Mailing is one of the most affordable and effective methods of communication with the target audience in the business. They allow you to keep the user’s attention to the brand, increase their interest in the product, provide information support, and stimulate sales. The variety of modern mailing channels makes it possible to ensure the proper development of the company. You can make use of the push notifications to make a big difference to your online presence. In this article, we will talk about push notifications, explain their functions, advantages, and capabilities for business.
What is Push Notification?
Web push notifications are messages delivered to a recipient’s browser and appear on their device, whether it’s a PC or mobile. For visitors to become recipients of push notifications, they only need to click on the “Allow” button in the browser when asked for and subscribe to it. After allowing, website owner can send web notifications to user’s device though the push service. Meanwhile, users do not need to share their personal data.
If a user blocked a notification request in browser, they can anytime unblock and allow it again by clicking on the padlock or similar icon showing at the left end of address bar.
Also, note that push notifications are same as the pop-ups shown based on user activity like exit intent.
What Tasks Do Push Notifications Solve?
- “Push” allows you to quickly return visitors to the site, including for completing targeted actions (purchases, registration, etc.).
- Such notifications maintain a constant interest in the web resource and its materials (goods, news, services).
- Web notifications create a brand image, increase knowledge about the company and its product.
- The push service allows you to send individual messages, as well as notifications to certain groups of the target audience, that allows increasing the conversion into a purchase and the knowledge of your consumer.
- Used for sending reminders like regular payments, important events, product launch, etc.
- Notifications stimulate sales, inform about promotions, new product releases, discounts, and bonuses.
Push ads help to set up long-term contact with the user based on mutual interest. Among the most popular businesses that actively use push notifications as a marketing channel are mass media, e-commerce, gaming resources, financial institutions, travel companies, etc.
Advantages of Push Notifications
You will be surprised if you understand all the pros of push notifications:
1. Quick and effortless collection of a subscriber base
To start collecting the database, you only need to connect the service for sending push messages to your website. Further, visitors interested in the content of the site can become subscribers in 1 click. Content management systems like WordPress offers plenty of plugins to integrate with the corresponding services like OneSignal.
The main reason for the rapid growth of the base is the simple subscription process. No personal data is required from visitors. Therefore, they are more willing to agree to receive notifications than, for example, if you need to fill out a standard registration form with an email or if you require authorization through a social network account.
Besides, push technology allows you to unsubscribe from notifications in the browser settings quickly. The result is an exclusively voluntary and unobtrusive interaction that brings profit.
2. Simple transition from the ad to the website
To go to the website pages, you only need to click on the notification. To improve the efficiency of mailings, you can choose the best time to send push notifications based on the statistics of the service.
3. Possibility to segment the subscriber base
You can divide users into groups by device type, geography, interests (tags). It allows owners to arrange targeted push notifications and increase sales. Push notifications are available for both mobile (smartphones, tablets) and desktop users (PCs, laptops). Besides, the cost of push notifications is several times cheaper than SMS.
Finally, even at the stage of campaign planning, you can predict the effectiveness of push-mailing using a calculator. Based on the current data of the site, you can get approximate numbers on the increase in traffic and profits after the launch of the technology.
Weaknesses of the Technology
When performing push-mailing, the delivery of notifications depends on the user’s status on the Internet (online/offline). Additionally, the subscriber will not receive the message until he opens the browser with an active Internet connection. Push notifications come to a mobile device even when the browser is closed and the smartphone screen is unlocked. Like SMS, push notifications can contain a limited amount of text (the title – up to 64 characters, the text – up to 240). Therefore, the notification should be intriguing.
Prospects for the Push Notifications
Push notifications are just beginning their journey, but the current success of this channel already predicts impressive results. Some websites are sending over two billion push notifications in 3 months. Meanwhile, to take maximum advantage of various advertising channels, we recommend using a multichannel approach. Use different types of mailings at the same time to solve different types of tasks.
Besides, to optimize costs, you can use the notification chain method – sequential sending of messages through different channels. For example, include WhatsApp and SMS delivery. Therefore, if the addressee has a connection, they will receive a service notification through WhatsApp. Otherwise, the message will be redirected to SMS.
