Set up browser push notifications in SGEN

Web push notifications let your site send messages to a visitor's browser even when they're not on your site. Used well, they're a re-engagement channel — a new product drop, a restocked item, a fresh blog post lands in the corner of the visitor's screen and earns a click back to the site. Used badly, they're spam that trains the audience to mute your domain forever.

SGEN push notification setup covers four moving parts: a site-level switch that turns web push on, an opt-in prompt that asks visitors to subscribe, a composer for individual messages, and a tracking panel that shows who opted in, who got each message, and who clicked. This walkthrough wires all four for the Your Store site, with the discipline that keeps the channel healthy across the first ninety days.

Push is permission-based and revocable in one click. A visitor who feels interrupted will unsubscribe and not come back. Treat the unsubscribe trend as feedback on message quality — not as a number to minimise through obscured opt-out paths.

How to set up browser push notifications in SGEN

The rest of this guide walks the full setup in order — from the discipline check before you turn the feature on, through the five-step admin walkthrough, into the per-message composer, and finally into the metrics that tell you whether the channel is healthy.

Before you turn this on

Ask yourself:

• Do I have content worth interrupting someone's day for? (Releases, breaking news, abandoned-cart recovery — yes. Random promo — no.)
• Will I respect the unsubscribe rate as feedback?
• Am I prepared to NOT send something for two weeks if there's nothing worth saying?

If yes to all three, continue.

What is this for?

Push notifications are short messages your site can deliver to a subscriber's browser or device even when the subscriber is not on your site. The subscriber sees a small native OS notification with your site icon, a headline, and a short body, plus a click action that lands them on a page you choose.

Reach for SGEN push notification setup when:

• A new product, batch, or limited drop goes live and the audience has signalled they care about being told.
• A blog post or article in a recurring series publishes and your readers want a heads-up the moment it lands.
• A cart-abandonment recovery message can plausibly earn a return visit (e.g. a subscriber added items, did not check out, and the inventory is moving).
• A scheduled event (live stream, sale window, member-only release) is about to start and the audience asked to be reminded.

The full SGEN web push opt-in pipeline runs in five stages: the site loads, the visitor crosses an engagement threshold you set, a soft pre-prompt asks whether they would like notifications, the native browser permission dialog appears if they say yes, and the subscriber is written to the SGEN audience. From there, the composer is your message tool and the analytics panel is your feedback loop.

Good use cases

Product drop or restock alert. Your Store releases the Digital Guide on a Tuesday morning. Subscribers in the "buyers" segment receive a single push when the product page goes live — title plus one-sentence body, a clear click-through. The drop sells through two days faster than the previous release with no other channel changes.

New blog post in a followed series. A team member publishes the next instalment of the Customer Stories series on the Your Store site. Subscribers who opted in to the "blog" segment see one push — post title, one-line teaser, click to read.

Abandoned-cart recovery for high-intent visitors. A shopper added a Canvas Tote Bag and a Sticker Pack to their cart, signed in, and did not check out. Twenty-four hours later they see a single push with "Your cart is still here — Canvas Tote Bag and Sticker Pack waiting" and a click straight back to the checkout. Two of every ten cart recoveries on the Your Store site come from this single message.

Time-bounded event reminder. A live product demo is scheduled for Saturday morning. Subscribers who opted in to "events" receive one reminder push fifteen minutes before the start, with a click that lands on the live page already on the live tab.

What NOT to use this for

• Daily promotional broadcasts. Sending a sale push every day trains the audience to mute the channel within a fortnight. Use email for daily promotion; reserve push for events that deserve to interrupt someone's screen.
• Cross-channel duplicates. If a subscriber already gets your daily newsletter, sending the same headline as a push is noise on top of noise. Push earns its place when it carries something email did not.
• News the subscriber did not opt in to. A subscriber who picked the "blog" segment did not consent to product alerts. Respect the segmentation you offered — sending across segments without consent reads as a bait-and-switch.
• Anything that needs more than 150 characters. A push is a headline plus one sentence. If the message needs paragraphs, send the email and use the push to point at it.

How this connects to other features

• Webhook setup — every push event (push.sent, push.delivered, push.clicked, push.unsubscribed) fires a webhook if you have one configured, so you can route engagement data into the same downstream stack you use for forms and orders.
• Launch a marketing site — the launch checklist explicitly defers push setup until after first content and audience are in place; this guide is the follow-up step.
• Launch a content operation — the editorial cadence guide defines what kinds of posts trigger a push and which segment receives them.
• Domain switchover safely — push subscriptions are bound to the domain on which the subscriber opted in; a switchover invalidates the existing audience. Read that doc before any rebrand or migration.

Before you start

• You have admin access to the SGEN site. Editor and Contributor roles cannot reach the push notifications panel.
• The site is served over HTTPS in production. Browsers refuse the web push subscription on plain HTTP. Staging may be HTTP for internal testing but the live opt-in cannot happen until the certificate is valid.
• You have a site icon ready — a square PNG, 192×192 minimum, transparent or solid background. The OS shows this thumbnail in every notification.
• You have decided on at least one segment — at minimum "all subscribers" — and ideally two or three (e.g. blog / shop / events). Sending one undifferentiated stream to everyone limits how often you can send before unsubscribes climb.
• You have agreed on a cadence cap — the maximum push count per subscriber per week. Most sites that survive past month three sit between one and three per week.

Where to find it

The push notifications setup lives in three places that you will move between during the first session:

The opt-in prompt rendering lives on the public site itself — the visitor sees it as part of normal browsing, not in the admin. You preview it by opening your own site in a private window after switching the feature on.

Steps

The five steps below run in order. The first one — picking your default opt-in moment — drives everything that follows, so do not skip it.

1. Open push notifications settings and enable web push at the site level

Go to Site → Push notifications → Settings. The top of the panel has a single switch: Enable web push on this site. Flip it on. Nothing reaches subscribers yet — this only unlocks the rest of the panel.

Click Save settings. You should see a Saved confirmation at the top.

2. Configure the opt-in prompt

Scroll to the Opt-in prompt section. Decide three things:

• When the prompt appears — page count threshold (e.g. on the 2nd page view), scroll threshold (e.g. after scrolling past 50% of any page), time-on-site (e.g. after 60 seconds), or a combination.
• What the soft pre-prompt says — the friendly question that appears BEFORE the native browser permission dialog. The native dialog is scary; the pre-prompt is your chance to explain the value.
• How long to wait before re-prompting a dismisser — at minimum 30 days. Asking again the next day is the fastest way to teach people to block your domain.

Recommended starter combination: prompt appears after the second page view AND scroll past 50%, pre-prompt text references the specific value ("Want a heads-up when something new arrives?"), and a 30-day silence after dismissal.

3. Add the site icon and test the opt-in on a private window

Save the settings and open the public site in a private/incognito window. Browse normally — visit two pages, scroll past halfway. The soft pre-prompt should appear with the text you wrote.

Click "Allow" on the pre-prompt. The native browser permission dialog appears. Allow. You are now a subscriber. Open the SGEN admin in another tab and confirm the subscriber count incremented by one in the Push notifications dashboard.

4. Compose your first push and send a test

Go to Push notifications → Compose. Fill the form:

Click Send test to myself first. Within seconds, your browser shows the notification. Read the headline aloud. Does it earn the click? If not, edit and test again. When the test reads right, click Send to segment.

5. Verify delivery and check the report

Go to Push notifications → Reports → . The report fills as the push reaches subscribers. Within an hour you should see delivered counts climbing, click-through counts following, and unsubscribe counts staying near zero.

The Click-through rate (CTR) is the single most useful number in this view. A healthy CTR for product or content pushes sits between 8% and 25%. Below 5% suggests the message did not earn the click — the title was vague, the segment was too broad, or the offer did not match the audience. Above 35% is also worth a look — usually it means the audience was very narrow (a small, loyal segment) and you can keep the send pattern.

What the audience sees

This is what one of your subscribers sees on macOS or Windows when the push arrives — the icon you uploaded, the sender name, the title, and the body, with a click that opens your chosen destination:

If the rendering on your own device does not look like this — icon shows as a blank square, sender name is wrong, body is truncated mid-word — go back to Step 1 and check the icon URL, sender name, and body length.

Composing a notification — quick reference

For each notification:

• Title — under 50 characters. Acts like an email subject.
• Body — 100-150 characters. One sentence that earns the click.
• Image (optional) — square, served from your CDN.
• Click URL — where the recipient lands after clicking.

Schedule or send immediately.

Opt-in flow best practices

• Don't show the opt-in prompt on first page load. Wait for a sign of engagement (2nd page view, scroll past 50%, time on site > 1 min).
• Explain the value BEFORE the browser permission popup. Native browser permission dialogs are scary — soften them with a custom pre-prompt explaining what you'll send.
• Honor the silence — if a user dismisses the opt-in, don't show it again for at least 30 days.

The five-step funnel below is what most healthy SGEN sites see in the first ninety days of running web push. The exact numbers vary by category and audience, but the SHAPE — the drop-off at each stage — is consistent. If your numbers diverge sharply, that is the signal that something in the flow needs attention.

Reading the funnel: about 28% of visitors crossed the engagement threshold and were eligible to see the pre-prompt. Of those, 96% saw it (the rest had already dismissed it within the 30-day silence window). About 27% of pre-prompt views accepted the pre-prompt; about 51% of pre-prompt accepters then granted the native browser permission. The end-to-end conversion from visitor to subscriber is around 3.7% — a healthy number for a small business audience.

The single most movable number is pre-prompt acceptance. The pre-prompt text is the lever — a vague "Would you like to subscribe?" might convert at 15%; a specific "Want a heads-up when something new arrives?" might convert at 30%. Test the wording.

Tracking and measurement

The push-notifications panel shows:

• Active subscribers count
• Delivery rate per notification
• Click-through rate per notification
• Unsubscribe events per week

Watch unsubscribe rate as the real signal of message-content fit.

Audience segments

Segments are the lever you have for keeping the cadence per subscriber low while still sending the right messages to the right people. A subscriber in the "blog" segment never sees product alerts; a subscriber in "members" never sees blog posts they did not ask for. The audience grows and shrinks differently in each segment:

Two patterns in this table to learn from. First, the Events segment is small but the CTR is the highest — narrow segments concentrate intent. Second, the Shop browsers segment has the lowest CTR and the highest unsubscribe rate — the audience is less engaged on average, so each push needs to clear a higher bar to earn its place.

Unsubscribe rate as the truth metric

Of all the numbers on the dashboard, unsubscribe rate per push is the one that tells you whether your push channel is healthy. The chart below shows seven weeks of unsubscribe-per-push for the Your Store audience. The red threshold line sits at 1.5% — above that line consistently means the channel is going sideways.

Week 5 spiked — that was the week the team sent four pushes (above the 2-per-week cap because the cap was temporarily lifted for a sale). The spike was the audience telling the team plainly that four pushes in a week was too many. The team restored the cap, week 6 returned to baseline, and the audience continued to grow.

The pattern to look for is not a single bad week but a rising baseline. If unsubscribe-per-push trends up over four consecutive weeks, the message-content fit is drifting and the channel needs a rethink — either the segmentation has gone stale, the cadence is too high for the current message density, or the message quality has slipped.

Examples in context

The three scenarios below show how teams at Your Store use push notifications across different parts of the operation.

Example 1: Product drop to the Members segment.

Your team has the Digital Guide going live on Tuesday morning at 10:00. You compose a single push the day before — title "The Digital Guide is here", body "60 pages of step-by-step instructions and templates. Members get first access for 24 hours." — and schedules it for 10:00 sharp on Tuesday.

The push lands. Members tap. Within four hours the report shows 598 delivered, 178 clicks (29.0% CTR), 2 unsubscribes. The Members-only window earns 134 orders by end of day Tuesday, against an average product launch of 80 orders in the same window. A note goes into the team document: "Push reach is now the single biggest day-one channel for Members drops — keep the cap at 2 per week."

Example 2: Cart-abandonment recovery sequence.

A shopper added a Canvas Tote Bag and a Sticker Pack to their cart on Monday afternoon, signed in, and did not check out. Your Store's cart-recovery flow sends a single push 24 hours later: "Your cart is still here — Canvas Tote Bag and Sticker Pack waiting." The click destination is the checkout page with the cart pre-loaded.

The 24-hour delay is deliberate — earlier and it reads as pushy, later and the intent has cooled. The push fires only once; the customer is not re-pushed if they ignore the first one. Across the Your Store audience the cart-recovery push converts at roughly 18% click-through and 7% completed checkout from each push sent.

The two-message anti-pattern: do not send a second push the next day if the first did not convert. The audience told you with their inaction that the moment had passed. Send a follow-up email instead — email tolerates the second touch where push does not.

Example 3: Cadence-cap collision protects a subscriber.

A subscriber opted in to two segments — Blog and Events — to follow the customer stories and attend the live demos. In a single week the team publishes two blog posts (push to Blog segment) and runs one live event (push to Events segment), totalling three pushes for a subscriber in both segments.

The frequency cap is set to 2 per week. SGEN delivers the first two pushes — the live event reminder and the first blog post — and skips the second blog post for this subscriber specifically. The skipped push appears in their per-subscriber log as "capped" but does not reach their browser.

The cap doing exactly what it should: protecting the subscriber from the team's tendency to send more than the audience can absorb. The team saw the skipped log entry, noted that posting two blog posts in the same week as a live event over-stacked the channel, and adjusted the editorial calendar to spread the next month's pushes more evenly.

What success looks like

A healthy push channel produces all of the following:

• Active subscriber count grows steadily week over week with no sharp drops.
• Unsubscribe rate per push sits below 1.5% in most weeks and never trends upward across four consecutive weeks.
• Click-through rate per push sits between 10% and 25% for content/product pushes; below 5% is a signal the messages are not earning their place.
• Segments are populated and segment-specific CTR is higher than All-subscribers CTR for the same kind of message.
• Frequency cap is set at 2 or 3 per week and rarely overridden.
• Reports show diverse click sources (multiple OS / browser combinations) rather than one platform doing all the engaging.
• The team can answer the question "why did this push go out?" for every send in the last 30 days.

What to do if it does not work

• Opt-in prompt never appears. Check the engagement threshold — most likely you set it higher than your average session reaches. Reduce the page-count or scroll-percent threshold and re-test in a private window.
• Subscribers opt in but no notifications arrive. Confirm the site icon URL is reachable from the public internet (open the URL directly in a browser). A missing icon causes some browsers to silently drop the push.
• Click-through rate is below 5% across multiple pushes. Either the segment is too broad (you are sending product alerts to people who only wanted blog updates), or the titles are not specific enough. Try sending the next push to the smallest reasonable segment with a sharper title and compare.
• Unsubscribe rate above 1.5% per push. Cadence is too high or messages are not earning their place. Pause for a week, halve the cap, and only resume when you have a message that clearly deserves to interrupt.
• A push is sent but a subscriber says they did not receive it. Check the per-subscriber log — they may have been frequency-capped, they may have revoked permission at the OS level (which is invisible to SGEN until the next send fails), or their browser has been closed and the notification expired before they reopened it.
• OS-level "Do not disturb" or focus modes. Many subscribers will have these enabled — your push is delivered to the device but silently held in the notification centre until they look. This is normal and is reflected in the gap between delivered and clicked rates.

What you should NOT do

• Don't send promotional pushes on day 1 after opt-in. Earn trust first with valuable content.
• Don't send more than 2-3 per week unless your category specifically warrants daily (news, sports scores).
• Don't push the same message to all subscribers if your audience has segments — use the segment feature.
• Don't ignore the unsubscribe trend. Rising unsubscribes = your messages aren't worth interrupting for.

Tips for a smooth rollout

Wait 30 days before judging the channel. The first week is not representative — early subscribers are the most engaged. Real signal arrives once the audience has mixed enthusiastic and casual subscribers, around week four.

Write the pre-prompt copy with care. It is the single biggest lever on conversion from visitor to subscriber. Specific beats generic. "Want a heads-up when something new arrives?" outperforms "Subscribe to notifications" by a wide margin.

Treat every push as a test of the channel, not just a message. Each send teaches the audience whether your pushes are worth tolerating. A single bad message can cost more subscribers than the next ten good ones will recover.

Document the cadence and segmentation rules where the editorial team sees them. A new team member who does not know the cap exists will compose the fourth push of the week and only discover the cap when the report shows hundreds of "capped" entries.

Send a "membership renewal" or "thank you" non-promo push every couple of months. The audience having one positive, non-asking interaction with the channel makes them more tolerant of the asking messages when they arrive.

Pause before you delete a segment. If a segment is underperforming, pause sends to it for a month and observe the unsubscribe rate of the remaining segments. Often the underperformer is the canary, and deleting it hides the signal that the rest of the audience is also tiring.

Related reading

• Webhook setup — push events flow through the same webhook channel as forms and orders; use webhooks to route push engagement into your downstream analytics or CRM.
• Launch a marketing site — the launch checklist defers push setup until after first content and audience are in place; this guide is the follow-up.
• Launch a content operation — the editorial cadence guide defines what kinds of posts deserve a push and which segment receives them.
• Domain switchover safely — push subscriptions are bound to the domain on which the subscriber opted in; a switchover invalidates the existing audience.

Also see

• _workflows/role-onboarding/for-marketing-manager.md
• _workflows/best-practices/engagement-cadence.md (planned)