Want a 30 times better opt-in rate than email
There has been a little gem which has been sitting around for a few months but not been widely talked about. What If we could tell you, that you can increase the number of people you can push content out to by 30x the rate of the current method of capturing people’s emails.
Web-Push Notifications
On smart mobile phones you have the ability to receive push notifications from Apps and Games. However Google and Safari have now made it possible to allow your website to do this as well.
This is our experience. Within the week of setting it up we got around 17 people opt-in. Its early days but if carries on at those rates that’s a potential 780 a year. For us, that is a pretty amazing thing to leverage.
Here’s a snippet from Google’s press release 21st April 2015:
This release of Chrome for Android supports the new emerging web standard for push notifications, enabling users to opt in to allow a specific website to send them push notifications just like an installed native app. Over the coming weeks, mobile web users will be able to opt in to receiving push notifications from early adopters including Beyond the Rack, eBay, Facebook, FanSided, Pinterest, Product Hunt, and VICE News. Roost and Mobify also provides services that make it easy for developers to integrate web-based push notifications into their site with minimal custom implementation work.
So this new functionality means that you can send notifications to subscribers automatically and push content directly to your subscribers instantly. Not only can you push the content to the user but to the desktop if their using OS X Mavericks.
The beauty of the website-push-notifications is that it doesn’t infringe the users privacy. You can’t see who the subscriber is but you can track through Google Analytics if the subscribers are looking at your content. If they are liking your content, it will be naturally shared.
There are limitations at the moment, if you’re not using a CMS system like wordpress it will be harder to implement the push notifications as a web application would have to be created. However if you’re running Wordpress then you can easily implement the push notifications through a plugin such as Roast which will add the code into your website plus also offer a free dashboard to allow you to send and monitor your notifications. The other limitations are that the notifications don’t work on iOS yet and Firefox is slightly behind and will be catching up soon. We’re also going to be developing our own Plugin for Wordpress soon.
The benefits are massive, like we said it can increase subscribers to your content by 30x. This means your content will be viewed more and shared more via social media. This will in turn increase your exposure to a wider audience and should naturally help your website rank higher on Google.
For example, web-push capabilities can deliver the following:
- Content distribution for content marketers, publishers and media companies
- Offer content consumers the ability to opt-in to specific author or topic notifications
- Notifications to community members when someone responds to a comment or when engagement milestones (number of likes, comments, etc.) are hit
- Product inventory/shipping notifications (product sold out, package shipped, new inventory just arrived, etc.)
- Notifications to travellers when their flight arrives at the gate
It’s very simple to setup and very easy to track and can help increase your brand presence and brand awareness.
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