We all know by now that push notifications are an amazing way to re-engage your website visitors. But what do we do when it's too much?

First of all let us explain what we consider to be "too much" by giving you an example.
Have you ever subscribed for push notifications to a news website? If the answer is yes, then you know that such websites send quite a few of them on a daily basis. The core problem with push notifications is that most people use them in a way that can feel quite spammy for the visitors.

Think of it this way, you turn off your device / computer / browser for a day or you simply have no internet connection. When you turn it back on, you suddenly receive 20 push notifications that were in queue. In terms of user experience, that's terrible!

Upon seeing this, most people will simply unsubscribe, which is definitely not what we want.

To deal with this problem there are a couple of solutions. The first one would be to assign short "time to live" values. This will simply release the queued notification from being shown if the device was inactive for a period longer than the one we define.

The second solution is to assign collapse keys to our push notifications. A collapse key is a value that we assign to all our notifications ( think of it as if it was a channel ). Once enabled, all the push notifications that belong to a collapse key are bundled together and if the device is offline upon receiving them only the last one is shown.

We recommend using the collapse key on all general purpose notifications like news, new releases, new content etc. On the other hand, you should probably have them disabled upon sending notifications that contain important information, because these should be seen regardless.

DigitalPUSH is not new to collapse keys. We've been using them for more than half a year for the ads that we deliver, but we recently decided to integrate them so that our members can make good use of them while sending their own push notifications.

We hope that this gives you a general idea of what collapse keys are and how to use them in order to greatly reduce the unsubscription rates.