6 immediate takeaways from PushCrew’s State of Web Push Notifications 2016

Web push notifications, as a channel, are a new entrant in the marketing communication space. And the data has just started coming in!

The year 2016 saw an increase in adoption rate of the medium. To understand this growth, PushCrew came up with a study that summarised trends, best practices, and future expectations from it. For those of you who missed it, I am highlighting 6 important findings from the study.

But before we begin, let me first tell you that this data comes from:

1. A consumer survey of 100 SMBs and 100 general website audience
2. A survey among 500 PushCrew users.
3. An analysis of 1000+ websites who installed PushCrew.

1. Small size organizations were quick in getting on board



Organizations with employee count of 25 or less make up for 60% of the web push notification users. This indicates that small organizations have identified the efficiency of this channel in terms of re-engaging their audience. On the other hand, large organisations form a meaty 9.5% of the pie. This points towards a larger trend in marketing technology where there are takers from bigger platforms as well.

2. eCommerce industry forms the biggest user base

With eCommerce market expecting a revenue of US$1.3b in 2017, it is evident all eCommerce players, big or small, would like to reach and re-engage their buyers before anyone else. This is evident from the finding that eCommerce takes up 21% of the entire user base of web notifications. The numbers are expected to grow in 2017.



3. Click through rates decrease as the subscriber count increases

An interesting finding from the survey is the inverse relationship that click through rates follow as the number of subscriber count goes up and to the right.



For subscriber count less than 5,000, the CTRs are good 10.85% but soon falls by 1% as the subscriber count reach the 10,000 mark. The falling trend continues with every 5,000 subscribers added.

4. Wednesday’s the best day to send a web push notification

A majority (16.40%) of notifications are sent on Wednesday that consequently record highest click through rate of 6.21%.



5. Click through rates decline with every extra push notification

The report found that with every extra notification sent, the click through rate changes, apparently the click through rates decline.



It indicates that users or receivers of the notification might be getting annoyed with so many notifications and hence a steady down and to-the-right graph. Limiting to sending one notification per day might help.

6. Increasing sales through re-engagement biggest expectation in 2017



When we asked the users about their future expectations from web push notifications, 29.57% of the people surveyed said that bringing their audience back to their website and consequently making a sale is something that they are expecting this new marketing channel should achieve for them.

This sets a roadmap for web notifications as a real-time marketing communication channel that not only promotes and advertises, but also effectively communicates with customers.

You can download the full report from here.