Web Push Notification and Email are both permission based marketing meaning they both rely on asking a customer to opt-in to receive content and then you – the blog owner – following up with the content that you promised them. But when figuring out your strategy you may wonder, “Which medium is better?”. Which one has higher subscribe rates (the rate at which users opt-in to receive notifications or email)? Which one has higher open and click rates?
What follows is a quick analysis taken from the blog at Restaurant Engine where both web push notifications and email newsletters are used to promote content that has been posted on the blog.
(https://restaurantengine.com/blog)
A quick case study
Around since 2012, Restaurant Engine has posted articles for the independent restaurant owner on how to manage and grow thriving restaurants on their blog. The blog already had a newsletter signup form and added Prompty to the blog late last year.
Opt-ins
The opt-in for Web Push Notifications is a simple single opt-in to show 5 seconds after landing on a blog page.
There email opt-in on Restaurant Engine asks the customer to give their email address to receive the “5 Website Essentials to Attract More Customers to Your Restaurant”.
Subscriber Rates
The first thing to compare is the number of visitors that subscribe to WPN and compare them to the number of visitors that subscribe to the email list – ie: The Subscriber Rate. Below is a table that shows the number of subscribers to each medium over the month of February 2020.
Blog Traffic February 2020 –
54,875 Unique Visitors
| Web Push Notification | Email List | |
| Number of Unique Visitors | 54,875 | 54,875 |
| Number of Signups | 505 | 110 |
| Subscription Rate | .9% | .2% |
The Web Push Notification signups far outpaced the Email List signups. This plays a huge factor in the ROI of WPN.
What can this be attributed to? One might be the ease of signup. Your email address does not have to be handed over when subscribing to an email list.
Open and Click Rates
Next, Restaurant Engine sent the latest blog post to both the newsletter list and also to the Web Push Notification list. What follows is a comparison of how each medium performed. Keep in mind, there was no segmentation or targeting so the open and click rates reflect that.
Also, the same content was sent to both lists. It was a notification that was promoting a new blog post entitled, “6 Tips for Restaurant Success in 2021”.
The stats for each send are below.
| Web Push Notification | ||
| Failed / Unsubscribes % | 9.76% | .17% |
| Read / Opened % | 44.97% | 5.73% |
| Clicked % | .64% | .90% |
The first thing to notice is the huge percent difference in “Read”. Web Push Notifications come in at 44.97% read vs a 5.73% on the email list. Now 5.73% on email reads is pretty moderate, even a widely successful email read rate of say 35% would still be well below the read rate on Web Push Notifications (and the content that engendered 35% open on email might have a much bigger read rate on Web Push Notifications too.)
Something also to consider is that a user has to actually open an email for it to be considered “Read”, so its easier to get this designation for Web Push Notifications which gets “Read” when it gets delivered and shown on the users screen. That being said, Web Push Notifications are more attention grabbing. A new email might sit in the inbox unnoticed forever, but a web push notification you can be assured it has flashed across the screen.
Another thing to notice is that Web Push Notifications have way more failed and unsubscribes. While this can be alarming at first, given the much bigger subscribe rate over email, Web Push Notifications are a much bigger draw.
For example, if you had 100,000 visitors come to your blog then 900 would subscribe to WPN and 200 would subscribe to your email list. If you then had a 9.76% failure rate on WPN and .17% on email that would be 88 lost on WPN and 3 lost on email. So, WPN is the clear winner here because the net new subscribers on WPN is 812 vs 164 email.
| Web Push Notifications | ||
| Unique Visitors | 100,000 | 100,000 |
| Gain Subscribers % | .9% | .2% |
| Gained Subscribers | 900 | 200 |
| Failed / Unsubscribe % | 9.76% | .17% |
| Number Subscribers Lost | 82 | 3 |
| Net Subscribers After Send | 818 | 197 |
This same analysis can be applied to clicks, a lower click percentage compared to email but because the uptake is so much higher, the number of clicks is greater.
| Web Push Notifications | ||
| Number of Visitors | 100,000 | 100,000 |
| Gain Subscribers % | .9% | .2% |
| Gained Subscribers | 900 | 200 |
| Click % | .64% | .90% |
| Total Clicks Generated By New Subscribers | 5.76 | 1.8 |
That is a 320% higher ROI.
Conclusion
Restaurant Engine’s Web Push Notification list is “hotter” than its Email lists meaning there experience higher rates of people subscribing and unsubscribing but the massive uptake of Web Push Notification subscriptions should serve as an eye-opener and a huge opportunity for blogs to establish a new lifeline to readers that can increase traffic and revenue. At the end of the day, Web Push Notifications ended up bringing in more clicks to the website even if the click percentages were slightly lower.
It also should be noted that the email sign up on Restaurant Engine was not a proactive lightbox that popped up after a few seconds or when the person was about to leave the page but rather a more passive call to action at the top and bottom of the page. Changing the email opt-in to a more proactive ask might boost the email subscription rates. That being said, Web Push Notifications are a big opportunity to be harnessed and an excellent way of bringing readers back to your site.
