Did you notice that sometimes you get a notification from the app that you installed on your phone?
It showcases a lucrative discount, new products, or the maintenance timeout.
Once you see the notification, either you tap on the message for more details or you just clear the notification.
It doesn’t end here.
Have you ever noticed a notification pops up on the header when you open a certain website?
Well, let’s just say, you’re about to learn something interesting; it’ll take your marketing and customer engagement to the next level.
If you haven’t thought about it before, maybe the next time you’d see it, you’ll recall this article.
Folks, it’s called a push notification. It’s one of the most underrated audience engagement strategies of today.
If you haven’t paid much attention to it, it doesn’t mean top brands and businesses are making the same mistake. Companies out there are doing engagement, marketing, and sales through push notifications.
Would you believe that there are companies that built their businesses on the very idea?
So there are tools that help you set up your push notifications on the websites and mobile applications. We’d dig deeper into the push notification tools that you can utilize later on. But right now, you have to comprehend the idea of push notification marketing so that you could also increase your subscribers, engagement, and sales.
If you’re still wondering what’s all this, then here is a definition of push notification:
What’s a Push Notification?
Push notification is a marketing tool that uses mobile apps and websites to send messages across and allows you to engage new and existing customers through discount offers, new content, and recommended products.
It’s a delivery system that takes a website visitor or the mobile app user into the engagement loop and sends out pre-defined offers, messages, and content to the audience.
You might wonder why you need a push notification system when you already have the following tools in place:
- Email list
- Lead magnet
- Cloud-based website host
- WordPress theme
- Caching system
- Spam protection
- Popup Opt-in
Well, there are three essential elements that will tell you why you need a push notification in your app or on the website:
1) Data-driven Insights
Most push notification tools have insights feature, which allows you to go through some statistics and understand your audience behavior on your website or app.
Plus, you can always A/B test between different offers and see which one works better. Push notifications could help on both web and mobile app interfaces in digging deeper into the data.
2) Engagement Opportunity
One of the perks of a push notification is that you get another chance to engage your audience through a different kind of connectivity.
For instance, if you’re sending out newsletters, but aren’t seeing a good open-rate, besides working on your newsletter content strategy, you could also use push notifications to directly engage the audience.
3) No third-party Reliance
A push notification system does help you in cutting off dependency on third-party tools such as Facebook ads, email list, opt-in tool, and more.
You retarget the audience that’s visiting your website or trying out your mobile app. The chances of your message being ignored are comparatively low with push notifications.
For example, if there is a notification on the mobile, the user would like to check it out or if a notification appears in the browser, it’d catch the attention for a second.
Why is Push Notification Marketing Essential for Your Business?
Push notification marketing has been around for a while, but it’s not as mainstream as other marketing channels. Once you read this article all the way to the end, it might change your mind.
Perhaps because push notification marketing has a better open rate and conversion rate than any other traditional marketing channels.
Localytics revealed a 30% increase in push notification marketing across all apps between January 2017 to April 2018, which shows that things are getting better as far as push notification marketing is concerned.
In the digital marketing world, when businesses and entrepreneurs start to adopt a technology, it’s always worth paying attention to. We can clearly see in the above-mentioned example about push notifications that it’s been adopted rather quickly.
If you’re wondering why this push notification marketing is a big deal, then let me elaborate it further. I can tell you five benefits right off the bat, which will convince you to look at this marketing channel:
5 Benefits of Push Notification Marketing
Retargeting Existing Customers
Push notification marketing enables any business or blog to retarget the existing audience to bring back to the website or app.
Remarketing or retargeting is an emerging engagement strategy among the marketers which specifically eyes the inactive audience and re-engage them.
A lot of businesses, bloggers, and online marketers focus on finding new customers when they can easily sell more to their existing customers. When we reach out to our existing customers, we don’t have to start off with the basics because the connection already exists.
The more satisfied your customers are, the easier it becomes to sell more.
It’s always costly to acquire a new customer through advertising or otherwise, but when you retarget the existing customer, it doesn’t cost as much.
For instance, when you engage a potential client, there is a period in which both the parties discuss the strategies, pricing, work details, and other practices — there are Skype calls, text messages, and loads of emails are being exchanged before things finalize. It often takes weeks to get started with a new client and get paid.
But when you retarget an existing customer, it takes less time, effort, and energy. Maybe you’d drop an email with an offer or link to check out, the next thing you know, the transaction has already happened. The reason is that there is a trust on both sides.
“Upselling” is a popular retargeting strategy in which the seller offers more, relevant products to the existing customer and ends up selling more products. We often receive emails of similar products or a popup appears before the check out page that offers more related products.
So don’t underestimate the power of retargeting the existing customers.
Offers and Discounts Announcements
This might change everything for you: you’re running a business and you sell products online.
What you can do is create an interesting offer or a huge discount to entice the audience to buy and avail the offer. SAAS companies, e-commerce stores, and online businesses can’t wait for holidays like Christmas, New Year, Halloween, and 4th of July to offer discounts.
It’s not possible that you never heard of Black Friday because it’s one of the most popular days to shop around the globe. So push marketing comes handy when you’ve got some exciting discounts and offers to share with your customer base.
Usually, if you send out an email newsletter or post on social media, people could miss out for some reason, but a push notification goes into their mobile device or web browser, which is why the open rate of push notification is amazing.
One of the major reasons for a high open rate in push notification is the opt-in ratio. Thomas Rodde writes that the open rate in 2018 was 53.3%.
According to a study that was based on 50 billion push notifications sent to 900 million users worldwide from January to June 2018, 43.9% of iOS users and 91.1% of Android users were opt-in.
The reason why there is a huge difference among the iOS and Android users is that in iOS, the user must manually opt-in to receive the push notifications, whereas in Android when you install an app, you automatically opt-in to receiving push notifications.
However, Android users can opt-out any time they want.
Analytics and Data
One of the perks of push notification marketing is that you can analyze your push notification statistics to understand the behavior of your audience as well as the result of the content or offers. Nowadays, the services that offer push notification marketing have advanced analytical data to showcase.
A blog post on the Urban Airship website says, “Analytics and measurement are important tools for improving your app’s performance.
But it’s important to write compelling push notifications that are valuable to users and that drive action.” It shows that having access to data and insight comes with a responsibility to improve and add value to the end-users.
Subscribers.com also has a feature mentioned on their website homepage called “real-time analytics”, and they further explain it as, “simple, digestible graphs consolidate all your data in one easy to understand location.
See the exact traffic and revenue that Subscribers is contributing to your business through the use of custom tracking links.”
It means that data and analytics are vital to push notification marketing.
Monetization Opportunities
One of the glittering things about push notification marketing is that it also allows you to make money off of it.
There are advertising platforms based on push notification marketing model that provide publishers with opportunities to monetize their blogs and websites through push notifications.
The idea is similar to any CPM network; you sign up for a publisher account. Once the requirements have been completed, your visitors would see push notification requests on their desktops or on their mobile devices.
Your website would natively recommend them content to check out even when they aren’t visiting your website. The more people opt-in to your websites push notifications, the more dollars would come into your bank account.
Here are some of the popular ad networks that support push notification monetization:
Improvement in Conversion Rate
It’s quite understandable that the conversion rate gets better with push notifications. For instance, when there is more interaction, activity, and click-through, then the conversion rate would get better.
What fascinating thing about push notification is that it connects the readers with a website or blog through just a click. Unlike email newsletter opt-ins where there is a funnel to go through with it.
Plus, in order to make a difference, you must be sending attractively titled emails to get a good open rate. The conversion, however, is a whole different story. The good open rate doesn’t guarantee a better conversion rate.
Similarly, first you struggle to put out great content on social media, engage with the audience, and deliver value in different shapes and forms, then you expect at some point to convert some of the fans into paying customers.
When we look at these communication and engagement mediums such as social media and email newsletters, they seem like walls with doors on them. First, the audience gets closer, then goes through the door. A few of them get through and the rest of them return.
Push notifications seem quite a different strategy, let alone it improves your conversion rate.
Let’s take a look at some of the best push notification tools out there.
7 Most Recommended Push Notification Tools to Try Out
1. OneSignal
OneSignal is a top-notch push notification tool on the market. Its multi-dimensional offering puts them on the top shelf.
This push notification service supports mobile push, web push, email, and in-app messages, which makes them stand out from the crowd. They empower over 600,000 businesses worldwide with their push notification marketing services.
The free plan includes 30,000 web push and unlimited mobile push subscribers. The best part is that you get A/B testing, real-time reporting, and timezone delivery in the free plan.
However, the free plan doesn’t have some advanced features such as a dedicated account manager, intelligent delivery, time-triggered notifications, and more.
2. PushEngage
PushEngage is one of the emerging push notification tools in the digital marketing world. They’ve gained more 10,000 users, which shows that they’re good.
Unlike many other top push notification tools, they only provide web push notifications. Some of the perks of using PushEngage include cart abandoned notification, dynamic segmentation, advanced analytics, trigger notifications, autoresponders, multi-browser, and multi-user support.
They have a free plan which supports up to 2,500 subscribers, 120 notifications per month, and 5000 clicks each month.
3. Subscribers
Subscribers is a rapidly growing push notification marketing company that provides web push service and works on all major web browsers. Some of its features include notification scheduling, delivery by timezone, no subscribers.com branding, custom notification designs, and real-time analytics.
The free plan offers up to 200 subscribers, push to chrome and firefox, http and https support, and mobile and desktop notifications.
4. Pushwoosh
IMG: pushwoosh
Pushwoosh is a multi-functional push notification tool which uses in-app messaging, web push, mobile push, email, and Facebook to engage the audience.
It has developed a system that helps users in acquiring clients, completing a purchase, upsell to the existing customers, and turn them into loyal customers.
The free plan allows you to send out push notifications up to 1,000 devices. Furthermore, there are paid plans with advanced features.
5. Airship
Airship formerly known as Urban Airship is a customer engagement platform which offers push notification marketing.
The channels they cover are mobile apps, web interfaces, SMS, mobile wallets, and emails. The features include performance analytics, real-time tracking, optimization, personalization, and automation.
They follow a simple mantra of customer engagement: acquire, retain, and grow. They provide push marketing across multiple industries.
6. LeanPlum
LeanPlum is another popular push notification marketing tool that uses in-app messaging, email, and app UI to attract, engage, and convert users.
Their engagement strategy is strategically designed to send customized push notifications, triggered emails, and in-app messages.
They help customers take their mobile marketing and prospects engagement to the next level. For more information regarding their pricing and features, request the demo from their website.
7. Intercom
Intercom is an integrated customer engagement platform, which provides various tools that help you develop a funnel for engaging, acquiring, and helping the audience.
It offers visitors targeting, personalized marketing, A/B testing, and lead generation facilities through various integrated solutions.
They’ve developed a system of capturing, qualifying, and nurturing the lead through multiple tools such as chat, automated messages, segmentation, and platforms integration.
Start your Intercom campaign with $87 per month.
Let’s Conclude
The point of this article was to guide you on push notification marketing. In case, you didn’t know or never heard of push notifications, it seems like now you can easily tell anyone about the push notifications.
We kept it simple, precise, and to-the-point. Plus, we shared 7 push marketing tools to support the details. You can test out some of the tools that offer free plans to get started with push notification marketing.
The benefits are huge because you get to engage people who are just visiting your website and they never subscribed to your email list or followed you anywhere on social media. And yet, they’re becoming your subscribers just by clicking a notification button.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a blogger, startup, or small business because it works for everyone. You need push marketing as long as you want to engage the prospects, gain subscribers, and sell more through your website.
A lot of businesses out there spending hundreds of dollars on Google ads, Facebook ads, content writing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization — all these things to engage and attract more people.
You can start doing engagement on your website through push notification. It’s one of the most underrated marketing channels so far; utilize it before it’s too late.
Has this article helped you in understanding the push notification marketing?
Let us know in the comments below.
