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 becomes 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?
Hey Erik, even though news sites do benefit greatly from website push notifications, it is also relevant for other industries. For example, eCommerce websites can benefit a great deal from web push notifications. It is particularly useful to send offers which are time-bound in nature (such as coupons which are expiring in a few hours or even a few days). For these offers, web push notifications work better than email since the response time for push notifications is usually in the range of 5-15 minutes while for email it can go upto 5 hours.
It is also useful for sending transactional information (your package is out for delivery). In this cases, email can be overkill.
You should go through these 2 posts I recently published on website push notifications for eCommerce (the 1st one is on my blog while the second one was picked up Kissmetrics for their blog)
Hey guys, looking for more responses to this which are interesting and thought-provoking.
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).
Yes, you are right. Chrome released partial support for Desktop and Android in version 42. And Firefox will launch support for it from version 44. However, the upcoming versions of all these browsers will hopefully have full support.
We too are excited to see how push notifications develop. It is an exciting new technology and chrome is behind it. Read this excerpt from a recent article on the Chromium blog: “Chrome 42 introduced the ability for users to receive push notifications from websites, allowing users to build deeper relationships with the sites they love. Usage of the feature has grown quickly, with Chrome now delivering more than 350 million push notifications every day. In the latest Chrome release, sites can now add custom buttons to notifications, enabling users to complete tasks entirely within the notification.”