Introduction

There has always been a debate between emails or push notifications among marketers to reach customers.

Emails or Push Notifications are prominent channels to communicate with the users. They establish an interactive bond between the company website and the users. Though these two are mediums to deliver the messages to the customers they differ in their effectiveness. Even though new in the market, the push notification click-through rate is high the emails are still in the game.

These digital marketing platforms have their pros and cons to engage customers. The marketers should compare, analyze and strategize to decide which works best for them. In this article, we will learn about email and push notification strengths that help to keep up your marketing.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is an effective way of reminding bulk audiences about your brand to grab attention and convert them into customers. You can educate users about products and services by sending engaging long or short format content. It is a popular way of reaching customers and building a subscriber base. There are different types of emails- promotion, marketing, auto-generated emails, and more. Advertisers can send emails about product updates, discounts, blogs on the latest topics, new service launches, and more.

What is Push Notification Marketing?

Push notification marketing is a trending tool to reach targeted audiences quickly through the browser push notifications. In this digital world of smartphones and tablets push messages are the best advertising strategy to convey messages and make higher conversions. Push notifications are suitable for every vertical to notify users. As these web push notifications are subscription-based, you can only push messages to the users who opt-in for your push service. So, to make your campaigns successful you need to have high push notifications opt-in rate.

Difference Between Push Notification Vs Email

Let us see the key difference between email and push notifications marketing techniques to know which channel works best for the marketing.

Length of Message

The most common difference between these two marketing channels is the length. Push notifications are small crisp messages that target a specific audience with their accurate alerts and updates. The push messages are small messages with less than 50 characters. You need to be more creative to deliver exact and specific messages to the users.

Emails, on the other hand, you can curate them as long or as short as per the requirement. Every different type of email has different formats and is time-consuming to read. Along with this, you need to deal with the email spamming process. 85% of marketing emails should pass over spam filters to reach user’s inboxes. But with push notifications, we can reach users instantly.

Emails are perfect solutions to reach users with newsletters, blogs, invoices, signup forms, and more. Whereas, you can create more impact on users with push messages for promotional offers, product and service updates, discounts, new blog remainder, and more. Always remember regardless of the communication channel, you need to create interesting content and make your users take further significant actions.

Create Urgency

For instance, you have received a push notification on your mobile devices that say “50% discount on favourite brands”. Won’t this make you eager to check the website? On the other hand, when you receive an email to convey the same thing. Where you need to open the email to check and then redirect to the website.

Push notifications create more urgency than emails by providing the complete campaign details in the push title and description. There are high chances that marketers can attain user’s interest, click rate, and open and view rate with push messages. You can collaborate with a free push notification service to engage your subscribers and increase conversions and website traffic.

Block Subscriptions

It is very easy for mobile or tablet users to block push notifications from your websites. So, make sure your messages provide valuable content, are not spammy, and do not annoy them by sending regular notifications. You can check and implement best practices of push notifications to receive the benefits of browser push notifications.

The subscription churn rate for the emails is low when compared with other communication channels. Users generally ignore unnecessary emails but don’t make an additional effort of unsubscribing from the service. So, you still have an open communication channel to optimize the formats and reach potential customers with your emails.

Personalization

Research stats say that 91% of customers shop and show interest in brands that recognize them and send relevant messages. The benefits of personalized notifications include user engagement, conversion rates, lead generation, customer experience, and more.

While the messages of email and push notifications communication channels can be personalized but push notifications to stand ahead. Advertisers can add rich media like videos, audio, and gifs in the push messages. Also, the app websites can take the advantage of users’ behaviour, previous purchases, and location to personalize push notifications.

As the emails are a former communication channel, advertisers may have sent irrelevant messages with personalized subject lines and now most of the users delete or skip these promotional emails.

Whereas in push notifications you can see the complete info on the notification panel and click to visit the website. This increases valuable website traffic and more meaningful actions.

The objective of the Campaigns

The push notifications can clearly represent the intention of the campaign with the Call to Action (CTA) buttons. We can include these buttons in the marketing emails in both long and short content formats.

But they are more efficient in push notifications as you can see them at the bottom of the web push notification in your device panel. Advertisers can reach their goals like increasing website traffic, conversions, brand awareness, etc by redirecting users to the landing pages with one click.

In the below example, you can see an email with a CTA button at the bottom of the content. In this case, the users should open emails and then click on the action buttons to land on targeting web pages.

Here is a push notification example with CTA where users can click on the button and reach the web store from the notification panel. You can provide 2 or 3 action buttons depending upon the campaign purpose.

There are various advantages of push notifications over emails. The graphical representation below represents a few of them.

  • The deliverability rate of push notifications is 90%
  • Push Notifications have a 7x click-through rate than emails
  • 93% User retention with the segmentation feature in Push Notifications
  • 4 times more engagement rate in push messages
  • Almost 60% of users agree to receive push notifications
  • Push messages opt-out rate is 3 times less than emails
  • 70% feel that push notifications are useful
  • The ignore percentage for Push Notifications is as low as 8%
  • Push messages to have 10 times more open rate than emails
  • You can have 15 times more subscription rate in push messages over emails

The above-listed points show that push notifications are quite effective when compared to emails. They help in increasing user engagement and retention.

When should you use push notifications?

The push notifications are effective when you want to convey updates immediately to your subscribers. Here are a few cases of why push is better than email to make impressive communication with the customers.

  • Promote product or services new launches
  • Inform your subscribers about the latest news updates
  • Alert users about timings of events, sales, forum discussions, and more.
  • Engage audiences by creating FOMO with push notifications.
  • To increase website traffic quickly

When Should Emails be Used?

Emails are the perfect communication channel to nurture leads in all verticals. Here are a few examples of when you can use emails to reach customers.

  • To educate users about products or services in detail.
  • Retain existing customers with personalized upgrades and discounts.
  • Sharing confidential information like transaction and shipping details.
  • Nurture leads about your products to make them customers.
  • To get customer feedback

We have curated all the comparative points between email and push notifications that can guide you in choosing the best engaging platform. Whether it is email or push notifications you should not annoy users with irrelevant and untimely messages.