Email marketing has proven successful in helping marketers reach their users and promote their offers for years. But in the current digital world, there are high chances of emails getting unnoticed in the clutter of promotional emails. It is therefore important for marketers to come up with new tactics to reach their customers and improve conversions.
Push notifications, a relatively new marketing tactic is helping marketers reach their target audience and put the word out more efficiently. Smartphone users like you and me check our mobile notifications more frequently than we open our inbox to check emails. Irrespective of how good the content, design, and offer in email messages are, if they do not have an appealing subject line, they are often left ignored in the inbox. Push notifications on the other hand can capture the attention of the users and get them to click-through immediately.
Read on to understand which medium would work best for your business.
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Email Marketing: Highly Personal and Interactive
Emails are considered to be a very personal form of communication. Sending well-crafted personalized emails can leave a substantial impact on your subscribers and give your brand striking results. Here are some pros of email marketing that make it an apt tool.
Email Content Can Be as Lengthy and Elaborate as You Want
Emails are great for promoting offers, launching a new product, sharing the latest blogs and content, inviting subscribers for a webinar or event, or sharing important news. It can be wordy and as lengthy or concise as you want. And the best thing, you can play with your creativity and design it the way you want using typography, colors, images, etc. Check out this elaborate monthly newsletter from Sublimio.
Emails Are a Great Tool for Marketing Content
The emails that you send stay in the subscribers’ inbox and allows them to revisit later. Whether you send a monthly roundup of blogs or an update about your brand, if it is useful to the subscribers, they will mark it to refer to it at their leisure. Here’s an elaborate message from the brand Maurices.
Email Templates Can Be Made Visually Appealing Using Interactive Elements
From adding images and GIFs to letting subscribers interact with your email using gamification and microsites, there is a range of options to create email templates worth clicking. You can design and code it the way you want using HTML and CSS to get users to engage and boost conversions. Take a look at this visually interactive Easter email from Uplers Email.
Email Segmentation Can Help in Sending the Right Message to The Right User
It is very important to send personalized and highly targeted emails to your subscribers to stay relevant and useful. And this can be done using segmentation. Emails can be segmented based on the users’ age, gender, location, income, purchase patterns, interests and preferences, etc. Sending targeted emails to each segment will help in retaining the existing customers and also acquire new loyal customers.
However, emails are not a preferred medium for several brands and marketers due to their following drawbacks:
- Risk of being marked as spam
- Email bounces or undelivered emails
- Getting lost among other messages in the inbox
- Not recommended for time-sensitive messages
Push Notifications: Instant and Interesting
If your brand has a mobile app, it is best to send push notifications to engage with your users. Push notifications appear as a popup notification on the web or mobile screen, and have higher chances of getting noticed by the users who frequently check their phones. Here are the strong points of push notifications that make it a winning marketing tactic.
Push Notifications Convey the Message Instantly
Push notifications are delivered instantly to a user’s desktop or mobile device. Irrespective of the user’s location, it appears as a pop up on their screen, inevitably drawing their attention. This enables brands to connect with the users anytime and send them messages and reminders that require quick reaction. Push notifications are hence best for sending time-sensitive messages.
Push Notifications Are Easy to Create
Unlike email templates, push notifications do not require design and coding efforts. They are simple and crisp text messages that are around 60 characters short. There are high chances of boosting conversions if you can convey your message in the limited space and entice your users to click through.
There’s A Simple Opt-In Process for Push Notifications
To start sending promotional emails, brands must get the users to submit their email address, set preferences and go through double opt-in processes. On the other hand, users can start receiving push notifications instantly from brands by simply clicking on “Allow” when the app or website prompts for their permission.
higher engagement and conversion rates
The probability of a user clicking on a luring notification message is higher than opening the email message in their inbox. Moreover, we check our notifications more frequently than we check our email inboxes. Push notifications, therefore, have higher open rates and click-through rates than email messages.
Push notifications are effective when they are used for the following:
- Sending time-sensitive offers and discounts
- Sending alerts about sales and price drops
- Reminders and product updates
- Notifying about the products back in stock
- Regaining cart abandoners
Wrapping Up
While email marketing has been widely adopted by brands across industries for years, push notifications are helping brands reach out to their customers instantly and draw more attention. Both have their set of pros and cons and hence it is vital to choose a strategy that best serves your specific business goals.
Author Bio: Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, that specializes in crafting Professional Email Templates, PSD to Email conversion, and Mailchimp Templates. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes & jazz, and he breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on email marketing blog.