Ever had shoppers visited a product page, ready to buy from your Shopify store, only for them to see that your product is out of stock? Back-in-stock messages allow you to easily recapture these shoppers and bring them back when your product is stocked up again. But, just setting up in-stock marketing automation isn’t enough. Your back-in-stock messages must also make it possible for shoppers to subscribe to your in-stock updates using the channel they prefer. This is why we’re integrating with our favorite web push notification app, PushOwl Web Push Notifications. With this integration, you can enable an additional channel to allow your shoppers to subscribe to in-stock updates using web push notifications.
Why are Back-in-Stock Updates Important?
21% to 43% of consumers faced with a stock-out will actually go to another store to buy the item. That’s a large number of potential shoppers that you miss out on capturing as customers just because of inventory issues.
While you can’t avoid your products going out of stock, you can, however, avoid losing your shoppers as customers.
By setting up Back in Stock Alerts, you can ask your shoppers if they want to be notified when the product is back in stock so they can instantly come back to your online store to purchase.
The subscribe widget is fully customizable by you and you can change its look and text to reflect your Shopify store’s theme and personality.
Shoppers can enter their email or phone number within the widget to receive a message on their preferred channel about the product’s availability or even subscribe using Facebook Messenger or web push notifications.
Once subscribed, the shopper in the backend. Once the product is in stock again, they receive an automated message to immediately bring them back to the store. This message can be crafted by you and is personalized to the product that the shopper is interested in.
If you haven’t already, you can install the Back in the Stock app now.
What does PushOwl do?
PushOwl is a web push notification app built for Shopify merchants. Web push notifications are a new but aggressively adopted marketing channel where the promotion is sent directly to the subscriber’s screen. Its high visibility makes the web push a perfect channel for merchants to send time-sensitive deals and messages to their shoppers and bring them back to their store.
PushOwl’s extensive list of features allows merchants to send short and sweet promotions and enable different features to maximize its reach. You can add an expiry date to avoid sending a promotional message after the offer is over, schedule push campaigns and deliver push messages during the subscriber’s active hours.
Merchants can even automate their cart recovery by setting up a sequence of 3 abandoned cart reminders that bring back the shopper to complete their purchase. You can even use Segmentation to send highly-targeted and personalized campaigns to shoppers using their location, click behavior, device, and subscriber history.
How does the Back-in-Stock and PushOwl Integration Work?
To allow your shoppers to subscribe to back in stock alerts via web push notifications, you need to first install both Back in Stock and PushOwl on your Shopify dashboard.
Once installed, you can integrate the apps by following these steps:
1. Log in to the Back in Stock app dashboard
2. Go to the Integrations tab
3. Click on the PushOwl integration card
4. Enable the PushOwl integration using the toggle switch
And voila, you’re done!
With this, your shoppers will now see an option to subscribe via web push notifications within the 'Back on Stock Widget' when they land on an out-of-stock product page.
Note: The shopper will still have the choice to subscribe via email, SMS or the Messenger from the widget.
Here's how it'll appear:
But just like emails, SMS and Messenger campaigns for in-stock alerts, you need to follow a few best practices to make web push notifications work.
Best practices for back in stock web push notifications
1. Keep it short and sweet
The good thing about web push notifications is that they get your message across almost instantly. But to make them effective, you need your message to be crystal clear. So keep it simple and really short when sending in-stock alerts. Remember to use powerful words that create a sense of urgency around the restocked product.
2. Include a discount (or maybe not)
Shoppers subscribing to back in stock alerts are interested in making the purchase. So bringing them back to your store with a simple in-stock alert is good enough. But if you want to sweeten the deal and make them feel special, you could offer a little discount to show how you’re sorry you didn’t have the product the last time!
3. Show an image of the product
A typical online shopper browses through at least a handful of sites before making a purchase. So you want to make sure that the subscriber knows which product they are receiving an in-stock alert for. That’s why you should always include an image of your product in the web push notification along with its name.
Ps. PushOwl dynamically generates the hero image for your back in stock web push notifications.
4. Offer a clear call-to-action
In-stock alerts are meant to trigger an action from the shopper. Instead of giving them the option to reconsider purchasing the product with a ‘learn more’ button, use a ‘buy now’ call-to-action instead. The idea is to nudge them in the direction of completing the purchase.
5. Remember to back your web push notification with follow-ups
Remember how it took a retargeting ad to follow you around for days before you made the last purchase? Similarly, you can’t expect one web push notification to bring back a shopper to your store. You need to follow it up with more reminders of the product the shopper showed interest in.
To recover the lost sale, create a multi-channel back in stock alert strategy. If the shopper has shared their email address, phone number and even subscribed to alerts on the Messenger, use all the channels to reach out to them.
But remember to space out your alerts across the channels to ensure you’re not spamming the shopper. And at the same time, tapping into different time slots to gain their attention!
