How to Send RSS Web Push Notifications to Segments in OneSignal

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It has been already more than one year since I've enabled OneSignal Web Push notifications for this blog. Over the past year, the blog has acquired more than 25,000 web push subscribers. Frankly speaking - sure web push notifications are great if used the right way, speaking of me - unfortunately, or for good, as I keep writing on many topics, I still haven't found the most optimal use for web push notifications, as readers of this blog fall into many audiences and demographics.

One of the use scenarios to sync web push notifications involves using RSS feed, see: How to send OneSignal RSS Push Notifications Using Zapier

For setting up OneSignal with Drupal see: How To Setup Web Push Notifications For Drupal 8 (Or Any Other Site) Using OneSignal

Today I will write about how to send RSS web push notification using custom-built RSS feed, OneSignal, and Zapier for the country based segment.

As usual, I will provide an example of real situation - about 743 subscribers from more than 25,000 are from Georgia. As Georgia related content is often featured on blog, I decided it would be a good to keep users engaged, by sending a new push notification every time a new Georgia related content is created. 

As a Drupaller, I've built already a pretty complicated RSS feed driven Mailchimp e-newsletter. Now, let's see can we apply the same rules for Web Push Notifications.

User segmentation in OneSignal

User segmentation in OneSignal

I wish there were better user segmentation options on onesignal, but for now, segmenting users from a country seems a good starting point.

In fact, this Web Push notification campaign will be similar to the e-mail campaigns automatically sent using RSS and Mailchimp. See: How To Sync Drupal RSS Feed to Mailchimp

As I've already defined a custom RSS feed for Georgia related content I will just simply reuse it: https://www.reinisfischer.com/georgia.xml

To make the magic happen I should make a Zapier app, and here is the details:

From your Zapier account make a new Zap -  RSS + OneSignal

As the steps are pretty easy to complete setting up the connection, I will not cover them here, just once in editing OneSignal settings, make sure to include your segment in Segment Names to Send To 

Segment Names to Send To

Segment Names to Send To 

The segment names you want to target. Users in these segments will receive a notification. This targeting parameter is only compatible with excluded_segments. Example: ["Active Users", "Inactive Users"]. Use All to send to all users.

That's it - make sure to save your configuration and enable this ZAP.