With email, SMS and display ads have grown to become less effective in recent years, many companies have begun turning to web push notifications to market and reach out to their respective audiences. And for good reason, it’s very effective.

Chrome, Opera, Firefox, and Safari, the four leading browsers of today, all offer support for web push notifications one way or another. Though the process varies from each one, it always involves users being asked permission to grant a website or web app permission, which if granted, opts them in so they can receive push notifications. Not every user opts in on the first try, which is why many marketers are clever enough to double down on the opt-in process and most of the time, it works. Eventually, users who did not opt-in the first time will opt-in for notifications. To make sure this happens, marketers spend hours working with their designers to come up with the proper User Experience Design (UX) that comes with web push notifications to increase the chances of turning visitors into regular subscribers.

User Response and Web Push Notification

CTR, otherwise known as click-through rate, is the number of clicks on a particular notification divided by the number of subscribers who saw the notifications. Case in point, if 100 subscribers receive a notification but only one of them clicks on it, the CTR would be 1%. This makes CTR one of the most important barometers for success of push notification campaigns.

The CTR of a push notification campaign is affected by a lot of factors, including:

• What the notification was all about
• When it was delivered
• Who it was delivered to
• How frequently it was pushed

Targeted vs General – Which Type of Push Notification Is Better?

In general, there are two types of push notifications: targeted and general. As the name suggests, targeted notifications are delivered exclusively to a specific group of subscribers. On the other hand, general push notifications are sent to all subscribers.

Now, as for the question, which of the two is better, there really is no correct answer. However, as a rule of thumb, targeted notifications often generate better engagement and click rates. The reason? Because you narrow your campaign to a select audience, you make sure that the people you’re sending notifications to will find It relevant and are less likely to block them.

Target campaigns come in handy in various ways. Though the most common targets are active and frequent subscribers, the less active and unengaged subscribers are also a potential goldmine as well. Sending follow-up notifications to less engaged subscribers might just be the key to bringing them back into the fold.

How Web Push Notifications Affect the Market

While it’s crazy to think how fast the market has adjusted to web push notifications, it’s still important to wonder if and how such campaigns conversely impact the market.

To answer that, you need only to look at what Google has been doing in recent years.

There’s a reason why the search engine giant has been constantly pushing web push notifications into the forefront of marketing for some time – it works.