With a plethora of digital marketing channels available today, choosing the right one for maximum user engagement online can seem tedious. It is natural, sometimes even for the best digital marketing agencies with experience, to recommend the right digital marketing channel from Email Marketing, SMS, Push Notifications, In-app Messages, Web Messages, Browser Push Notifications and more, to their customers (Yeah, there are so many!). As an ecommerce business, it is important for you to understand the mutually exclusive use and impact of each channel before deciding the best digital marketing channel for yourself. Today, we have two contenders, Push Notifications - a powerful and popular means of mobile marketing competing against Emails - one of the oldest and more traditional channels of engagement with average open rates of 18% across online industry. Push notifications and emails both have their unique strengths as channels of digital marketing as they help communicate your message to your users efficiently. While these two mediums have some similarities, the methods and strategies used in email marketing are quite different than what is required to be successful with mobile push notifications.

Email Marketing

Digital Marketing Agencies and online marketers generally use emails to alert users of sign-ups, product updates, sales, offers, and weekly newsletters. Any online marketing activity which is not time sensitive is perfect to distribute via email. Periodically scheduled emails, such as a weekly newsletter, are one of the most effective ways to deliver quality content to your users and build trust. You can also control the level of user engagement which is available in your emailer by adding compelling personalized content and interesting visuals. Email Marketing is one of the most popular channels for digital marketing as it is very cost effective since user acquisition is a onetime cost. Once a user has subscribed to your mailing list they rarely opt out, as long as you are delivering quality content to them on a regular basis.

How do Push Notifications differ from Email?

Unlike emails, a push notification has a potential for spontaneous user engagement, since it is delivered to a user’s personal device such as a mobile phone or their tablet. Push notifications offer the ability to deep link to specific sections of your app, allowing your users to directly engage with a specific section of your product. Since a push notification can deliver limited amounts of information to users, it is important to focus on targeted information while conveying your message directly.

Difference between Email and Push Notifications

1. Length

While Emails give you an advantage of sharing both, a brief message or a detailed story, a push notification can accommodate 50 characters at the max. The length of the marketing message should be the key to select the right channel of digital marketing for your business. A delivery update can be a push notification but an order confirmation receipt should be shared via email. Shorter messages like promotional offers create more impact when sent as push notifications.

2. Urgency

Users react to push notifications faster than emails. Hence, urgent messages are best delivered as push notifications, while the not-so-time sensitive ones can go as emails. Content that requires immediate attention or action from your users such as ride booking confirmation, out-for-delivery update, payment status notification or a flash sale that is available for a few hours is meant for a push notification against a blog post update, newsletters, account statements, etc. that doesn’t require your users to view it immediately, are best sent through emails.

3. Campaign Schedule

Use your campaign schedule to decide which channel to use. Push notifications can be delivered any time but so can it interrupt your users, annoy them and uninstall your app completely. Whereas, you can send an email campaign at 7AM and expect your users to read it when they check their inbox later, but you can’t do that with push notifications.

4. Intent of the campaign

While both channels of engagement can be used to alert customers about a sale, or feature update, push notifications prompts additional action (app launch through the CTA) while emails can serve complete content by themselves. If your intention is to drive user action, then push notifications work better. The response time to emails is likely to be much longer than push notifications, so you need to identify what channel would give you a better marketing ROI based on your campaign intent.

5. Cost and Click-Through-Rates

Push notifications generally have a very high average open rate and users will have a strong chance of being engaged with your mobile marketing interactions. They also have a lower cost than email marketing campaign which implies that your overall ROI has the potential to be high, providing that you have strong campaigns. To get an overview on the correct digital marketing channels for your e-commerce business, connect with the panel of digital marketing experts at CreativeWebo. To book an appointment, visit the link here.