There are less than 200 million active websites present today out of a total of 1.7 billion websites on the world- web-wide. A very small fraction of these websites use digital marketing tools to engage audiences. Today, we are going to compare the two best digital marketing strategies- push notifications and emails.

Push notification is relatively a new concept for brands as compared to emails which are long been used to market products and services.

So, what is push notification? How it is different from emails?

To make it easier for you to understand, we have covered the difference between push notifications and emails based on certain parameters as you will read in the table below

Difference between push notifications and emails

Parameter

Push Notification

EmailDefinitionA short and clickable message that user receives on their desktops and mobile devices.An electronic network that allows you to send and receive messages from and to mail ids.User Permission– A user needs to subscribe to the website using the opt-in push notification.

– To subscribe, a user needs to click on the ‘allow’ button on the notification that appears on the specific website.– The users need to share their mail Ids in order to receive email messages.

– There could be various ways businesses collect mail ids

For example, newsletter subscriptions, web pop-ups, downloadable resources, etc.Visibility– Push notifications are delivered straight to the user’s devices such as desktops and mobiles.

– The users will still receive the push notifications regardless if they are present on the browser or not.

– Therefore, the visibility is higher in push notifications compared to emails because of less competition for the screen space.– Emails are delivered to the inbox of the user’s mail account. Therefore, it’s up to users if they want to check the email or not.

– Business emails can land in the Promotions tab of an email account. Therefore, the visibility of emails is relatively low and requires multiple actions to get noticed.

– Also, there are many emails that a user receives in their inbox, therefore the competition is much higher to gain visibility.Content– The content for push notifications comprises three main components- Title, Description, and image.

– The push notification comes with the character limits for the content.

– Ideally, the title length varies up to 60 characters, the description could be up to 140 chars long, and the image should be less than 2 MB.

– Push notification copy, however, is short, but it needs to be competitive enough so that users click on it.-The email content comprises the subject line and message body.

– The major role in an email is played by the subject line which should be tested multiple times to fetch click-through rates.

– Emails give you the freedom to play around with content. You can add long descriptions, include multiply links and attachments, and so on.

– Emails have benefits over push when it comes to getting into details about your products/services and promotions.Use casesSome of the common use cases of push notifications include the following.

– Sending discounts and sales offers.

– Sending newly published blogs or content updates.

– Cart reminders for eCommerce platforms.

– Sending important news alerts and trending information.

– Sending job offers, and so on.Some of the common use cases of emails include the following.

– Sending daily, weekly, monthly marketing campaigns.

– Sending newsletters for the channels like webinars, podcasts, etc.

– Sending integration guides or other important information regarding product updates and features.

– Driving customer communication, etc.Best toolsThe best tool to send push notifications is Truepush.Truepush is a free push notification platform in the world which charges only for the subscriber count (Free up to 1 lakh subscribers) and provides all the unlimited features that are expensive on other push tools.The best email marketing tool is Mailchimp.

From creating campaigns to tracking them, you can automate all the email strategies using Mailchimp.

If you are worried about the push notification cost, join Truepush a free push notification tool. Websites can push unlimited notifications with access to advanced features like personalization, segmentation, and triggers. But if you want to have email service for your website check services like MailChimp, Sendinblue, Mailerlite, and many more.

Push notifications and emails are different in their own sense with different intent and features. However, the main objective of using these two modes of communication is to engage the users, retain them, and boost conversions.