Today, we have a guest, Ravi Trivedi who talks to us about Push Notifications and how you can actually build a list without requiring your readers’ emails. Ravi will also be talking to us about his platform and offering you a special 1 month free trial for being my reader. Just read through and you’ll get to learn more on how push notifications work and how to get your special free trial.
Over to you Ravi!
You have written a viral blog post and it gets you 100,000 visitors in one day. Content is hit driven and your post won’t go viral each day, so what do you do to benefit from the viral post. May be you are collecting emails or feed-burner subscription, or doing re-targeting to reach back at the visitors.
But did you know that there is an alternative to Email which has proven ROI of 2x to 5x over Email. Email opt-in rates are low, as consumers don’t want to get spammed with emails, and they feel they are not in control who is sending them emails, due to spammers.
Browser Push Notifications is a new emerging channel in 2016, which can help you reach back at your existing customers at fraction of a cost, and have a higher opt-in than email. Further the consumers are happy as they have full control on who they want to receive notification from as they can configure this in their browser settings.
Push Notifications in Browsers are now supported in Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and it constitutes a majority of the users. Sign-up at PushEngage.com to enable them on your website in 5 minutes.
How to Implement Push Notifications on Your Website:
- Go Live with Push Notification Platform on your website using a tool like PushEngage.com. These tools will help you do subscriber management as well as run campaigns.
- Building a List of Subscribers:
Similar to list of Email users, we can get opt-in from users in multiple ways.
- Default: The default method includes a subscription pop-up on load of the home page or all the pages. The delay is configurable in tool like PushEngage.com, and you further you could change the Messaging on the Pop Up.
- You can choose to trigger the Push Subscription pop up on Button Click, at specific place in your site – like Subscribe to Price Alert, or after downloading a white paper, or any other action.
One issue is that we need to build with subscriber base from scratch, so it will take time for this channel to pick up. But the patient list building will payout in terms of returns. After six months if you have a decent list and other competitors do not have one, you would have a better reach.
There is no method currently to submit a list of emails to Google or Safari and get a similar list for Push Notification back.
What should be a benchmark rate of subscription?
We have noticed a healthy subscription rate for Push is similar to Email and we can get between 2 to 15% subscription rate depending on the website/page and intent of the user.
- Segment your users during subscription for better targeting
If you want your users to engage more with your push alerts, then you should send targeted and contextual alerts. Right now you can segment the users based on actions on your site, or where they subscribed.
As an example: Right when users subscribe you can ask them if they are interested in Sports News Alerts or Political News Alerts or both.
- Plan & run some campaigns constantly
Even when your subscriber base is small, plan some campaigns and run with the users you have to keep in engaged. Depending on the type of site each user will have a different expectation on how frequent these notifications should be.
Respect those choices and send them as frequent notifications as desired. Once a day, or each time while it happens.
How Does Push Notification Work?
We are using our tool as an example here to explain, but the experience will be similar with other options as well.
A user visiting your site is asked to subscribe to Push Notifications on Chrome Browser (Mobile or Desktop).
Once the user confirms subscription, he is added to a subscriber group. We can also segment the users here, and add them to specific subscriber groups.
As a Website owner, you can now go to the dashboard and create and send a notification to all your subscribers
Subscribed user will get the notifications as long as browser is running in background. This will get your subscribers to come and visit you back.
Few Example Campaign Ideas With Push Notifications
- Price Alerts
Users can subscribe to Price Alert on a Flight, or a Mobile Phone. Usually websites use email subscription for such alerts.
However, the user may not always check the email in real time and the price may fluctuate a lot. A real time push notification here works better and the user is more likely to see this alert.
- Limited Time Coupons or Deals
E-commerce sites or Coupon and Deal sites promoting limited time Promotions or Coupons would benefit from a notification to the users. Offers with sense of urgency work well, and the channel is ideal for such notifications.
- Breaking News or New Article Alerts
Content Sites would like to deliver breaking news and fresh off the press content to their readers. This can help them drive traffic to the website.
- Convenience Alerts
You want to be notified when a bill payment is due, your insurance renewal is due, or when your favorite rock concert tickets becomes available at a ticketing site. Such alerts are helpful to users and they add a lot of value to them, and depend on what they want to receive and when.
Special offer
We are offering the readers of enstinemuki.com a special 1 month free trial for all plans which is better than our existing free trial on the website. Please sign-up at PushEngage.com to avail of this offer.