Increasing bookings and reservations with web push. City Digital Group and PushPushGo.

City Digital Group offers a wide range of services, from restaurant bookings and events to online discussion forums, dating applications and online marketing. The company has implemented web push notifications to reach its millions of visitors through an additional communication channel. We spoke with Late Fenander, Partner at City Digital Group, about his experience with web push notifications starting with the implementation process and ending with the strategy and results achieved.

Can you give us an overview of City Digital Group and your role in the company?

I represent City Digital Group which provides online technologies and digital platforms in Finland. We offer everything from restaurant bookings and events, to online discussion forums, dating applications and online marketing. Our reach is millions of users every week. I am a partner of City Digital Group and I’m working as a consultant in the restaurant-related businesses. 

What prompted you to take implement push notifications on your websites? What goals did you want to achieve?

We are always keen to look for new technologies and since our newsletters were not functioning as well as before, we started to explore new ways to implement our and our customers' marketing needs. Then we found out that push notifications could patch up that flaw. We wanted instantly to reach our own target group on their devices and there PushPushGo came to help us.

How did the implementation of web push go? Was the process easy, or did you encounter any obstacles?

Sometimes I have felt that implementing is just left behind because there is no one who takes responsibility for onboarding. But this wasn’t the case with PusPushGo. From the start, we were taken good care of and didn’t have to keep the communication up from our end. We just installed the push notification script through Google Tag Manager and the rest were set up with PusPushGo in their own dashboard. 

How long did it take before you noticed the results? Which KPIs improved?

After the first notification we sent through PushPushGo we saw that the site visitors grew for a moment instantly. We saw also that there were more clicks in our goals which could lead to some more sales for us.

How can you characterize your web push subscribers? Can you notice any behaviors in them that are not typical for your audience in other channels?

Firstly, our delivery rate of push notifications was over 75% and it has remained over 50% still. Users might consent to push notifications by mistake, so there might be lots of unsubscribes after sending the push notification. Despite unsubscribes, targeting is so precise that the notifications are very useful. For example, in the traditional marketing channels or many social media channels, there will be lots of reach outside of the target group but push notifications will be delivered only to those who have been on your website.

What is your sending strategy for web push? Which features do you find the most useful?

Actively, we are using the automation of push notifications. Push notification is used to remind our users who abandoned their reservation or gift card purchase process. PushPushGo sends automatically push notification as a reminder to those who haven’t finished the process in 30 minutes. We are also using push notifications about once a month, to supplement our newsletter and article reach but only if there is something really interesting content from our side because we don’t want to spam our users so that the effectiveness of notifications would be diluted.

What do you think about web push as a communication channel?

Push notifications alone are not enough for all communication but it complements the other channels very well. It's really effective way of reaching your own users. 

How would you rate your experience with PushPushGo so far?

I am very glad about the customer care and communication from PushPushGo. Most of the other companies should follow the PushPushGo example!