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October 27, 2022

Push Notifications vs Email: Which Is Better? (Pros and Cons)

Are you comparing push notifications vs email to figure out which is better?

Push notifications and email marketing are two of the most effective marketing tools to increase conversions and sales. But how are they different and which one should you focus on?

In this article, we will compare push notifications vs email marketing with pros and cons to find out which one is better.

Push Notifications vs Email: Which Is Better? (Pros and Cons)

Push Notifications vs Email: Which One is Better?

Push notifications and email marketing are two different marketing channels that each have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Both can help you achieve similar goals like increasing conversions, recovering cart abandonment, boosting sales, and getting more user engagement.

When used properly, they can help you significantly grow your online business.

Due to the difference in the delivery platform, one method could be better suited over the other. For instance, in some places email will be less effective than a push notification and vice versa.

That being said, let’s take a look at push notifications and email and see what are their pros and cons and when one of them is more effective than the other.

Email Marketing – Pros and Cons Explained

Email marketing is the most effective marketing tool available on the market. However, what most people are unclear about is what makes email so effective and when they are using it wrong.

Pros of Email Marketing

Following are some of the advantages of using email marketing in your business strategy.

1. High ROI with Low Costs

As a business, one factor in your decision-making is the costs and what kind of return you should expect.

For every $1 spent on email marketing, $44 is made in return. That’s an ROI of 4400% (source).

Email marketing has a very high ROI due to low-cost email marketing platforms. These services allow you to send thousands of emails to your customers for a very low cost.

2. Wider Availability to All Customers

Most internet users today have 24/7 access to their email inbox via a variety of devices laptops, mobile, and even smartwatches.

An average internet user checks their email several times a day and due to cheaper unlimited storage, many people don’t bother deleting emails.

This increases the chances of your subject line and a snippet been seen by users even if they don’t open the email.

3. Perfect for Longer Content

Emails can be as long as you need, so you have plenty of room to create an effective copy for your email.

We generally do recommend keeping it short and sweet. However, sometimes you may need to add more information to your email.

You can place multiple calls to action if needed, add several products, provide users instructions on how to do something on the website, and more.

4. Emails Are More Customizable

Emails can be in plain text, or you can use HTML and CSS to create beautiful newsletter templates. You can also add images, link to YouTube videos, create buttons, and more.

Most email service providers allow you to use smart tags to personalize your emails. Plus, you can segment your email list into different user groups.

For instance, you can segment your email list into users who have already made at least one purchase and users who have never bought from you.

You can also set up automated drip notifications that send a sequence of emails with a set frequency to users.

All of this allows you to make your emails look more personalized, professional, and persuasive.

5. Email Isn’t Time Limited

Unlike push notifications, which demand the user’s urgent attention, emails are more relaxed and users can decide to read them later.

Once the email arrives in a user’s inbox, it will sit there until the user takes an action.

Most users check email several times a day, so even if they don’t open it right away, they will scan through your subject line multiple times.

Cons of Email Marketing

Email is cheap and highly effective. There is no doubt that it will remain one of the most efficient marketing tools for businesses in the future.

However, there are certain areas where email puts you at a slight disadvantage.

1. Too Frequent Blog Post Emails

Sending users an email for every blog post doesn’t work very well. Specially if you publish daily or several times a day.

That’s why you see a ton of blogs (including WPBeginner) sending weekly emails with a recap of all the blog posts they published this week.

2. Competition in Your Customer’s Inbox

An average internet user gets a lot of marketing emails each day. Each one of them tries to come up with a creative subject line to get their attention.

You are competing with many other businesses for users’ attention, and this affects your open rates. You have to learn how to write better emails that users actually open and take action.

3. Email Apps like Gmail Assigning Low Priority Labels

Due to huge volume of marketing emails, popular email clients like Gmail may not display any notification for new emails to your users.

Your email may be labeled low priority promotional email among hundreds of other marketing emails. This may reduce the visibility, open rates, and CTR for your email campaigns.

Push Notifications – Pros and Cons Explained

Push notifications are a highly effective marketing tool with higher click-through and open rates. Let’s compare how they stack up against email marketing.

Pros of using Push Notifications

Following are some of the advantages of using push notifications over emails in your marketing strategy.

1. Easy to Subscribe

Push notifications are very easy to subscribe to. Users simply need to click a button to subscribe for notifications.

Whereas in a traditional email sign-up forms, users will have to first go through popups and opt-in forms to fill in their email address, submit the form, and then confirm their subscription via double opt-in.

This easy subscription option in push notification works very well for users as it instantly gets out of their way once they click subscribe. Most push notification software offer 1-click subscription options.

2. Messages Are Delivered to Users Instantly

Push notifications appear on users’ screens as soon as they receive them. Unlike emails, they don’t need to open them separately.

They work on all platforms and are particularly more effective on mobile phones. Basically, users will get the message instantly as a notification regardless of which device they are using.

This increases the visibility of push notifications and makes them much more effective than email marketing.

3. Push Notifications Add Urgency and FOMO

Push notifications appear as mobile notifications, which adds urgency to them.

Users feel that they will not see the notification if they dismiss it, so they don’t want to miss out on anything important.

4. Users Cannot Provide Fake Signup

Push notifications work on users’ browsers, so users cannot provide fake sign-up information.

This is far more effective when comparing to email sign-ups. Many users now enter disposable email addresses that they have made particularly for subscriptions.

Users may also provide wrong email addresses or makeup fake ones to signup. As marketers, this affects the open and CTR rates of your email campaigns.

5. Highly Effective Personalization

Push notifications can be customized for individual users and triggered based on user activity.

You can do this with emails too. However, it becomes more effective when combined with the urgency and FOMO effects of push notifications.

For instance, a user added a product to the cart, you can use push notifications to nudge them into completing the purchase.

You can also add drip push notifications which work very well for blog post alerts and many publishers / bloggers send targeted push notifications based on user’s interest.

Cons of Using Push Notifications

Push notifications work great for most websites. However, to avoid misusing them, you need to keep in mind the following disadvantages.

1. No Lengthy Content

Push notifications have a character limit which varies on different platforms and browsers.

For instance, you can use 30-70 characters for titles and 65 to 200 characters for descriptions.

You’ll have to keep your messages short and persuasive with in these limits.

2. Limited Media Options

Platforms like PushEngage allow you to create rich push notifications with hero images, Gifs, videos, and emojis.

There is still a limit on what you can use to make your notifications more interactive.

3. Can Easily Get Excessive

Push notifications have a much higher CTR, which may compel some website owners to use them more frequently.

This could ruin user experience as they may start getting more than usual notifications.

On the other hand, if the user has signed up for too many notifications, their notification panels may get too many messages from different websites which may affect how they feel about web push notifications.

Which is Better, Push Notifications vs Email?

Push notifications are better than email due to the higher click-through rates, urgency, personalization, and easy subscription options.

However, email is still highly effective for transactional emails, upsells, newsletters, and other campaigns.

We believe that they are two separate tools. While one of them can be more efficient in particular scenarios, the other one may excel in other areas.

Combining email and push notifications is ultimately the best win-win strategy for most businesses.

This is why we use both push notifications and email marketing in our business to get maximum results.

How to Get Started with Push Notifications

To send push notifications, you’ll need to sign up for a push notification service.

We recommend PushEngage because it is the best push notification service on the market.

PushEngage comes with powerful customization options, triggered notifications, automatic drip campaigns, A/B testing, and more features to grow your business.

Plus, it is extremely beginner friendly and much easier to set up without any special technical skills.

For more details, see our tutorial on adding web push notifications to your WordPress site.

How to Get Started with Email Marketing

You’ll need to sign up for an email marketing service to get started.

We recommend using Constant Contact, which is the best email marketing service for small businesses and bloggers.

Constant Contact comes with easier setup, beautiful email templates for every type of campaign, engagement reporting, and dynamic personalization.

For more detailed instructions, see our article on how to start an email newsletter in WordPress.

We hope this article helpes you compare push noticiations vs email and which one is better for your business. You may also want to see our practical tips to grow your email list quickly or see our complete conversion tracking guide.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post Push Notifications vs Email: Which Is Better? (Pros and Cons) first appeared on WPBeginner.

August 3, 2022October 12, 2023

How to Set Up Automated Drip Notifications in WordPress

Do you want to send a series of automated drip notifications to your subscribers?

Automated drip campaigns are great for welcoming new users and boosting engagement on your WordPress site. You can use them to guide your users along a specific journey.

In this article, we will show you how to set up automated drip notifications in WordPress using both push notifications and email notifications.

When Should You Use Automated Drip Notifications in WordPress?

Drip notifications are automated messages that are sent to your subscribers, usually in the form of a push notification or an email.

These messages are part of a series, and they are automatically triggered to send at a predefined interval. In other words, they are ‘dripped’ to your subscribers over time rather than ‘poured out’ all at once.

You can use drip campaigns to promote a product, get more pageviews on your WordPress blog, build a relationship with your users, increase sales, and even teach a course over a specific period of time.

Here are a few use cases to get the most out of automated drip campaigns in WordPress:

You can send an automatic welcome drip notification to new subscribers and customers. This way, you can educate users about your products and services and build brand trust.
If you are running an eCommerce store, then having automated drip notifications setup can help upsell and cross-sell different products upon purchase.
You can promote your most important content and get people to revisit your website.
Using drip notifications, you can show targeted messages to people from different regions. This helps get more conversions based on geographic segmentation.
You can get people to register for your webinars and upcoming events using automated drip notifications.

In this guide, we will cover push notifications and email drip campaigns. You can click the links below jump to your preferred method :

How to Set Up an Automated Push Notification Drip Campaign
Set Up Automated Drip Notifications Using an Email Marketing Tool
Bonus: Grow Your Email List in WordPress

How to Set Up an Automated Push Notification Drip Campaign

The easiest way to set up automated push notifications is with PushEngage. It’s the best web push notification software for WordPress, and over 10,000 businesses use it to send targeted messages.

First, you will need to visit the PushEngage website and click the ‘Get Started for Free Now’ button.

The PushEngage push notification software

Next, you will need to select a pricing plan that meets your needs. PushEngage offers a free plan that includes 30 campaigns and up to 200 subscribers.

After selecting a pricing plan, you can create an account or register with a Google account.

Upon signing in to your account, you will see the PushEngage dashboard.

The tool will then take you to Site Settings » Site Details and ask you to enter your website details, like your site name, domain name, site icon, and more.

If you scroll down further in the ‘Site Details’ section, you can generate the API key for connecting PushEngage with different platforms, select a time zone, and enable geolocation.

There is also an option to remove the ‘Powered by PushEngage’ branding.

Next, you will need to connect your WordPress website with PushEngage.

First, you’ll need to install and activate the PushEngage WordPress plugin. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you will see the PushEngage setup wizard. Go ahead and click the ‘Connect Your Existing Account’ button.

A new popup window will now open.

You can then select your website from the dropdown menu and click the ‘Let’s Get Started’ button.

Next, you will see a success message that PushEngage is connected to your website.

You can go ahead and select the ‘PushEngage Dashboard’ option to close the setup wizard.

You can follow our detailed guide on how to add web push notifications to your WordPress site for more details.

Next, you can set up automated drip notifications using PushEngage. For this example, we will create a welcome campaign for new subscribers.

To start, you can head to PushEngage » Drip from the WordPress dashboard. After that, click the ‘Add New’ button.

After that, you can add different push notifications and edit the content you want to display.

Go ahead and click the arrow at the end of the notification to see more options.

For each notification, you can change the notification title, message, URL, icon image, and more by expanding each notification. There’s also a preview of how your notifications will look in the browser.

If you scroll down, then you’ll find more options, like showing multi-action notifications. Here, you can show call-to-action buttons on the push notifications and edit their text.

There is also an option to enable notification duration. This allows you to set an expiration time for your notification.

Enable multi action and notification duration

PushEngage also lets you choose when to send each notification. For example, you can send the first notification immediately and select a different time for the following notification.

To select when you’d like to send the push notification, simply click the ‘Send notification’ dropdown menu.

To add another notification to the drip campaign, simply click the ‘Add New Notification’ button at the bottom.

Once you’ve added all the notifications, simply click the ‘Drip Settings’ button.

Next, you can choose whether you’d like to send the notifications to all your subscribers or a specific audience group that you create.

PushEngage lets you segment your subscribers and create different groups. For this tutorial, we choose the ‘Send to All Subscribers’ option.

Select user segment and activate autoresponder

After that, you can simply click the ‘Activate Autoresponder’ button to enable automated push notifications for your WordPress website.

You can then go to PushEngage » Drip from your PushEngage dashboard and see the drip notifications as ‘Active’.

That’s it! You have set up an automated push notification drip campaign for your site.

Now you will be able to get detailed stats on its performance in the Analytics section of your PushEngage account.

Set Up Automated Drip Notifications Using an Email Marketing Tool

Another way you can create automated drip notifications in WordPress is by using an email marketing tool.

We recommend using Constant Contact because it’s the best email marketing service on the market. It’s super easy to use and offers a drag-and-drop email builder.

However, the drip email notification functionality exists in all major email marketing platforms, including Brevo (formerly Sendinblue), HubSpot, and others.

You can set up email automation in just a few clicks and send email series to your subscribers with ease. Plus, Constant Contact integrates with WordPress plugins like WPForms and OptinMonster.

It even works with eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce and Shopify, so you can automate emails for new customers or help recover abandoned carts.

To start, you can visit the Constant Contact website and create an account. The best thing about using this software is that you get a 60-day free trial. This way, you can try out the tool before committing to a premium plan.

If you use our Constant Contact coupon code, then you can also get 20% off by purchasing upfront.

After creating an account, you can visit the Constant Contact dashboard to create a contact list.

Constant Contact will have already created a default list for you. However, you can create your own list by going to the ‘Contacts’ tab in the top menu and then clicking the ‘Create List’ button.

Next, a popup window will appear where you will need to enter a name for your list.

Simply click the ‘Save’ button after entering a name.

After that, you can add contacts to your email list.

You can manually add contacts by going to the ‘Contacts’ tab and clicking the ‘Add Contacts’ button.

A popup window will open with multiple options for adding new contacts.

You can connect your WordPress newsletter form with Constant Contact and start building an email list. For more details, see our guide on how to add email subscriptions to your WordPress blog.

Alternatively, you can manually create new contacts, upload a spreadsheet or CSV file, or integrate with lots of other platforms to import saved email addresses.

Now that you’ve added subscribers to your Constant Contact list, the next step is to create an automated drip campaign.

To do that, head over to the ‘Marketing campaigns’ tab and then click the ‘Create’ button.

Next, Constant Contact will show you multiple options for creating a campaign.

Go ahead and select the ‘Automations’ campaign.

From here, Constant Contact will show you multiple templates to choose from.

You can select a pre-built template and customize it according to your requirements or create an automation path from scratch.

For this tutorial, we will select the ‘Create custom path’ template option.

After that, you will need to select when your contact starts the path. Constant Contact will show different options.

You can go ahead and choose the ‘Subscribes for email’ option and then click the ‘Next’ button.

Next, you will have to enter a name for your custom path.

Once that’s done, simply click the ‘Create path’ button.

This will launch the Path Builder, where you can create an automated workflow.

By default, you will see the Trigger for your path. In this case, it’s when someone subscribes to any list.

However, you can simply drag actions and rules from the menu on the left onto the path. For instance, you add different actions like sending an email or sending an SMS to your workflow.

There are also different rules that help you customize your automation. You can add a time delay and specify when the next email should be sent. Similarly, there is a conditional split option that lets you set up Yes and No conditions and split the path.

You can also edit each action in the automated workflow. Simply click the 3 dots icon and select the ‘Edit’ option. For example, let’s edit the Send an email action.

Next, a popup window will open where you create a new email or copy an existing email.

Since we are creating the workflow for the first time, go ahead and select the ‘Create a new email’ option, enter a name for your email, and click the ‘Continue’ button.

After that, Constant Contact will show you multiple email templates.

You can also search for a template based on the occasion or use a blank template to create an email from scratch.

Once you select a template, the email editor will launch.

You can add different blocks to the template, edit existing text, customize the design, and more.

When you are done, simply click the ‘Save & Close’ button at the top.

You will now return to the Path Builder in Constant Contact. Go ahead and finish your automation path by adding as many actions and rules to your path and editing each one of them.

After creating an automated workflow, you can simply click the ‘Activate’ button at the top.

That’s it! You’ve now successfully launched an automated drip notification campaign using an email marketing tool.

Bonus: Grow Your Email List in WordPress

In the second method of this tutorial, we showed you how to set up email drip notifications. But before you can send out your emails, you will need a list of subscribers.

Here are a few tips to grow your email list:

Use OptinMonster to design multiple email newsletter signup forms and exit-intent popups to target users before they leave your website.
Offer content upgrades like PDF downloadable files, podcast transcripts, and blog post checklists in exchange for email addresses.
Run giveaways and contests using RafflePress, where readers must provide their email addresses to enter the competition.

For more ideas, you can see our complete guide on how to grow your email list. You may also want to read our article on how to start an email newsletter to help you design better email campaigns.

We hope this article helped you learn how to set up automated drip notifications in WordPress. You may also want to check out our expert pick of the best WordPress plugins to grow your business and our ultimate WordPress SEO guide to improve your SEO rankings and get more traffic.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Set Up Automated Drip Notifications in WordPress first appeared on WPBeginner.