a competitively-priced no code solution.

• 🛎️ Web push notifications

  Web push notifications are a ridiculously simple way to notify users about sales, important updates or anything else you can think of. PushBots are so sold on their potential that you can get unlimited notifications for up to 1,000 users on their free plan.

  These powerfully-simple marketing messages work across all push-enabled browsers, including Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Users subscribe to receive them and see your notification the moment they open the browser. Because permission is explicit, there’s no risk of ad-blockers getting in the way of web push notifications.

  Sending them with PushBots couldn’t be easier, involving only a couple of lines of text and clicks of a button. You decide whether it’s silent or not and the URL to send recipients to. That’s all there is to it!

  The online downside is that PushBots don’t yet allow you to setup triggers to automatically send notifications when certain conditions are met. It’s not a total dealbreaker, but something they need to address.

• 📩 How to send push notifications

  You can install PushBots on multiple websites and either manage them from one central account or assign them to separate members of your team.

  Once you’ve added the lines of code, use the PushBot dashboard or programmatically through their API. If the former, select the audience using various filters, such as users of opt-in date, subscription status, their location or what language they speak. Then simply give your message a title, message and choice of emoji from the built-in library, and decide whether to broadcast it now or in the future.

  One nice touch is the ‘Smart schedule’ feature, which uses AI to determine the best time to send to each user. Imperative if you’ve got different time-zones to contend with and don’t want to wake your users with a notification in the night.

• 💁 Events - Record user actions

  PushBots’ Events feature tracks the actions users take inside your app and website, so you can filter your customers base according to these events and send smarter messages.

  However, as pointed out earlier, Events can’t act as triggers, so you’ll have to manually set your selection criteria each time you want to send a message.

• 🔂 A/B testing (‘Plus’ feature)

  No more guesswork! PushBots’ A/B testing sends two variations of your notification to test groups, then automatically rolls out the best-performing one to the rest of your users.

  Try different titles and body copy, emojis and pictures, then sit back and let PushBots do the rest.

• 📈 Analytics - Events timeline and dashboard

  PushBots presents you with a timeline of individual user actions, including how they’re using your app, their devices, languages, active dates, tags you’ve assigned them and more.

  If you’re looking for quick insights, you can also zoom out for a birds-eye view of user engagement. Get a snapshot of key stats and trends or use the custom query builder to cut the data any way you wish.