Everyday, I see people say "don't try and reinvent the wheel, just do what I do". While I think this is true for a short period of time, I believe it's very important to innovate.
I mean seriously, think about it. How can you call yourself an entrepreneur if you fail to innovate?
Things are constantly changing and sadly most of these gurus, which you look up to, will tell you to not reinvent the wheel (innovate). This is only because you're their competition.
But let's get to the topic, email marketing is dying people & many people know this. For you people that disagree with me, that's fine. I will bring statistics to the table and show you I'm not bluffing.
I simply pulled 10 random email marketing types. For each type, I then averaged the open rate & click through rate. Here is what I found out.
These email marketing statistics were retreived from Smart Insights
Surprisingly, you can see that the open rate & clickthrough rate isn't that high for email marketing. Let's put this into perspective, shall we?
With the open & clickthrough rates provided, if you sent 1,000 emails to your visitors, 220 would open your email, but about 7 people would actually click your link.
Seven people guys. However, I have great news! There is a new technology, which will take email marketing's place, and that is push notifications.
Why do I say this? Well, this is because first of all, there is no such thing as an open rate with push notifications. You see, your message goes directly towards your vistor's subscribed mobile device or desktop device. Therefore, we can simply things and elminate the open rate factor and only focus on engagement rate.
I did some extensive research over push notification marketing and found this excellent info graphic. As you clearly can see, if we average all of this data, there is an average push notification engagement rate of 24 percent, throughout these 8 random industries.
These email marketing statistics were retreived from Andrewchen
Now, 24 percent may not seem like a big number, but let's be fair and take push notification marketing into perspective with those same 1,000 people..
With the engagement rates provided, if you sent 1,000 emails to your visitors, 240 would click your link.
Now which sounds better? 240 vistors or 7? I hope you said 240!
My Top 5 Biggest Mistakes With Push Notification Marketing
Getting these engagement rates, provided above, takes some thought and learning. So, if you're willing to learn just a tiny bit of information about push notifications, allow me to provide you my five biggest mistakes I've personally made & what I did to improve my engagement rates with my audience.
Note: As of now, I use onesignal for my push notification marketing. It's a free and open source push notifications service.
Mistake #1: Lack of Time Optimization
I didn’t do time optimization in a few of my first notifications. Essentially, people were notified at any random time when I was first sending my push notifications.
Now, this might be convenient for you, but sending push notifications at 10pm on a Friday night might not be such a great idea. Rather, you should find out the best time your visitors are active. This is so you can catch their attention with your notification & market to them better!
How would you go about doing this? Go to Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights is a fantastic tool that allows you to see when people were the most active with your site.
You can then take this information and apply it to your push notifications and send them out during a particular time, instead of just randomly guessing a time and getting no results.
Here's how to access the data, provided by the image, above:
- Go to your Facebook page
- Click the "Insights" tab
- Click the "Posts" option in the list.
Jot down the time your visitors are online. We will use this data for later!
Mistake #2: Description Text Was Too Long
Let's face it, your push notification will hardly get any engagement, if no one can read it. If the message is too long, chances are your message will get snipped and consolidated to the notorious "..."
To make a long story short, I treated push notifications as long ad copies and added a paragraph for each push notification, only finding out that my notification snipped the text away, because I added an image and it took all of the space.
In each push notification you’ll want to include your logo, a title, a short message, a button leading your site, and an image. Then keep in mind that the image might not pop up on a Mozilla Firefox web browser, so in that instance, it’s even more important that the words you choose to say are powerful & engaging.
Mistake #3: Lack of Consistency
Many marketers will tell you, "consistency is key" But why?
Well, that's because visitors like consistency. Therefore, it's important to push these notifications in a consistent manner.
I posted them many days apart and at different times, which wasn’t consistent. Thus, my push notifications were surprising my visitors and psychologically they were intruding their time space.
Mistake #4: Lack of Segmentation
Another reason my click rate wasn’t high was because I didn’t segment visitors. Segments allow you to target users through more personalized and engaging push notifications.
In other words, you can send relevant information towards a specific audience. Therefore, this helps with you unsubscription rates and click through rates drastically.
Now, how would you segment your audience? First of all, all you need to do is implement a few simple lines of Javascript code. This code will add your custom attributes to your individual notifications.
Let's say that when people subscribe to Wealthy Hustler on the guides page, they will be put into a guides segment. This allows me to find the people most interested in money-making news, rather than sending them something which covers money-making tools or money-making news.
Nowadays Internet marketing is all about relevancy. Be a relevant marketer and you will notice a noticeably higher click through rate on anything you post out, simply because the message is relevant towards them.
Mistake #5: I Didn't Track My Visitors
The last mistake I made with OneSignal was not tracking visitors. Well, how do you know people are coming to your site if you’re not tracking this?
Simply add “?utm=onesignal.” UTM parameters are tags you add to a URL so that way when your link is clicked, the tags are sent back to whatever analytical site you want to send them back to; in this case, the tag is for OneSignal.
The purpose of this is to tag your links to look for the effectiveness of your campaigns and to find out if you’re driving visitors to your site the right way or not.
How to Use Push Notifications the Right Way
We all make mistakes. However, there are two different types of people in this world: those which make mistakes and those that make mistakes and fix them.
If you use Onesignal, simply click "New Messages" under the "Messages" panel on the left sidebar. Below I will show you everything I did to improve my push notification campaigns.
Chose Your Segment
Start off your push notifications campaign with force by segmenting your audience. Push notification services like onesignal make it very easy to segment your audience with a few simple lines of javascript code . However, if you do not have a segment audience to chose from or you don't want to segment, you still can send a push notifications.
Here's how to segment your push notification audience:
- Under the "AUDIENCE" heading, click the radio button "Send to Particular Segment(s)"
- X out the "All" segment and pick your most relevant segment
Choose Your Message & Set a Title
Press the "NEXT" button to continue to the next part of constructing your push notification.
Start by deciding what type of notification you want to send out. In this example, I’m using one of my news posts as an example. When creating a title for your message, make sure it’s engaging and grabs their attention right away.
Don’t be afraid to use all caps and descriptive, enticing words. And feel free to use an emoji, but make sure it’s going to capture their attention and mean something to them. In other words, if sending out a message about cryptocurrency, include a money bag emoji or bell, but don’t include a chicken wing emoji.
Here's how to set your push notification title & message:
- Input your creative title text in the "Title" input box
- Input your creative message text in the "Message" input box
Create Your Advertisement Image
Real quick, you need to have your image ready. This is so you can implement it in your push notification.
If you are a blogger, your feature image on your post (your post thumbnail) will do. However I like to take advantage of this feature and I actually just add some engaging text on my image, along with some buttons, for push notifications.
If you want to add text to your image, all you have to do is follow my tutorial in my youtube video I did here. I heavily recommend this, because users are more likely to respond to call to action, rather than just a simple picture.
Add Your Advertisement Image
Next, it's time to add that image, which you've just created. It's important to mention that this option is totally optional, but why would you not add an image if you have the chance?
It's also important to tell you that, as of 2017, Chrome is the only webbrowser that support images for push notifications. However, this isn't bad news, because most of your Internet users are chrome users anyways!
Here's how to add an image on your push notification
- First, upload your image to any image hosting website. It can be yours or a third parties.
- Copy the image URL. We will use this for the next step. (the image url will be something like: "https://{imagesite}.com/{imagename}.{extension}"
- forwardIn the "Image" input box, paste your direct image URL.
Add a Call to Action Button
Chrome also allows you to add a custom CTA button. I cannot stress how important this is, because you are the creator of your CTA message. Be creative here guys and make a really engaging CTA button.
Here's how to add a custom CTA button:
- Under the "Chrome Web Push Action Buttons (Chrome 48+)" option, toggle it on.
- Go to the "Button Text" input box and enter your CTA text
Add Your Launch URL
The last thing you want to do is have your campaign all prettied up and when your user clicks the notification it doesn't take him or her anywhere. The only way of counteracting this is adding your launch URL.
Keep in mind, with Onesignal, we do this in two places. One in the Chrome setup and the default launch URL setting.
Here's how to add a launch URL to your push notifications
- Go to the "Launch URL" input box in the "Chrome Web Push Action Buttons (Chrome 48+)" panel and paste your URL you want your users to go to.
- forwardScroll down to the separate "Launch URL" input box & paste your URL.
Note: Keep in mind to use UTM paramters to track your users! Example: paste your url, but add "?utm=onesignal" to the end.
Set Your Priority Level
As a marketer, it's your job to stand out. As of 2017, there are no current consequences if you set every notifcation as a high priority. Therefore, I make all of my notifcations have a priority level of "high". This is so I can create a sense of urgency.
However, this all depends on your niche. The basic rule of thumb I go by is if your notifications are a few a week and not constant, then I see no problem of making them all a high priority. However, if you are sending annoying push notifications every day, respect your users and make the priority normal. This is so your users don't unsubscribe.
Here's how to set your push notifcation priority
- Go to the "Priority" section.
- Choose High or Normal for a priority.
Schedule Your Push Notification for Delivery
This part of the Onesignal push notification page is probably the most important, so please pay attention, because we are almost done!
Remember what I said about finding the time your users are online and saving that information for later? Well, now is the time to grab that information, if you haven't already.
As a really cool feature with OneSignal, they even have an “Optimize by user time zone” section where you can set the time you want people to receive it in their own time zone. When you grabbed the data showing when your visitors are online, it's important to mention that that data was automatically optimized towards your time zone.
However, you can send notifications optimized towards your vistor's time zone. For this case we will be sending towards our timezone.
