Email v/s Website Push Notifications - have you compared them?

[Anand Kansal]

Hello all,

I wanted to start a discussion on this forum and get everyone’s opinions on: a) whether you’ve tried push notifications for their visitors on their website; b) how does it compare with your email marketing experience.

Disclosure: we’ve started a service called PushCrew. It’s very new and currently we’re talking to email marketers, educating them and taking their feedback.

Our experience: we’ve seen our early users getting an opt-in rate of up to 20-40% and click rate of up to 15-20%. However, we feel that the use case of push notifications is very different as push notification if overdone become spammy. But in certain use cases sending a notification is better than sending an email - like expiring discounts (that only last for a couple of hours or days) or personalised alerts/updates (where sending one email per alert/update could be an overkill).

I’m curious - how is your experience for these two technologies (in terms of use case)? Since push technology is new, how do you think end users will react to them?

Anand
PushCrew - Push Notifications for Websites

 

[Anand Kansal]

Hey guys, looking for some interesting responses to this.

Just in case you're wondering about website push notifications, it is a technology which enables a website to send a push notification. It works very similar to app-style push notifications, the difference being that 1)there is no need of an app download and 2)it works on all three major devices (desktop, mobile and tablet).

 

[Dr. Forum]

Hello all,

I wanted to start a discussion on this forum and get everyone’s opinions on: a) whether you’ve tried push notifications for their visitors on their website; b) how does it compare with your email marketing experience.

Disclosure: we’ve started a service called PushCrew. It’s very new and currently we’re talking to email marketers, educating them and taking their feedback.

Our experience: we’ve seen our early users getting an opt-in rate of up to 20-40% and click rate of up to 15-20%. However, we feel that the use case of push notifications is very different as push notification if overdone become spammy. But in certain use cases sending a notification is better than sending an email - like expiring discounts (that only last for a couple of hours or days) or personalised alerts/updates (where sending one email per alert/update could be an overkill).

I’m curious - how is your experience for these two technologies (in terms of use case)? Since push technology is new, how do you think end users will react to them?

Anand
PushCrew - Push Notifications for Websites

Hi Anand. I have for years given my trust to email marketing. This may be a little bit personal but the reason why am so glued to it is the fact that I have the contact list with almost 100% active members. This is are the people i email and get response from them depending on anything I have shared with them. I have been able to get loyal customers through the list and it keeps on growing since I get people who refer their friends to me. I have never used push notification but will try and compare the outcome.

 

[Anand Kansal]

Hi Dr.,

Thanks for your comment. At various places I've worked, we too place a lot of trust in our email marketing efforts because it has consistently given us good results. The point of push notifications is not to replace email but rather to act as a complementary channel to it. Both email and website push notifications have different features which make them suitable for different kind of situations. For example, email is suitable where a lot of important information is to be given and which needs to be stored for future reference (product announcements, invoices etc.). However, for more time-bound information which requires an instant response (limited time discounts, product tracking details), push notifications is beneficial since it has a faster response time.

If push notifications are used well, it will also benefit email since then people will stop spending emails when they can send push notifications and thus emails will be used for other purposes. Thus, quantity of email communication will decrease but its quality and effectiveness will increase.