If you have been using PushOwl actively, you would have noticed that the delivery rate of your notifications is not 100%. In fact, the industry average delivery rate for push notifications is around 40-60%.
The delivery rate can be affected for a number of reasons, ranging from the subscriber erasing site data to disabling background activity. You can read about these reasons in more detail over here.
PushOwl offers you an option to clean up inactive subscribers from your account. To do so, simply reach out to our team via the in-app support chat or at support@pushowl.com and ask us to clean up your subscribers.
Our team will then clean up these inactive subscribers from your account to give you a more accurate representation of how many active subscribers you have.
How does PushOwl understand if a subscriber is inactive?
Whenever someone subscribes to your store, the browser they are using will issue a unique token for their device. Think of this unique token like a virtual address, which helps our systems find that specific device on the internet.
But in certain cases (for example, clearing browsing history), this token is erased from their system and becomes invalid. But it's impossible to know when this happens, because of the way the push notification technology works.
As a result these subscribers stop receiving notifications from your store, even though they had not unsubscribed. When this happens, our system will mark them as inactive (or zombie) subscribers.
What actually happens to my inactive (zombie) subscribers on clean up?
None of your inactive (zombie) subscribers are actually deleted from our database, but simply hidden on your dashboard. Whenever any of these inactive subscribers comes back to your website, PushOwl can auto-sync them to your subscriber base and make them active again.
The auto-sync feature works without having to ask them for permission to send them notifications again. This is because the subscriber had already agreed to receive notifications from your store in the past. Our systems will issue a new valid token for that device, which makes it possible for them to receive notifications again.
After the inactive subscriber becomes active by PushOwl's auto-sync, any future notifications sent from your store will be delivered to them.