How Push Notifications Drive Audience Engagement with Quick, Snackable Content

Engaging audiences seems to become increasingly difficult every day. With so many channels and new ones constantly emerging, it’s hard to know which is most effective for reaching your target audience. And the one that’s best today may not be tomorrow, as consumer behavior shifts.

Adding to the challenge, there’s a major trust problem across some of the most popular channels, especially social media. Despite being a popular source of news and information, up to 80% of consumers say they don’t trust social media at all. Add to that the rampant amount of counterfeit advertising fraud, and it’s easy to see how this creates a trust problem for brands.

Not to mention, there’s a tremendous amount of competition for consumer attention. There’s a lot of noise out there and it becomes overwhelming for a lot of us. So much so that Apple’s new iOS 15 now includes several feature designed to cut down on distractions by curbing notifications so that we can finally get a break and maybe even get something else done besides stare at our phones.

At the same time, consumers have no patience for irrelevant clutter. They want personalized content and messages that feel like they’re created just for them, on their own terms and timeline. In order to cut through the clutter and give consumers what they want, marketers need some way to deliver that just-right, just-for-me experience.

Browser-based push notifications have emerged as one of the most effective channels for meeting digital audiences’ expectations with trustworthy, personalized content they actually want to receive. Publishers love push for its ability to deliver quick, snackable content that drives organic traffic back to their site. In fact, some 70% of consumers say they already do or would subscribe to publishers’ push notifications to keep up to date on the content that matters most to them.

What makes push notifications so attractive? First, they’re timely, with instant delivery that plays right into our human nature to want to be “first to know.” Second, they can be personalized and curated. By tracking audience engagement with the push notifications they send, publishers can fine-tune their content recommendations to deliver only the most relevant content to each subscriber. Finally, for publishers, push drives organic traffic directly to their site, where they can monetize that traffic to drive revenue from brand partners like you.

Farmers’ Almanac is a great example of an “old school” publisher using this “new” push notifications channel to drive revenue. By sending out personalized push messages, this 200-year-old publisher was able to breathe new life into its evergreen content by distributing one article via push per day, based on subscribers’ interests. They’ve also added one monetized push per day.

“Because we’re able to send content that caters to a readers’ particular interests, instead of generic batch-and-blast content, our click-thru rates and traffic on our website have both increased,” said Frank Pagano, digital marketing manager at Farmers’ Almanac. “Plus, we can track what each user engages with, and what they don’t, to continuously refine our content recommendations and timing. It’s become one of our most stable revenue streams, boosting revenue from our email and push programs alone by 110% a month, and we’ve had very, very few complaints from among our 500,000 push subscribers.”

For brand marketers, the audience appeal of push provides a powerful opportunity to engage new audiences. By partnering with a publisher that offers sponsored push notification programs, marketers can reach a highly-engaged audience. Because there’s a conveyed trust—audiences trust and click on advertising they see in publications they trust—marketers can take advantage of this captive audience to drive higher engagement.

For publishers with push personalization systems in place, your content can be customized for subscribers based on their known interests. Because sponsored push campaigns are CPC-based, they’re also extremely economical—unlike web ads where you pay for views regardless of engagement, with push, you only pay when a subscriber takes action.

Brands can also leverage the power of push for themselves, as well. With collateral and lifestyle content such a critical part of audience engagement these days, many brands have also become publishers in their own right, through blogs, vlogs and social content, for example. Marketers can push their own branded content to subscribers over a channel that captures their attention and creates an urgent, can’t-miss feel that drives engagement. And by leveraging known audience behaviors, purchase history and interests, you can also personalize those notifications to ensure subscribers get only the most relevant content.

With their quick, snackable content delivery, push notifications have become one of the most powerful channels for direct, 1:1 audience engagement, cutting out the middleman to amplify trust and data insights. By partnering with publishers to push sponsored content, or pushing their own content out to existing subscribers and customers, brand marketers can overcome information overload to drive increased audience engagement.