Most marketers understand the importance of email campaigns, but many don't know that combining them with push notifications can multiply conversions and revenue. Nowadays, the competition for your users' attention is tough: multiple brands send them emails every day. That's why, in order to have your messages read, your marketing communications have to be omnichannel.

Strengths & Weaknesses of emails

To build effective customer communications, you have to understand the strengths and weaknesses that communication channels have. With that understanding, you can then craft campaigns that work to amplify the strengths and diminish the weaknesses.

Email remains a very popular way to interact with customers. It's not surprising; there are over 4.48 billion email users in the world. However, when communicating via email, it's possible to stumble upon such issues as:

  • Being marked as spam: getting into the Spam tab of your users' inbox is easy. Such emails are less likely to be seen (very few people check the Spam tab), which means lower open rates and fewer clicks and conversions.
  • Undelivered emails: bounces are very common. Determining the reason why your email hasn't been delivered can be difficult.

A soft bounce might occur because the recipient's mailbox is full, the server is down or swamped with messages, or the message is too large.

A hard bounce means an email has been returned by the recipient's mail server as permanently undeliverable. This can be caused by invalid addresses (domain name doesn't exist, typos, changed address, etc.).

  • Getting lost among other messages: sometimes users' inboxes can get really full. Not all people take time to study the received content, choosing to take a quick glance instead, and reading only the most important. That's how your messages can easily get ignored.

Besides, it's important to remember that the average amount of time it takes for a user to view an email is nearly six and a half hours. If you have a time-sensitive message, that won't work for you. That's when push notifications are a better solution: they’re delivered instantly to a user’s desktop or mobile device.

Strengthen your strategy with emails + push notifications combined

Emails + push notifications is the combination that our customers love to use the most. It allows reaching the users who ignored emails via short and hard-to-ignore push messages. Such notifications can also be automated and personalized, so you can be sure they are always timely and relevant.

👍 Push notifications can not be marked as spam, and they are much harder to ignore, because they pop up on users' screens, inevitably drawing their attention.

Besides, you can be sure there won't be any delivery issues, like the ones that can occur with emails.

If you need to deliver any type of limited-time offer, notify your users you’re hosting a live stream or a webinar, or deliver breaking news, push notifications are perfect. Sending a series of emails in advance to get people to register and to alert them is great. But, come the time of the event, sending a push notification will be much more helpful. It is this combination of messaging channels that will help ensure greater success.

How to send emails + push notifications in a campaign

One of the most useful tools that allows building email + push notifications campaigns, is Pushwoosh Customer Journey Builder. It's a visual drag-and-drop campaign builder that creates chains of push notifications and emails that get launched by a user's actions.

With Customer Journey, you can build automated behavior-based message flows that ensure you’re giving each user a cohesive, relevant experience. Such messages make the strongest impact and bring the most conversions due to their relevance and timeliness.

For example, let's say you want to greet your new users with an email that contains a special offer. If they ignore your message (or if they open your email, but don't use the offer) you can wait for some time (you specify the delay) and send them a push notification that will once again remind them about you. If they read the message and perform the required action, you can continue onboarding them by delivering a series of messages that contain instructions, tips, and best practices on how to use your app or website via emails and push notifications.

Explore what email features are available in Pushwoosh:

Or see Pushwoosh in action:

Sign up to Pushwoosh