#48 – How To Take Advantage Of Website Push Notifications Before Your Competitors

What you will learn

  • What Push Notifications are and why they are relevant?
  • Dealing with the Push hate.
  • How Email and Push compare on our sites?
  • A word on unsubscribes.
  • How Push notifications influence traffic quality.
  • Our tool recommendations.

Push notifications are a fantastic way to engage users. Yet, few sites are taking advantage of this new technology. In this episode, we show you what to do and we share the results from our own sites.

Our Results:

ChannelOpt InCTR10k hits
AH – Push6%5-7%36 clicks
AH – Email9-11%1.5-3%20 clicks
HA – Push1.4%4-5%7 clicks
HA – Email1.2%1-3%3.6 clicks

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

Full Transcript

Gael: Hey guys, welcome to the Authority Hacker podcast, today I’m with Mark, how is it going Mark?

Mark: It’s going good.

Gael: Today we are going to talk about push notifications, are they the new email, are they complementary- I was going to answer it, push notifications are essentially these little notifications that we usually meant for your phone, but now they are also on desktop browsers and more and more sites are using them, and nobody is really talking about them, if it is other than trying to sell you some kind of tool because they get an affiliate commission, and we’ve been using them for about four or five months, and I thought it was time to actually look at the stats a bit and see how they work. We talked about the a little bit, and when we talked about the pop up updates but, I thought it was worth having a podcast about that. First of all, let me ask you Mark, how do you feel about them? As a user?

Mark: Okay, as a user, I think they are annoying and I don’t sign up to them even on our own sites. But, I think it’s really important to most of us who are listening to this podcast to remember that you are not your audience, and that it’s the same thing with opt in popups, I hate them, I think they are really annoying, but the fact is they just work really well. I kind of feel that that is probably the same thing going on here.

Gael: Here is a deal as well, you are running the email marketing for Health Ambition basically a 100%, and imagine if you had 5 times less subscribers per day, do you think you would make as much money for it?

Mark: Of course not.

Gael: Exactly. And, the thing is, I actually looked at the stats, people are like, yeah, I would never click on these, that is never going to work, etc. And as you said, people used to say the same stuff for opt in popups and the truth is, now they are basically the industry standard, right, most sites have them now. Even though it is really annoying, and especially on mobile because it kind of slows down your site, push notifications are definitely built more for mobile so they don’t do that and they don’t take the entire screen etc, but we’ll talk about that in a second.

First of all, I am going to talk about the stats. We are running them both on Authority Hacker and Health Ambition. What is interesting is actually the industries are very different obviously and I got quite different results, and I looked at three things essentially, the first thing I looked at is the opt in rate, how do people actually opt in to push notifications, what percentage of people, and I compared that with email. Then, I looked at the click through rate, so when we send a push notification what is the percentage of people that click through and get to the link that we’ve attached to it, versus how many people click through on the link we put in our emails. And after that, what I did to try to make this a little bit more so people can understand more what that means in real life for your business, I’ve kind of imagined that we throw 10 thousand hits to both websites, and I’ve looked at how many additional clicks per push or per email that adds when we send an extra email or push notification.

Let’s talk about the opt in first. On Authority Hacker, we have a really good email opt in rate. We have, depending on days, depending on where the traffic comes from if we are emailing the list, or if it’s coming from Google or whatever, we had between 9 and 11% opt in rate which is probably the best opt in rate I’ve ever had on on a website, quite a bit of margin and even compared to most people in the industry, I think we have at least double. We are doing a really good job at that. And so, I was like okay, it’s probably because of our branding and people like us etc, and we are doing a really good job. I was expecting push notification opt ins to be around the same, right; and actually, the push notification opt ins were only 6%, and it’s interesting because the push opt in actually shows up when a page loads so does the opt in pop up. I definitely have a feeling that in this industry, people are really trying to give that email, it’s not just because we are amazing, it’s because of the way the audience works. But when I looked at the opt in on Health Ambition, the opt in rate for email is much lower, we are around 1.2% of the all the traffic. If we only took new visitors and I am counting sessions as well, so people that come several times in 30 days etc, it adds up but it’s still showing me 1.2%. Which probably is closer to 2% for new visitors, but around that. And in push notification opt in was actually higher, a little bit, it was around 1.4% which you could say it’s almost similar but since there is not a very high percentage, it’s still extra 15%.

Mark: Yeah, and there is a lot of traffic so that is quite a big difference.

Gael: Yeah, it counts quite a bit, it’s 20, 25 subscriptions extra per day or something on the push notifications, right. On one side, on Authority Hacker we have actually basically 50 % more opt ins on email than we have on push notifications, and on Health Ambition which is more B2C site we have around 15, 20 percent more push notifications subscriptions than email opt in. But I think that is also probably due to the split of the traffic, so I’d say around 70% of the traffic on Authority Hacker is desktop, and 70% of the traffic on Health Ambition is mobile.

Mark: Yeah, I think even more than that now, but yeah.

Gael: I haven’t checked in the last six weeks or something but it’s usually around that. There is different industries and different platforms so it’s hard to tell which one is causing that, but it’s interesting to see that actually in terms of opt in on Health Ambition on mobile first, let’s say push notification already overtakes email in terms of opt ins. Now, I’ve looked at also the last 30ish notifications we’ve sent on both sites, and I’ve looked at the click through rate, so the people that clicked on the link. And, on Authority Hacker we’ve done quite a few especially for the launch etc, and the click through rate was between 5 and 7 percent for push notifications, right, which is pretty good, actually, because then I checked the email and it was between 1.5 and 3 percent of people who were clicking on the email links. Now we are talking up to 4, 5 times, 6 times, 10 times more clicks in percentage than from email. Actually then I took that and I run the 10K hit comparison, right, so 10K hit comparison is imagine you stroke 10 thousand new visitors to your website, how many extra clicks does that add to your next push notification or next email based on all these percentages. And even though there was basically 50% less opt in rate on Authority Hacker for push notifications, then there was for email, 10 thousand visitors, 10 thousand new visitors on Authority Hacker adds 36 clicks to our next push notification, whereas it adds only 20 clicks to our email. Which means, we literally get 1.5 times more returning traffic from push notification than from email, despite the fact that the opt in rate is basically 50 percent lower, which is quite interesting. I am not sure if the podcast is the best format to talk about all these numbers.

Mark: Yeah, what I’ll do is I’ll put this in a table on the podcast page when I publish it.

Gael: Two tables, very simple. Anyway, all that to say that it’s 50% more traffic on the site that is predominantly run by emails where people mostly signup with email so that is quite impressive and it shows that even the audience on Authority Hacker is definitely jaded about email marketing and push notifications and all that things that we do to keep in touch with people. And even that, it still works, it still works way better than email.

Mark: Why do you think that is?

Gael: I think, first of all, it’s newer and less people use them. Right now, I see a lot of sites that have the opt in, but they don’t even send any notifications, so many sites have email opt in but don’t send any email, but still, most people now starts to send emails. I am pretty sure some site owners even forget they have push notifications set up on their site, they just set up because it was an exciting new tool and they didn’t use it. I actually made a conscious effort to sign up to a bunch of them just to get a feel of how it feels, and so I think I am signed up to 20 sites, and to be honest, out of this 20 sites maybe 3 or 4 actually send notifications regularly and most people are quite afraid to send notifications I’d say if I get one a week, it’s a big deal. I think it’s an underused media and second of all, the notification you get it on your screen and you click on it or you close it, right, it’s basically you have two choices. And, whereas email, you can just let it stack up with the gazillion other emails you have in your promotion inbox.

Mark: That’s actually a really good point, I’ve never thought about that. I guess there is a certain thing you have to take the action or lose it forever, it’s the kind of choice.

Gael: Yes, it’s kind of like the [09:30 inaudible] for website owners, you need to get your screen real estate back, right. Whereas an email, you can just ignore it. And most of the time, I look at my promotion tab and I am just selecting everything, and I am just archiving it all at once, I am looking at the title, at the subject lines, and I click on whatever interests me which is one in 50 maybe, and then I archive the rest. I would imagine, especially in this industry a lot of people do that, and you can definitely feel it in terms of the amount of people that clicks through. I am going to give the numbers of Health Ambition but then we’ll talk a little bit about the quality of traffic as well. The numbers on Health Ambition I am just going to put the reminder here but there is going to be the tables on the website, the opt in was 1.4% for push notifications and 1.2% for email, and then I looked at the click through rates and the click through rate for email is depending on what we email between 1 and 3 percent. It’s a little bit lower on the lower rank than Authority Hacker, but quite similar actually, and the more we do email marketing, the more I feel that unless you have a really engaged and tiny list, the way we build our email list which is usually quite large, no matter what you email you get around that click through rate. But for push notifications, the click through rate was lower than on Authority Hacker it was between 4 and 5 percent, pretty much every time. But still, we are talking between 25 and 400 percent more clicks, which was also very impressive especially considering that we also have more opt in rate here, right? When I looked at the 10 thousand hit comparison, which is once again send 10 thousand new people and look at how many clicks that adds to our next push an email, the truth is the difference is not as staggering because the opt in rate is much lower for both things, but we also get so much more traffic that it needs to be tempered a little bit, but for the email it added 3.6 clicks for our next email, for 10 thousand visitors, and for push notifications it added 7 which is still, basically double the efficiency of email with push notifications.

Mark: Yeah, just one thing, it’s worth remembering that that is just for the next email or the next post.

Gael: Yes, we send hundreds of emails and push notifications in the next 6 months, so it’s 7 clicks doesn’t sound like a lot, but 10 thousand visitors per day we get it multiple times per day, and then on top of that we send these people dozens and dozens of emails and dozens and dozens of push notifications which all adds up quite a bit. But all we know, if you just look at how much traffic that pushes to your website, push notifications tend to work 50 to 100 percent better than email to actually just drive pure traffic back to your website. For all the haters out there, I really wanted to check the stats and look at how it’s been doing, and it’s not like we put it last week, we’ve been using it since March or something, it’s been a while so this is obviously getting bigger, we are getting slightly better numbers than at the beginning. Overall, I think it’s definitely a very exciting traffic source, especially if you are someone that stays in touch with your audience etc. Now, I want to talk about the quality of traffic, even though it’s not in the next point in the notes for this podcast, because there is a little bit of, it kind of rebalances itself, the time on site for people that come from push notification from what I’ve looked at for the last launch, for Authority Hacker was around 40% lower than the average time on site. It is more traffic, but it’s also slightly lower quality.

Mark: But, do you think that’s perhaps because they are actually using mobile more often than they are on desktop, percentage wise?

Gael: That’s possible, it’s also like in the ones I’ve checked, I’ve checked a lot of these stats came for the last launch on Authority Hacker, so we were also pushing the same page, therefore I can imagine some people were clicking and closing or maybe some people misclick, I can imagine some people with fat fingers try to swipe the notification and click on it or something. Also, it’s very easy to opt in on push notifications on our site it’s basically one click, so there is less commitment here, than there is for signing up for email, seeing the email in your inbox in the middle of all the other ones, opening it, reading the email, clicking the link.

Mark: I see what you are saying, I guess I maybe slightly disagree on that, I think all my emails are over in one place, I can sort of control it, but and this is just a personal thing, like push notifications, like oh I don’t know when and where they are going to appear, maybe it’s going to distract me, so I am more careful about signing up for push notifications than I am for email, but again, I don’t think I am the typical type of person.

Gael: That is quite interesting. Another quite interesting thing that we are going to talk a little bit about later is that for email, you get maybe 75% of your clicks in the next 6 to 12 hours, and then after that, for a very long time people still open your emails and click on the, right. You get that kind of long tail traffic that comes through.

Mark: Residual traffic.

Gael: On push notifications not so much actually. Most of the traffic comes right away and there is very little long tail traffic. And that is because it is tied to your browser, if your browser is open you will get it right away, and you have to close it or click it. In terms of the traffic, that is quite interesting that basically all of it, 95% of it comes within the next 6 hours, so and I quite like it and I’ll explain why in the second.

Mark: That can make it if you are doing time sensitive things like a launch countdown or something like that.

Gael: Thanks for ruining m next point. I tried to tease it but obviously we are not very good at that stuff. Before we actually go through that, I am going to talk about the different uses of push notifications later, but I wanted to talk a little bit about opting in, push notifications because actually there is different ways that you can opt in and it kind of ties back to the podcast we did not so long ago, which is the http versus https, why you should have https on your site before the end of the year and basically the short answer was because Google Chrome is soon going to show sites as not safe rather than safe when they have https they will say not safe if you don’t have it. And that could definitely kill your conversions and the trust in your website. But to get back to that, actually https also allows you to have a different mode of opt in for push notifications, if you only have an http site what you can do is you can have some pop up overlay very similar to opt in popups for email where it just says do you want to allow push notifications and when you click yes, it basically opens a real pop up on top now which is https and then people can allow it and it send the notification. And, if you actually have https on your site, it can be a browser notification which appears next to the lock on the http bar, and you can just click allow and in one click you are part, you are in the push notification which is reducing the number of clicks you need to sign up and actually it increases the opt in rate by a lot, especially because these opt in popups that start push crew and other services have designed are not looking very good on mobile and they are a little bit cumbersome. Whereas the native browsers that you get with https actually looks perfect on mobile, it’s very smooth and as a result you get a much higher opt in rate, in our case, when we switched, it basically doubled the opt in rate for push notifications, so it’s a really big deal. I would not even consider using them without https at this point.

Let’s talk about unsubscribes actually. One thing that I have seen, I’ve talked with Stewart from Niche Hacks actually, and he was telling me that he was losing a lot of subscribers every time he does a push notification, and we do get the same actually, we lose 2, 3 percent of the list every time we send a push notification, which can be scary for people who are newbies in this kind of marketing, with email, we will usually lose around like 0.2 so definitely a lot more but what seem to be the case, because your push notification is getting in the face of people, you get more clicks, you get more views of the notification, like email, you may get 5, 7, 10 percent open rate whereas push notification you essentially get 95% open rate and as a result, people opt out more. It’s not something to be worried about, it’s just part of the game for push notifications I think. I think there is lie one guy that emailed me that said I don’t know what you did but your website is sending me these notifications and I never signed up for them. And it happened one time, out of literally hundreds of thousands of push notifications sent.

Mark: That could have just been someone who is using his computer and forgot about it, or something.

Gael: I am pretty sure he was not on Internet Explorer because it’s not compatible but it’s someone that wasn’t very tech friendly. Cool, now let’s talk a little bit about providers and then we’ll talk about the actual practical uses for these push notifications. Providers are actually listed three, that is a lot more, it’s kind of like the wild west in push notifications right now where everyone is trying to be the next AWeber or whoever jumped into email marketing first, and launched their own first service company, I would even maybe have tried myself, but it’s a bit too late now. Anyway the three we are going to talk about is the first is Push Crew which is by far the most popular for online marketers these days, a lot of people use them, a lot of bloggers, personally, I find them expensive, they are as close as AWeber for push notifications as you can imagine, they have decent optimization for websites, but the day your email list, your push list rather gets big, it’s quite easy to get to the 300, 400 dollars a month for push notifications, which if you make money out of it is not a big deal, but it is quite of a price, they have no export option, which means that you are locked in with them forever. And, I don’t like feeling captive over a service like that.

Mark: If I recall did they have quite high affiliate payout as well, is that why a lot of people are promoting them? Kind of like Bluehost.

Gael: Yeah, that is how it works, basically, they make money out of you and they get bloggers not like us, because we obviously wouldn’t say that, but they get bloggers to essentially promote them and give them a large chunk of their money back. Which is why I am like not my model, that is why we are not promoting Blue Host, that is why we are not promoting AWeber, that is why we are not like- most of these companies are the kind of companies that don’t create a great service, but they just bribe bloggers to get the exposure and make money. It is definitely a service, I’ve tested the free version, it was alright, but it’s definitely overpriced.

The second one is the one that we use, it’s One Signal, it’s actually free but there is a little ‘but’ it’s like they actually use your traffic to essentially cookie for retargeting ads, so, the way they make money is that it’s free for you but if an advertised sees Health Ambition, he can say hey I’d like to be able to retarget the traffic from that site and they pay One Signal that lets them do that and essentially, they show advertising to our traffic. But, they show advertising in AdSpots anyway, like this people would see ads anyway. I just don’t think it’s a very big deal for us, it doesn’t really change anything, and essentially we can scale to unlimited for free and they actually have a dashboard that is more advanced than the one in Push Crew, despite the fact that we don’t pay; for example, there is an option I really like, that sends the push notifications not all at the same time, but it looks at the time zone of the person and it looks at when was the last time that they were on your website, and it sends it to them, over 24 hours at the time at which they were on your website which- because, you don’t really want to send a push notification at 2am to someone that is sleeping because then they are going to wake up, they are going to have 20 of them and most of the time people just clear the notification at that point when they wake up. You want to do it when they are active in front of their computer and so that is a really cool option for example. And there is a bunch of others, you can segment your list, you can if you want to go get advanced it’s actually pretty good and you also get support as well even though you don’t pay, so I like it.

Mark: It’s pretty good.

Gael: Yeah, they just show ads where people would see ads anyway, so it really doesn’t change anything for us. And finally, there is a new kid on block that I have checked out quickly, called [22:18 inaudible] it seems to be modelling after One Signal, I haven’t tried it, so I won’t talk a lot about it but essentially it seems like a lot of things are developing now what scares me with this is like a lot of these companies will probably disappear in the next two years, and so I like to pick a provider that lets me at least export my contacts unlike Push Crew that doesn’t, One Signal does let you do that because in cases like they close down I will be able to actually maintain my list whereas if Push Crew crashes financially, you essentially lose everything and it’s just not a good idea I think. That is my word on providers, obviously we recommend One Signal, we don’t make any money from it because it’s a free service, but that is the one we use. We tell you what we use.

And now we are going to jump into your part, that you spoiled for me earlier, which is when and how to use these push notifications. I think that it’s slightly different from email, and they are quite complementary and there is something we are going to talk a little bit after about shotguns versus sniper rifles after. But, first of all, the first way we were using it at the beginning is like it was on Health Ambition when we started, we had daily post and we were just sending a daily push notification like we did email, and email marketing exactly the same way, it’s the way you get the most clicks but also it erodes your list really fast, do you want to talk about how it works for email for you Mark?

Mark: Yeah. I mean, sending emails once a day or 5 times a week or something along that frequency in health Ambition at least, you are getting a percentage, half a percent, one percent, something like that they are going to be unsubscribing, but- it doesn’t erode your list that fast, I don’t think.

Gael: It erodes it fast at the beginning and then it slows down.

Mark: Yeah, because the people who want to unsubscribe, they will unsubscribe quickly, the people who don’t want to unsubscribe they will happily just keep receiving the emails in their inbox, even if they are not opening them but the are not going to unsubscribe. I am not saying that is a good thing, it’s just the stats on your dashboard are going to show a relatively low number. Whereas I think what you are saying is with push notifications is because they are always in people’s faces, they are going to unsubscribe.

Gael: Even though people that are interested, imagine if you receive the push notifications every day from me, no matter how much you like me [laugh] you would probably unsubscribe eventually, so because it’s more in the face of people it’s probably worth to be a little bit more subtle with them, which is also why a lot of people are afraid to use them at all, but there is a balance, one thing that we are thinking of doing actually, are B2C sites now on Authority Hacker because we don’t publish enough, is to make kind of like a page or a post that is not indexed, on the blog, and essentially make it a weekly recap of everything that is being published, essentially a list if the posts that have been published, and push that once a week or twice a week. This way it keeps the list engaged but they don’t get a notification every day but they get to choose their content. A little bit like an offer wall in affiliate marketing where you put a bunch of statements of what the products help with and you send generic traffic to that, like generic health traffic and you could say how to get rid of acne, how to lose weight, how to whatever. And you send generic health traffic to that and you let people segment themselves, based on the statement that corresponds to them the most. You can do the same with kind of around the post of your own content every weekend just push that. That is one way to do that.

The other way to use push notifications and that is the one you spoiled earlier is I am going to remind you a few times, is time sensitive offers and as I said, there is very little long tail traffic, so the problem with email when you email time sensitive offers is the guy that is on holiday or doesn’t connect to his work email or whatever, and we say hey the offer is closing down in 24 hours, and that guy is opening it two weeks later and he is like oh, I missed it, can I please join in etc, and it happens all the time, when we have these. Well, in that case because most people see the notification right away, it works extremely well, and we’ve used this for the AH Pro launch last time and every time I sent a notification I could literally see sales growing in the next two or three hours form that push notification, so if you think you can’t make money with them, you can make quite a lot, especially if you put a big timer on you page, that really works well.

Mark: I don’t think they are replacements for emails in that sense, more like a complementary thing though.

Gael: Good, you spoiled the next question. [laugh] Okay. One point I wanted to make before we jump on that, that is in the question section you will see in the notes, is that it also works for things that are not on your website, so if someone else is doing the launch and you can become an affiliate for them and they have a time limited offer, and maybe you don’t want to email or for whatever reason you can’t email which happened with our friend Tim for example in the last AH Pro launch, he was busy with structuring his email list or whatever, well he was able to send a push notification and actually make sales as well. It’s not because people opted in for your site, that you can only push pages on your site and as a result, it makes it really great for affiliate offers especially when they are time sensitive.

Another thing I wanted to say as well in terms of push notifications is it’s a good way to segment your audience, so it’s something we haven’t done a lot yet, but I’ve tried a few times and it worked, essentially, people sign up for the notifications from your website where they say just get notifications, you don’t have a lead magnet, it’s simple etc, and as a result, you can, when you release a new lead magnet, a new pdf, for people to download, you can actually push notification that opt in page, so you take people that are on your push notification list and you say hey download this free ebook about recipes to lose weight with juicing which is one of the ebooks we have on Health Ambition. And then, people land on the squeeze page essentially which is just a picture of the ebook and say put your email here to download the ebook, and essentially you put a bunch of people on your list really quickly, and you can have an automated email follow up for this people. You can quite easily put them into their segmentation the people that are interested in the ebook will get the marketing for it, the people that are not, will not get it, and I think that’s a cool way of using notifications and they essentially get a soft opt in at the beginning and then take the engaged people and push them further into one of your funnels.

And finally, two things, first of all, I think push notifications are also great for sites that don’t have time to manage an email list yet, because you don’t need to clean the email list, you don’t need to create the lead magnets like I talked about, so if you are a site that just is monetized with advertising for example, and you want to send a notification to people about your new content but you don’t really have anything to say to them via email, I think it’s also a great use of it and I know John Dykstra for example, he is focused a lot on push notifications right now for his AdSense sites because it gets more traffic for him which brings more money, and it’s also he doesn’t need to manage nearly as much as like writing a tweet when you send a notification, which I really like. And, the last one is, they are really good if you have a lot of mobile traffic, like we do on Health Ambition, you can see we get a higher opt in rate, and in January, opt in popups will get you penalized as well for the mobile index which is a completely different index form now on, and so the opt in looks really clean actually on mobile, if you don’t know what it looks like, go on Authority Hacker or Health Ambition to see what it looks like. The only thing though is that it doesn’t work for Safari on iOS, which means you are missing out on a lot of iPhone owner which are a lot of high net worth people as well so it is a big problem but I hope that Apple is going to implement that soon. That is basically all the uses for push notifications and now, we can jump into the question which is do you send the same offers via email and push notifications? What would you do? Would you send the same offer?

Mark: I mean, we did, didn’t we, when we did the Authority Hacker launch? It was the same general offer but I think the message timings and notifications were different.

Gael: The timing notifications usually, we used them for extreme scarcity, so we timed them, because we know there is very little long tail traffic, most people will click in the next three to four hours, we were able to send a push notification 5 hours before the close, right, whereas for email, we had to time it 24 hours before, even 48 hours before because you text to people to actually go through their emails and check it out.

Mark: Yeah, plus we were sending so many emails during those two and a half weeks, that if we had done that with push notifications, I am sure we would have eradicated our list completely.

Gael: Yeah, one thing I wanted to bring up, a little discussion I wanted to bring up, it’s not exactly about push notifications but it’s related, is that a lot of people they will listen to this and be like you are a bunch of spammers, you are sending us the same message across all these different channels etc we hate you, i would never sign up for your list again, goodbye, I hope whatever something bad happens to you. Someone is going to send me that email. But, what I want to say is that in terms of personality as well, I am personally a very introvert persona that doesn’t shout about whatever I do in the street, or whatever, like it’s not our personality to be like that; however, in our experience, when you have something to sell, when you have something to promote, when you try to do a very limited messaging to the most engaged people etc, I don’t know if it is because we are not good enough, it’s because it works better, but usually just shouting it as loud as you can, as many times as you can has always generated more sales for us, than trying to actually be measured with our messaging, and, I think it’s the way online marketing works these days, especially you see it on social media for example. Look at Twitter, people have to tweet every 5 minutes to get any kind of visibility, etc, it’s when you are promoting something you are fighting against the competition that is fighting for the attention of the audience, and the truth is you need to repeat a lot of times and push notifications are essentially helping with that and that is what I wanted to say.

Mark: Yeah, I think again, it comes back to the old marketing quote I think it was like “your audience needs to be exposed seven times before they buy” I think that’s totally irrelevant, but the principle behind it is still true today and the more channels like so email, or ads, retargeting, and push being another one, that you can expose your message to them, your brand to them, I think helps you get notice more, and certainly because not so many people are using push notifications at the moment that it is kind of golden opportunity to sort of get in early and start capitalizing on that.

Gael: Yeah, it just works, we really tried to talk about what works for us, it’s not necessary what we prefer as we said, you don’t like push notifications, you don’t subscribe yourself etc, and that is completely fine but when we look at the stats and what works, and if you really look at the stats I mentioned earlier, I mean, most of the time open rates we were talking stuff like click through rate we we talking like 5 to 7 percent for push notifications and like 3 percent for email, so most of the time the people that see these things are not even the same people, it’s just that even when you reach the audience, you only reach a very small part of them every time you send the message, so you need to not only use different channels, but repeat the same message several times, on each channel to reach a lot of people in your audience, and the really active people they will see the message several times, and well, we hope they forgive us when it happens, but, really a large percentage of these people they see it for the first time when you send the same promo for the fourth time. That is something that is counterintuitive and feels obnoxious because if you went in front of the same person and repeated the same thing like n times, then they would be like shut up, but that is not what you are doing, because people, you don’t reach this person all the time, like you say the same thing ten times and at best two times. And so it doesn’t feel like that much really.

Mark: Short version: do it.

Gael: Yeah, don’t be afraid of repeating your message across different channels and several times per channel essentially. And I think the funny thing is that I wrote this questions to myself, that is kind of very weird but I think that was a good way to expose the information, I think a lot of people are going to ask oh which one should I do first, should I do email first, should I do push notifications first; because of all the reasons I’ve mentioned earlier, especially for the sites that are monetized with display ads and so on, I would say actually push notification can even be put from day one on your website, even if you are not going to be using it a lot, just because it takes so little management, it’s like you put the code, you install it, One Signal has a guide if you are going to be using One Signal, and then it’s like writing a tweet, right, if you are going to be updating your Facebook page it takes less time to make a push notification. Because of that I would say put your push notification on your website from day one, you might not use it but that is okay, but email it’s really something that takes quite a bit of work especially because you have to do all these lead magnets, and optimization, and pop ups and it’s quite a bit of work to set up so I would not do it on day one, unless you start selling your product from day one, so yeah, push notifications first. And that is actually the end of my note, do you have any final words about push notifications?

Mark: Yeah, I just think the final takeaway or the sort of to do action list should be that basically everyone who has a site should be using this technology now, you should first switch to https, in order to do it, which is really simple by the way, and yeah, just get it going, even if you are not going to send any push notifications out for a couple of months, you can start building your-

Gael: Yeah, you will be happy like the day you find a good offer in your niche, or the day you decide to launch a product or something, you will be happy you have collected people for the last six months and you have like several thousand people you can reach right away, versus being like oh, I don’t know how I am going to be promoting that thing, I didn’t imagine I would be needing it or whatever, because it’s just the one time setup it’s worth collecting these people and then you can reach them again whenever you want which is really powerful.

Mark: Especially if you are using One Signal as well, there is no costs to doing this, it’s not going to cost you anything in tools, and the more people you get it doesn’t cost you any more.

Gael: Yeah, a large percentage of the money we make is from people we collect through this email list, through these push notifications, etc, I know it’s really more popular when we talk about link building and SEO but the truth is, if you just do that you won’t make a ton of money, you really need to collect your audience as well, and, that is by far the simplest way once you have set it up, to do that and to actually communicate with them, it’s much easier than email, and it produces basically double the results so yeah, do it, and I guess we are going to close it here so thanks for listening, and we’ll see you guys next week.