Push Notifications, The Best Automation You Didn’t Know You Needed

Until recently I would have recommended an RSS feed to be the best way to directly reach an interested audience. Outside of email marketing of course.

But I think that the time has changed, and people’s use of the internet has evolved, and fewer people are paying attention to our thinking, and more people are paying attention to too many things.

What I mean by that is that social media has become the place where people go to find their content. So outside of direct email, the best way to catch somebody’s attention with something new for them to read or see is to have a notification show up right on their computer.

And that is why push notifications are ideal to directly touch your interested audience.

Push notifications are very similar if not identical to that of your mobile phone, in fact, you can have your website send push notifications to cell phones as well.

There are many systems out there to offer push notifications to let for websites some of them charge a hefty fee but one of them is 100% free, and that is the one I wanted to show you today.

But before we get into that I want to talk a little bit about the statistics that I have found with using a push notification system.

The first thing you’ll notice in the screenshot is that I currently have just under 2000 subscribers to push notification of my website. That is 2000 people that may or may not be subscribed to my email list. I have no way to know outside of comparing IP address analytics between push and email marketing. However, these are 2,000 people that are growing by about 13% every month.

That means next month see subscribers for to my push notifications will be closer to 2250 people.

That is a tremendous growth rate when you compare it to other things like opt-in forms email marketing subscribers, RSS subscribers, and social media subscribers. It is also one of the only ways that have a similar direct impact on somebody’s desire to look at your content like email marketing. RSS won’t get someone’s attention in the same way as a push notification or email. The same for social media posts. Try reaching 2000 people with a click-of-a-button on Facebook without paying Facebook a lot of money.

The tool that I use and the one that I am recommending is not the simplest to set up, but once it is set up, it’s set up for good. Like I said earlier it is 100% free and as you can see in the screenshot. I have set it up for Chrome browser for Safari browser and Firefox browser. The three most popular browsers. If I wanted to go through the effort, I could set it up for Android phones end for iPhones as well. I could also set it up for the Kindle Fire and other devices like that.

Now here’s where it gets even more interesting. The next screenshot you will see that my latest blog post content has been going out and it’s been doing fairly well some. It was sent to over 1,100 people with a click-through rate of between 1 and 5%.

In fact, the last blog post to be sent out to push notifications went out to 1121 individuals with a click-through rate of 2.14%. That meant that 23.98 people clicked that blog post. If you compare that to email marketing, you might reach more through email, but it’s very different. You can’t really compare apples to apples when you talk about push notifications vs. email marketing it is more like apples to oranges with minor similarities like maybe the color of the skin of the fruit.

Like email marketing, you can maybe test push notifications you can A/B test. For example, the subject line, description or a different icon that shows up on the computer or device. You could also test timing which is neat.

Also like email marketing you can segment depending on the platforms that people are subscribed from, or based on how active somebody is with your push notifications.

The service that I’m talking about is called One Signal. It is a free WordPress plugin and a software-as-a-service. It relies on the API from Google and Apple and all these different platforms to generate the push notifications. In doing so, One Signal does not have to charge the end user because it’s not using their own push system. It is using the push systems from Apple and Google.

But like I said, it is not the simplest to set up, especially when compared to others like push notifications systems. For example, PushUp Notifications, which is inexpensive, all you do is install the plug-in put in your account, and you are finished. One Signal requires creating developer account different platforms, creating certificates, creating API keys and then including them on your website in the appropriate places of the One Signal settings. It also requires some customization of how you want the push notifications to look. But like I said it’s free, and it’s push notifications and its direct touches to your interested audience.

So with the system, you can send out a blog post, which is the default setting for when you set up One Signal. You can also send out other push notifications on the fly by logging into One Signal.

• For example, you can send out a push notification if you are having a sale on your photography services.
• Or a sale on your latest ebook or sale on prints and digital downloads of your photographs.

There are so many possibilities when using push notifications. And the beautiful thing is that you are directly touching people that are interested in what you have to offer because they opted for receiving this those push notifications.

So I encourage you to check out One Signal. Take the time it might require to set it up. Maybe an hour to two. Start getting subscribers via push notifications to your website. Take advantage of this newer technology because it is going to outperform RSS feeds tenfold.

Want to see some sites already using One Signal? Try these:

• My website
• Resource Magazine
• Nikon Rumors
• Imagely