Category Archives: Notification

08May / 2013

[Release Announcement] Sticky Header Layout For Notifications Is Now Available

Ladies and gents, we present to you our second Notification layout – Sticky Header! Underneath is a sample of how it looks on your website:

Sticky header notification in action

We are listing down a few use-cases when you’d like to use this layout:

  • When you’d like to show a persistent header message to all visitors on your website … something like “Hey, if you need any help please call on 1-800-xxxx ..“
  • When you’d like to make an announcement for a couple of days .. “We have a 10% off on all diapers this week. Check it out!“; and here’s why you should use us – because you don’t need to make any code changes on your website at the end of the week, as campaign dates can be controlled from within your WebEngage dashboard. Did you say “oh, wow!”? Thanks ;-)
  • When you’d like to greet users who log on to your website and throw specific promotions – “James, great to see you back. Claim your $20 coupon now!“. For more on such application specific use-cases, see custom targeting.
  • When you’d like to train your users on the product – “Hey Joe, having trouble using the loan calculator? Check out our user guide“. The message can be targeted at users who end up spending a-lot-of-time on certain pages in your product’s workflow.
  • When you’d like to prompt visitors on your blog/website to “subscribe to your newsletter“. The best part? – those who close the notification, won’t get to see it again. So, no more worrying about irritating your users with the same prompt over and over.

Rings a bell? Cool. We are sure that you can think of hundreds of such use-cases in context of your application. That’s precisely the reason why we have made it super simple to create a notification. You can get up and running in less than 5 mins. Here’s how:

Step 1: Create a Notification (Dashboard > Notification List > Create)

Create a notification and choose sticky header layout

Step 2: Add message and call to action (see live preview)

Add message, call-to-action and see live preview

Step 3: Additional options and themes

Options (push down, stick-to-top, content alignment etc)

Choose from our themes or add your own

Step 4: Add rules to filter the audience which gets to see this notification (more on targeting here)

Specify rules to filter the audience which gets to see this notification

Step 5: Advanced options; activate and go live!

Activate the notification and go live!

Step 6: Get real-time stats and reports

Real-time stats

An interesting bit with this is latest feature is that we have designed layouts keeping third party developers in mind. The idea is to allow developers to make use of our infrastructure, API’s etc and build+distribute such layouts. More on this next month .. if this interests you, do keep a watch on our docs.

Liked what you saw? Let us know. In coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out all the other notification layouts. Existing customers can log on to their dashboard and start using this new feature; and, for the new ones …

Sign-up today for a FREE trial →

Stay tuned. We love you!

Posted in Announcement, Dashboard Update, Notification, Product-Update

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15Mar / 2013

[Release Announcement] Custom Data – Mashup Your Application Data With WebEngage Products For Amazing Insights

Custom Data: Fork your user/application data with WebEngage products for deeper analytics

In yet another attempt to bring some great insights for your business, we are pleased to announce the release of Custom Data feature inside all WebEngage products.

What is custom data?
In layman terms, it is a hook for you to push customer or application data to us while using WebEngage products on your website. Upon doing so, we store the data and present it back to you in far more insightful ways. So, e.g. if you are passing “Customer Type” information for the feedback product, you’d be able to filter your feedback data based on this criterion in your reporting module. i.e. you can find out all feedback that were submitted by your “Gold” customers. Sweet, ain’t it?

Is this similar to pushing data/events inside Google Analytics?
Yes. Very similar w.r.t how it works. However, very different for what its worth. GA is restricted to visitors on your website. We extend it further to users submitting feedback on your site, clicking on promotions (aka notifications) on your site or participating in in-site surveys. Imagine being able to dice-n-slice all this data with your own application data. Sounds powerful? It indeed is …

Ah, I don’t buy into ideas that easily. Tell me more.
Let us show you some samples of what you can get out of custom data for each of the WebEngage products. The screenshots underneath show you a quick preview of how to pass data via our API’s as well the analytics you get on top it for all the three products.

Custom Data in Notification

Custom Data in Survey

Custom Data in Feedback

Wow! Super cool! Where’s the documentation?
Thanks for buying into our idea. Finally ;-) . We have tested this feature with over half a dozen existing enterprise customers before announcing this release. Here’s the JavaScript API on how to pass custom data for – feedback, survey and notifications. These API’s are a work in progress and are bound to get better with time.

Now tell me about the moolah involved. Will you?
Except for Google, no great software should be free. Keeping that in mind we have added custom data feature ONLY under the paid plans. So, you at least have to be a Basic plan customer to be able to use this feature. If you are in the free tier currently, an upgrade will automatically make this feature available in your account.

Anything else?
Oh, yes. A whole lot. We have set our eyes on offering you enterprise class analytics. Not only on top of WebEngage data but also by mashing your application data with it. The idea is to give you instant insights on your business to sleep over or to present in your board meetings. We love data (for SEO reasons, let’s call it BIG DATA) and we want to help you visualize it better.

Give this a spin. We look forward to your feedback.

Stay tuned. We love you!

Posted in Announcement, Custom Data, Feedback, Notification, Product-Update, Survey

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11Feb / 2013

[Dashboard Update] Transfer Ownership Of Your WebEngage Accounts

We shipped a brand new update to your WebEngage dashboard last weekend: Transfer Ownership in the administration area.

What does it do?
In simple terms, it lets you transfer your (or your account admin’s) rights to someone else.

Why do I need it?
You will find this feature helpful for a couple of use-cases. We are highlighting some underneath:

  1. Agencies, who manage WebEngage accounts for their customers, typically sign-up on their behalf. As, a next step, they would add the customer as an administrator for their account and then remove themselves altogether. With more and more agencies coming on board WebEngage, we realized this was a pain point. Now, with this feature, agencies can thank us.
  2. An employee, currently managing your WebEngage account, decides to leave the company and you have to transfer the responsibility to a new person. We know that this situation is traumatic; so, we made sure the pain and friction is reduced on our end, as much as possible :-)
  3. With the FREE tier, there was no way to “delete” yourself and “add” another admin to the account, because the feature “add admin” isn’t available in the free plan. Free plan customers will no longer need to update their personal email info to receive end user feedback in a different mailbox.

Ah, got it. How does this work?
This option is available for each of your widget accounts. Navigate to Dashboard > Settings > Administration and follow the steps underneath:

Step 1. Navigate to your administration area. Click on Transfer Ownership

Navigate to your administration area. Click on Transfer Ownership

Step 2. Add details of the new owner

Add details of the new owner

Step 3. An email is sent to new owner. Transfer is pending activation (as per instructions in email)

Email is sent to new owner. Transfer is pending activation

Step 4. Yay! Bbye old admin. Welcome new admin.

Yay! Bbye old admin. Welcome new admin!

Stay tuned. We love you!

Posted in Dashboard Update, Feedback, Notification, Product-Update, Survey

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07Feb / 2013

Notification Layouts

Did you know that you can run targeted promotions, announce new features, address cart abandonment and pop discounts to users on your website like a pro with WebEngage Notifications? No? We request you to go through this and this and this first.

Very soon, we’ll be adding a cool new feature inside Notifications – Layouts. The idea is simple – at its core, a Notification is Title + HTML description + Call-to-actions. With layouts we intend to present this core data in different UI formats to address specific problems. Samples underneath:

Classic: THE original WebEngage Notification layout.

Callouts: This layout will allow you to pin point new features on your site and make it easy to announce them to your users. The description can be rich HTML content containing images, URL’s etc. And of-course there’s a nice call-to-action.

Notice: Need “there’s a live update for you” kind of notices for your users? Look no further. We heard you …

Slider Top: Greet your visitors/users with a page slider message positioned right at top of the page. You can embed small images/icons and call-to-actions etc in the message too!

Sticky Footer: Want a persistent footer for announcements and promotions? This layout is designed to show up in fixed format in the footer section of your site.

Technically, we are building layouts in an extensible manner. In layman terms, we’d allow customers and developers to build their own layouts on top of our basic framework. We’ll publish more documentation on this soon.

Even with the Classic version (that is currently available), we have seen some amazing UI customizations. Underneath are a few samples of how customers have been making great use of what we have built. These are some small little pleasures that keep us going …

With WebEngage you can filter the audience to which you’d like to pop the Notification to. Check out our cool targeting capabilities and Javascript API which makes it easier to run highly targeted campaigns based on application specific criterion. Did we tell you that the integration on your site is a piece of cake too? Integrate our widget code once on your site (like GA) and no more code changes are needed. Ever! All knobs and controls sit in your WebEngage Dashboard. Still waiting to use us? Now is the time. Sign-up today for a FREE trial.

Layouts are a work in progress and we intend to release a version one around first week of March, 2013. Can’t wait? Let us know, we’ll give you priority access.

Like what you see? Please spread the word for us. If you have some interesting layout ideas, leave your comments here. We’ll definitely work on the ones that gives us and our customers goosebumps.

Sign-up today for a FREE trial →

Stay tuned. We love you!

Posted in Announcement, Milestones, Notification, Product-Update

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08Dec / 2012

[Release Announcement] Custom Targeting – the ultimate solution to Cart Abandonment problem and other challenges faced in in-site marketing

I am glad to break this news to you – custom targeting based on application specific parameters, is now available inside WebEngage. There is now a new section for custom rules in your survey and notification builder.

Prelude:
As you’d know, we always allowed you to “target” a survey or notification at specific audiences on your website through a built-in targeting engine, with filtering criterion like – cookies, visitor’s geography, time spent on the site, page URL patterns of your site etc (more here). As a natural extension of this engine, we have now made it possible to target based on parameters that are specific to your application. We call this “custom targeting”.

What is custom targeting?
In layman terms, it lets you run campaigns and promotions based on deep, application specific rules. Lemme explain with a few examples:

  1. [E-commerce] Cart Abandonment: You can use notifications to run promotions on the checkout page for, say, users who have added items to the cart but haven’t checked out in 60 seconds. Using custom targeting, you can optionally configure to run these promotions only for a certain value of the cart size or number of items in cart or only for items from a certain category … (ref: image below)

    Address cart abandonment issue on your website using WebEngage Notification's custom targeting

  2. [E-commerce] Happy hour promotions: Always wondered why only bars and pubs have a happy hour? We felt the same and hence we created targeting based on time-of-the-day. Now, using custom targeting, you can run category specific promotions on your website for the “dull hours” like a pro (ref: image below)

    Run happy hour promotions on your website

  3. [All Web Applications] Hyper Targeted Messaging and Promotions: Don’t you want to pamper your “Gold customers” by telling them how much you love them? Do you want to offer a 10% off for customers who have not made a purchase in the last 3 months? Do you want to announce a special on-boarding message for “paid only customers” of your SaaS app? No matter what your application specific use-case is, custom targeting is designed to make all this work from the comfort of a powerful dashboard (ref: image below)

    Get love from your customers - display hyper targeted Notification messages

  4. [E-commerce] Promotions for SEM/SEO Traffic + Product Categories: Let’s say, you wanted to convert a visitor who came via your SEO/SEM spend into a buyer. You intend to offer a discount code to this visitor if she is browsing the catalog for slow-moving category items. You can configure a marketing-promotion notification with a discount code for such visitors. Using custom targeting, you can tell us what those slow moving categories are, and we can take care of the rest (ref: image below)

    Maximize the ROI on your SEM/SEM spend. Run specific campaigns

  5. [All Web Applications] Customer Profiling: There is so much more to know about your customers than what Google Analytics could tell you. To make informed decisions, say hello to WebEngage surveys. You can use it to pop customer profiling survey at first time visitors on your website once they have spent, say, 2 minutes on the site. Do you want such surveys only for the fairer sex? Using custom targeting, you can achieve that (ref: image below)

    Custom targeting at its best - run customer profiling surveys (or promotions) for female customers only

I can go on, for this list is endless. But, I am sure you get the point. We are doing our bit to make in-site marketing and customer engagement a data and experimentation driven science. Hope you like what you see. Your comments on this post will hugely boost our morale.

As our philosophy has always been, custom targeting doesn’t need any code changes over and over on your website. You have to make sure that you are passing all the parameters of interest to you, through our API, and be assured that you’ll not need to change any code on your website – the rules can be modified in real-time from your WebEngage Dashboard.

Note: Custom targeting is only available under the Premium and Enterprise plans. If you are an existing customer, you’ll see this option in targeting section for each of your surveys and notifications. Have questions? Please get in touch.

Stay tuned. We love you!

- Avlesh

Posted in Announcement, Notification, Product-Update, Survey, Targeting-Rules

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03Dec / 2012

Simplifying the on-boarding process – introducing WebEngage dashboard’s sitemap

With 3 feature-rich products rolled into one, WebEngage dashboard is no longer the super-easy-to-navigate platform that it earlier used to be. A large number of our support queries these days are about, “how to get to a certain page in the dashboard?”.

To make things simpler, we have now added a “useful links” page for each of your widget accounts in the dashboard. The URL for this page is also sent to you in the on-boarding email. Now, be it changing styles for your survey windows or adding a new notification theme or changing the HTML template for feedback acknowledgement emails – there’s no need to spend time looking for it; this page will guide you to wherever you wish to go.

Underneath are different sections of this page to give you an idea of how it looks and what it does -

Quick links for Survey


 

Quick links for Notification


 

Quick links for Feedback


 

Quick links for account administration and other tasks


 
Long live simplicity! Do let us know if you love us for doing this.
Stay tuned. We love you!

Posted in Dashboard Update, Feedback, Notification, Product-Update, Survey

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24Nov / 2012

How do we eat our own dog food at WebEngage

Every company tries to find answers. So do we. Every company tries to communicate with visitors on their website. So do we. Every company tries to seek feedback from their users. So do we. Hence, we created WebEngage. And companies, worldwide, love us for that. 

In this post, we are outlining some of the interesting use-cases, for which we have used our own product – eating your own dog food, as they say.

Notification

Ever since we announced the launch of Notification 4 months ago, the tool has become a must-have solution for marketers and product managers across companies. Very recently, we had issues at the end of our payment gateway because of which recurring payments via Mastercard were failing. We used Notification to create a “system alert” and popped it in the WebEngage Dasboard on billing and billing-history pages of our customers, to which they were coming to find out what went wrong. See how -

Notification being used for user messaging


More about the Notification product – webengage.com/notification

Survey

We released our Survey product almost an year ago. From instant customer insights, to customer satisfaction surveys, to product feedback, to customer profiling .., we have seen a wide variety of use-cases with the survey product. We have used it all this while to generate leads on our pricing page. See how -

Survey being used for lead generation


If you spend a minute on our pricing page, you’ll get to see it live too – webengage.com/pricing

Feedback

Thousands of websites worldwide use the Feedback product as their customer support tool. We use it, as such, too. 90% of our support queries come via the feedback tab on our website. The remaining come through direct emails or phone calls. This continues to be our primary use-case too. However, in several other interesting usages, we also use it to manage hiring applications on our website. See how -

Feedback being used to manage hiring applications


You can see this in action on our careers page – webengage.com/careers

Loved these usages? Very soon, we’ll be releasing a gallery of such use-cases for each of the 3 products. Customers, instead of creating their own survey/notifications etc, can directly use such templates from the gallery. Sounds nice? Let us know.

Stay tuned. We love you!

Posted in Feedback, Notification, Survey, WebEngage-Review

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14Jun / 2012

[Announcement] WebEngage Notifications: adding awesomeness to user messaging

Hello,
It gives me immense pleasure to announce an ultra-cool, new add-on to WebEngage. After our in-site feedback and survey products inside WebEngage, we are very close to releasing the third product in our bundle – Notifications. Simply put, notification is a plug-n-play, DIY messaging tool for your website. The illustration below, tries to explain the product idea -

Notifications


Some simple use-cases for notifications:
1. Announce a new product/service launch to visitors on your website

2. Offer discount coupons to visitors coming from a your Facebook fan page or any other web based promo campaign

See
referrer based targeting

3. Engage search engine visitors on your website, drive sign-ups

See
search based targeting

4. Tell your IE visitors that their browser sucks. They need to upgrade to make the most of your website

See
browser based targeting

5. Someone spending 60 seconds on your pricing page? Its time to generate a lead!

See
URL & time based targeting

Smart Notifications

Wait, I am not done, yet. We thought of some amazing use-cases that needed a behind the scene automation to create and display notifications on your website. Have a look at the illustration below:
So, the idea is to pick up messages from your Twitter/FB/LinkedIn or Blog and display those as notifications on your site. Without you having to do anything at all. You’d love us for this one. Right? Needless to say, we’ll give you all sort of controls to tell us what to pick and what not. Underneath is a short explanation of how smart notifications can be put to some great use -

  1. Smart notifications from your Twitter stream – Do you tweet mission critical or promotional stuff on your company’s Twitter page? Would you like to broadcast some of those tweets automagically to visitors on your website? You said yes? Aha! You got the idea. With WebEngage notifications, whenever you tweet on your company’s page with a certain hashtag, we’ll pick it up and create a notification and start displaying it on your website. So, the next time you announce a downtime on your company’s twitter page or offered a discount code there, we’ll make sure that the message is conveyed to visitors coming to your site. Cool? Ain’t it?
  2. Smart notifications from your Company’s Blog – Your product team just pushed a whole lot of new features, upgrades and fixes. As a practice, you make sure that your company’s blog carries a post on this update. With Notifications, you can choose to flash a snippet of that post on your site and lead users into reading that blog post.
  3. Smart notifications from your LinkedIn job posts –  Hiring is a pain. I agree :) . Amongst a whole lot of things all of us do, to hire people, one of the key items on our list is to create a LinkedIn job post. The next time you do so, WebEngage can automatically pull this data along with a snippet of the job description and start displaying this content as a notification on your site (or only the careers page of your site, if you wish).
  4. Smart notifications from your Facebook fan page – You have an active social media strategy. Your FB fan page is buzzing with activity. You want to share some of those updates with visitors on your website. WebEngage notifications will let you do the same.

We’ll be adding complete customization capabilities (colors, targeting etc) to Notification. Analytics will be included in the first version. It will tell you about clickthrough rates, geographic distribution of users clicking the call-to-action link etc – very similar to what we do for our surveys. At WebEngage, we are die hard believers of simplicity. It means two things – the product will be dead simple to use; and even easier to integrate with your website. See how our one time integration works.

Notification product is now live. Sign-up today to give it a go.

- Avlesh

Posted in Announcement, Engineering, Notification, Product-Update

Permalink 11 Comments