Differences between email and web push notifications
Email marketing has been the holy grail for marketers for a very long time. It has been around since the days of the inception of the internet for building lists, sharing content. However, in today’s crowded digital landscape it has become increasingly difficult to stand out.
It has to do with visibility. With most email clients sending marketing emails to designated promotional or shopping tabs, it is difficult to get noticed. Do you know how many emails are sent per day?
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It is estimated that more than 269,000,000,000 emails are sent each day.
Yes, that’s 269 Billion. With roughly 3.8 Billion registered email users, on an average a user gets more than 70 emails each day.
Then there’s email spam.
While email marketing is still relevant, it is simply not as effective as it once was.
That’s where web push notifications come in.
So let’s get right to it with the 6 reasons why web push notifications are better than email marketing and how can you leverage this new channel to build your own audience.
1. Easier to get a subscription
Getting a user to give their personal email address is becoming harder every day. Most savvy users have begun to use a separate email address for personal and another for shopping online. Even with that, they are reluctant to give out their real email addresses on a website.
But with push, all your users need to do is:
- Receive the opt-in prompt
- Allow permission.
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That’s it. No personal information required and the best part is that this works on both desktop and mobile devices. You don’t have to build an app to send notifications on a mobile device.
2. No fake subscriptions
Unlike fake email addresses, a web push subscription cannot be faked. This is because the browser itself handles the subscription and there are no contact details asked for, which could have been faked.
With web push notifications, visitors don’t pick or provide any contact information. What that means is that each and every one of your subscribers is accurate and reachable.
3. Higher Click Through and Engagement
Re-marketing through web push notifications have proven to be 3X more effective than email. Given the real-time nature of web push notifications, and aided by high visibility, push notifications have a far greater impact than an email in a crowded inbox.
Average click through rates of 18% or above for e-Commerce are very common and some of our clients have received average CTR of 30% or above for mobile customers. This easily dwarfs the average 3% click through rate of emails.
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Moreover, succinct web push messages provide an easier brand recall than a subject line within an email inbox. This visual nature of push notifications enhanced with large images boost CTRs to double digit numbers.
4. Better Visibility
Similar to the above point, web push notifications have a distinct advantage of being more visible. They do not need you to login to any email service, check an inbox or social media pages. They are presented right on your desktop or mobile screens, making them far more effective.
Push notifications draw attention, and a cleverly targeted campaign can result in both conversions as well as brand-recall. Compared to display advertising, re-targeting using web push notifications yields 20-30 times better click through.
Moreover, a push notification has the added advantage of showing CTAs right on the notification body. You can use these CTAs (Action Buttons) for even upsell or cross-selling campaigns to boost revenue. The hero images in push notifications further boost engagement.
5. Web Push Notifications can be scheduled to expire automatically
Unlike emails, which always reside in your inbox, you can add an expiry to web push notifications. Suppose, you have a limited period offer running on your site for 2 hours and your customer, sees the email after 2 hours and comes to the site to see the offer expired. How many times has that happened to you?
With web push notifications you can set an expiry to the notification and after that it is not delivered. So if the customer was not online within the 2 hours when the offer was running on your website, no notification would be delivered and you customer would still be happy.
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Notification expiry not only helps with time bound offers, but also with serializing your notifications. Moreover, this helps de-clutter your marketing efforts. You can also use notification expiry for serializing your notifications. You can sequence notifications to expire one after the other.
6. Web Push Subscribers cannot be sold or transferred without your permission
When a user subscribes to web push notifications, the browser generates a unique code corresponding to it. This code in itself is of no use until it is paired with a private key stored on the provider’s server.
Only once you have both, a notification can be sent to a subscriber. This private key is not visible publicly and therefore the unique code generated by the browser is quite useless without it.
Essentially, nobody can buy, sell or transfer your web push subscribers without this private key.
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Wrap-up
If you are still on the fence about using web push notifications, there’s a 15-day free trial and no credit card required. Give it a go and if you have any questions, click on the blue chat icon on the right to talk to a customer support specialist.
