Today, in total, web push notifications are installed by roughly 360,000 websites. Media giants like The Hill and Business Insider, with more than one million monthly visitors, use news push notifications to maintain their readership and increase reader engagement.
The Business Insider push notifications
How does it help their business?
In this article, you will find the answer and the best practices for news and media websites to boost reader engagement and website traffic. Also, here we provide a guide on how to set up push notifications if you are running a news website.
How to start sending news push notifications
First, let us see how to set up and start sending notifications from your news website.
You may look for a push notification service all over the internet for hours or set up the Gravitec.net push notifications service, which is the best fit for news and media websites.
You can install the Gravitec.net WordPress plugin or if you use any other website-building platform, register by this link.
Registration in Gravitec.net
Suppose you have installed the Gravitec.net push notifications, and now we can set up the service together.
Opt-in prompt
After you have finished the installation and checked whether you see an opt-in window on your device, your website is ready to get subscriptions.
You do not need to do anything else until you get subscribers in your base. It will take up to one to three months to convert 10-15% of your monthly website traffic to push subscribers. However, you can start sending notifications right after you get your first subscriber if you need.
Here are two essential points to not forget about before sending your notifications.
- Once you have decided to send notifications, hold on a minute. First, segment your subscribers. We will discuss this in detail later in the Best practices chapter.
- Secondly, set up the automation features. It is not only for saving time but also for correlating your notifications with reader interest. Which automation to set up and how to use it properly? It is also in the Best practices chapter; scroll down to set up automation.
After you have set up segmentation and automation features, your readers will be automatically informed about the latest news. You are free to manually send special notifications to all subscribers or some groups of readers. Nevertheless, even without these special notifications, your push notifications strategy is good enough to boost your website traffic by at least 5-10%. Why are we so sure? See some cases of news and media websites that use Gravitec.net.
News and media websites cases
- News websites from Latin America with 5.8 million visits per month — Prensa Libre and Minuto30 — use push notifications by Gravitec.net since 2019. With the service, they have increased the number of visits to both websites by 300,000 per month. It became possible with the RSS to Push feature. It informs readers about the latest news once it has been published on the websites. You will find detailed information about these cases by this link.
- A scientific journal from the Netherlands with 1,5 million readers — Scientias.nl — has purchased the Gravitec.net Lifetime Deal on AppSumo. Note, that the website has the Gravitec.net WP plugin installed, and the news is sent through the RSS to Push tool from the WP dashboard. As a result, the website team got 200,000 additional sessions per month. The details are here.
So, push notifications on websites from Latin America attract roughly 5% of their overall traffic, while the website from the Netherlands gets 8% of their website traffic with web pushes.
Best push notifications practices for news and media websites
We are ready to review best practices for news and media websites that will bring you more traffic and value when you use push notifications.
- Bell widget. It is a must if you want to let your subscribers communicate with you. With the bell widget, your subscribers can choose categories of your website to get notified about them. Also, they can see their notifications history and, if needed, return to a particular notification. Additionally, those readers who had blocked notifications previously can click on the bell widget to re-subscribe.
Bell Widget Configuration
- Segmentation. As mentioned above, you need to segment your subscribers to meet their interests. Otherwise, you will have a high bounce rate. To segment subscribers, there are filters and custom tags in the Gravitec.net service. Filters let you create groups of subscribers by browser, country, city, language, and operating system. At the same time, custom tags are set up via RESTful API to identify visitors with specific behavior, such as visiting some website category or page.
Segmentation options
- Automation features. In the Gravitec.net dashboard, you will find five automation features: Welcome Message, RSS to Push, Tweet to Push, Push Digest, and Drip Campaign. You might wish to use all of these features or choose one or two. The most popular features among news and media websites are RSS to Push and Push Digest. As you might already know, RSS to Push lets you automatically inform your readers about your new posts. Push Digest allows you to send only the most popular news to your subscribers.
Automation options
What not to do?
Do not you love John Oliver with his show Last Week Tonight? Anyway, he knows what push notifications look like, and in the video, he points out how push notifications shouldn’t be used.
So, yes, you need to think twice before sending notifications that do not fit your reader interest. That seems disturbing and even abusive if you send too many messages with no particular use.
How to avoid such a scenario? Use the above Gravitec.net astonishing features and get the best from the service.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at support@gravitec.net.
