Web push marketing more effective than email marketing

25 May 2016

Web push notifications, which allows advertisers and media outlets to send notifications directly to their users through their browser, even if the user does not have the page open at the time of sending, is starting to be utilised by websites from various sectors, including retail.

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The initial results are surprising: web push technology has been shown to be 10 times more effective than email marketing or app push notifications. The advantage is that it has all the benefits of mobile app push, without requiring the user to have the app installed. The user can view the push message on any device, whether that be computer, tablet or mobile.

Furthermore, 80-90% of these notifications will be seen. This is in contrast to email marketing, where only 10-25% of messages are opened and read. The click rate of web push notifications is 27%, while the click rate for marketing emails is around 5-10%.

Web push is a new, less saturated marketing channel, with superior opt-in rates compared to other channels. It has the capacity to send more relevant and more visible content to the user, across multiple platforms. Chrome, Firefox and Safari currently support the technology.

Despite having to give prior permission at some point in time, (the ‘opt-in’ process) the user does not have to divulge any personal information such as email address, telephone number or name. The channel allows asynchronous delivery of messages to a user’s web device, even when the user does not have the web browser open.

“Attracting users with this new technology is 10 times faster than with the more traditional ones,” says Eva Martin, CEO of Tiendeo. To date, the average initial opt-in (subscription to the channel) for this company moves between 3-5%.

According to company’s recent experience with web push marketing, users tend to give permission to receive web push notifications more easily than they do for other services, such as email newsletters:

For this reason, Web Push notifications are attractive to marketers. The innovation is presented as an alternative to the daily deluge of emails sent through traditional channels: it allows the establishment of a direct channel between the users and their favourite websites and works in the same way as app push notifications, except the messages are sent from web browsers in a much simpler way.

Tiendeo is a web portal, specialising in the digitalisation and geo-localisation of the catalogues and promotions of large retailers, available in 35 countries. The site has more than 20 million unique users per month and the mobile application has been downloaded 4 million times. For more information, go to www.tiendeo.co.za.