Should you use web push notifications?

Web push notifications? They are spam. No one wants them. Just another marketing tool that soon no one will remember. 

I hear it all the time. What’s more, I used to think exactly the same and as I am writing these words, a lot has changed since then. 

I am a marketer, content marketer to be precise, and in this article, I will present you with web push notifications from my point of view. No sugar-coating - just facts and observations. 

Start testing web push!

Web push notifications - what are they? 

If you are not sure what I am talking about, let me explain browser notifications to you.

They are small messages that appear on the corner of a desktop or on a screen of a mobile device via the browser in use. 

You get them after signing up via a form which most often looks like this:

To sign up, you don’t need to provide any data - not even an email address. Everything happens in the browser environment. 

An interesting feature of web push notifications is that you can be on whatever site you want and you will still get them. Take a look:

And, of course, you can unsubscribe notifications at any time. 

My story with web push 

Just a few months ago I didn’t know any of this. 

I wasn’t a subscriber to notifications from any site and I would just click “No” to any subscription form that I saw. Who wants spam?

Then PushPushGo came along and I simply needed to get to know web push. So I did.

I read many articles about notifications and became familiar with the statistics. Unfortunately, working in marketing has taught me to be skeptical. CTR up to 20%? 3500% ROI? Come on. 

That’s why I had to find out on my own if website notifications really work.

I was about to write an e-book about web push, so I signed up for notifications sent by some of our clients. 

First impression?

They look quite nice - minimalistic and nonintrusive. A nice break from all the banners. 

and on mobile:

So what did I do with them?

At first, I would just receive them… and make screenshots for my future e-book.

Then I started to appreciate them. 

Most of the notifications came from publishers. I realized that thanks to web push I don’t even need to visit a website to stay up-to-date with what’s going on. 

That’s why I signed up for web push notifications sent by my favorite bloggers, so now I get notified about new articles and don’t have to check if there’s something new every day. 

What about e-commerce? Thanks to web push, no sale or discount will remain unnoticed. 

You could say that you can achieve all of this with newsletters. And I would say “no”.

They are a few reasons for this. But let me tell you just one:

Because every delivered notification is automatically opened. Do you open all the emails you get?

And finally, I started to send web push notifications 

Being a subscriber is one thing, but as a marketer, I wanted to gain subscribers on my own. 

One of my daily challenges is effective content distribution. I see web push notifications as another channel that helps me share articles, e-books, case studies, and any other content. 

I also inform our subscribers about new features or upgrades in our app.

It helps me stay in touch with PushPushGo readers, and the subscriber base is still growing. Want to join? :)

If you are interested in numbers, here are some good ones:

So far I have created 21 campaigns for  48,523 subscribers. 

It means I have sent 1,018,983 notifications.

774,427 of them were delivered, which is 76%.

98,352 were clicked - which means that the average CTR is 12,7%. 

That’s what I’ve done so far, but you can do a lot more, depending on the type of your business. 

Check out our article about ways to use web push, if you want to know more details. 

What are the advantages of web push?

Form a subscriber perspective:

• Web push notifications are convenient and save time. If you want to stay informed about news, interesting articles or sales in your favorite stores, all you need to do is open your browser. 

• You can keep order in your mailbox. I use mine only for professional and private purposes, the commercial ones I leave to web push. 

• Also, you don’t need to delete notifications. They disappear on their own. 

• I carefully chose sites form which I want to receive notifications. All of them are relevant to me, so no spam. 

From a marketer perspective:

• Web push notifications are another channel that allows you to communicate with your audience. 

• It’s easy and fast. It takes less than 5 minutes to prepare a campaign. 

• Notifications are effective. They may not always be as effective as paid ads, but they give you a chance to reach a completely new audience. And they’re a lot cheaper. 

• Web push apps (in my case PushPushGo, of course) give you an opportunity to monitor the behavior of your page visitors. This is precious knowledge that you can use in many other marketing activities. 

Send your first campaign - for free!

What’s the secret?

Send web push notifications wisely... 

Sending 5 notifications per day? Every day? No, it doesn't work that way (unless you are a publisher). 

Send them only when you have something important to communicate. It has to be relevant for your subscribers, not only for you. 

Choose the right time. If you send them in the middle of the night, you can wake up and really annoy your subscribers. Web push notifications can also be sent to mobile devices. To avoid such situations use the time zone feature. 

Use the power of personalization and marketing automation. Tag your subscribers, ask them about their preferences and send them notifications based on their interests and behavior. 

And don’t forget to inform your audience why you’re going to send them notifications and in what way they can benefit from receiving them. 

We’ve created ABCDE rule, to help you send effective web push notifications: 

...and receive them wisely 

Subscribe only to notifications from brands that you really want to stay in touch with. 

I definitely don’t subscribe to all the websites I visit. 

To be honest, I think I get notifications from maybe 1% of them. And it’s ok, because I am the target audience of those messages and they are relevant to me. Win-win. 

If you find notifications sent by a specific site uninteresting, just unsubscribe. It’s easy. 

Any flaws?

No one is perfect, and neither are web push notifications. 

It’s a form of permission marketing, which means that the web push audience is limited. You can send them only to people who agreed to receive them. 

On the other hand, those are people who are definitely interested in your content/products. And as they express their wish to get notifications, you can be sure of that. 

Speaking marketing, you send notifications only to leads.  

You gain the opportunity to reach a completely different audience - one that ignores newsletters and paid ads. Why waste it?

Web push notifications - the cure for everything

Just kidding. 

I won’t tell you that web push notifications will solve all your marketing problems. But they work for me - as a customer, as a reader, and as a marketer. 

Maybe your CTRs won’t be as high as 20%. Maybe only 5% of visitors to your website will even subscribe to notifications. But they are still an effective marketing channel worth to explore. 

So?

Let’s give it a try.

Start testing web push - for free!