Small and medium business (SMB) and startups could face some difficulties when it comes to digital marketing. First of all, it’s time-consuming to launch marketing campaigns, and even after spending a lot of time and money you might find that nothing happens and your campaign is ineffective. Here we introduce you to web push notifications that is a marketing solution for startups and SMB that ensures quick results for affordable prices.
What are digital marketing tools?
Let’s clarify the meaning of digital marketing tools to be sure that we have the same thing in mind. So, a digital marketing tool is any online channel that serves for communication between a business and a potential customer. This includes social media, online advertising, emails, push notifications, and all kinds of text and multimedia messages. And, it could be tricky for an individual entrepreneur or a small company to use all of these tools simultaneously in a way that helps their business grow. On one hand, you need to know how each tool works and to control them, on the other hand, the budget matters, and you need the most affordable solution for your specific needs.
How marketing tools solve business problems
Next, we compare some marketing tools for small businesses. To do this, we compiled a list of questions that we assume an entrepreneur asks before choosing marketing software.
- What problems does a service solve?
- How effective is a service in solving the problems?
- How much does it cost?
- Is it necessary to hire a specialist to work with a service?
- How easy is it to implement it in my business?
Marketing tools for small businesses
We try to answer the above questions for four of the most popular marketing tools. Additionally, you will find our recommendations on which service to start with for each marketing tool.
Push notifications
- Push notifications solve surprisingly many tasks such as getting subscriptions, regularly communicating with your website users, and increasing return traffic. And the best part is that it doesn’t require any additional staff. You can install a service with a WordPress plugin or by adding a code, set up settings just once, and a push service will work automatically. Its average click-through rate (CTR) is about 15% and push notifications ROI is up to 2200%. To check how push notifications work, we recommend Gravitec.net as an easy-to-use service with the full set of web push features. Its prices start from $20 for 20,000 subscribers in a base. For this price, you can add unlimited websites.
Email marketing
- Email marketing is an online tool that helps generate and nurture leads. An average click-through rate for emails is around 3%. Many factors influence your email campaign’s effectiveness such as the design of your subscription form, your email content, and how it correlates with your subscriber interests. So, to manage your campaigns you need an email marketer or email marketing agency services that cost from $300 to $2,000 per month. Otherwise, you need to spend your own time setting up, launching campaigns, and analyzing their results. To see how it works, we recommend Brevo as a proficient and affordable email marketing service. Its prices start from $25 for 20,000 emails per month.
Online advertising
- Online advertising is a marketing tool for attracting new customers. The leaders of online ads in market share are Google and Facebook. To run an ads campaign you need to hire a PPC specialist who works with target groups and keywords, and is familiar with online ads services. The Statista forecast shows that digital advertising spending will reach $646 billion by 2024. However, studies show that the effectiveness of digital ads is overestimated, and a large amount of the budget is just wasted. So, you can’t guarantee that your money will be spent in a way that attracts new customers. To analyze your competitor’s activity in online ads we recommend the SpyFy service.
Social media marketing
- Social media marketing is a vast field of study and a multitasking marketing tool. Your Instagram or Facebook page could be platform for communicating with your audience and selling your products. However, you need to hire a social media manager with an average salary from $20 per hour. Plus, you need additional services like Hootsuite to manage multiple networks as well as time to build your strategy and wait for results.
Each tool from this list has its pros and cons and is more or less effective for your particular business. However, if you’re running an online store, a blog, or any sort of media website, we recommend starting with push notifications.
Five reasons why you should start with push notifications
Here are some arguments why push notifications are worth your attention if you’re running a small or medium-sized business.
Multitasking
Push notifications help cover multiple tasks and we compiled the list of the most requested.
- Generate website traffic. Push notifications pop up on a subscriber device pushing them to open your website. It’s the most straightforward way to attract visitors.
- Increase repeat visits. People who click on your push notifications return to your website each time when your web push fits their interest. This way your audience stays connected to your business whether you promote hot sales or announce your new blog posts.
- Boost sales. Roughly 70% of shopping carts are abandoned, and push notifications can help you convenience your customers to proceed with payment, giving that click-through rate for personalized push notifications is up to 30%.
- Inform readers instantly. Once you publish a new blog post or a new product, your subscribers receive a web push right on their device. With these visits, you get your new page indexed faster, show your new content to your loyal audience, and inform them about the latest news in the most instant way.
- Grow ad revenue. By increasing your repeat traffic with push notifications, your visitors see ad banners more frequently and are more likely to click on them. Plus, you can specifically promote your posts with ads and affiliate products to grow your ad revenue.
Simplicity
It takes just about 30 minutes to start sending notifications. After the installation, you can set up automatic campaigns and see how your website traffic grows without your efforts. You don’t need additional employees to manage your push campaigns, because notifications can be automatically sent from your RSS Feed or even from your Twitter account.
Here are five steps to start your push campaigns using the Gravitec.net service.
- Register on Gravitec.net, or install the Gravitec.net WordPress plugin
- Choose a pricing plan
- Add your website
- Set up push automation
- Set up the bell and permission prompt
Then click “Enable subscriptions” and start your push campaigns.
If your website is not WordPress based, register on Gravitec.net and choose from the other options to add notifications to your website.
Affordable price
An affordable price for a service makes a difference when you choose a product. However, you probably don’t want to pay a penny for something that doesn’t work.
Luckily, push notifications work while you’re sleeping and work great. Keep reading to find more information about their effectiveness. Meanwhile, you can start sending notifications for just $20 for 20,000 subscribers per month with Gravitec.net. And you’ll be able to use all push notification features including segmentation and automation.
Flexibility
When you run social media campaigns and online advertising you’re dependent on conditions and algorithms of third-party platforms. Even if you have a Facebook community you need to keep a finger on the pulse of Facebook updates to make sure that you will not lose it. With push notifications, you have more control over your campaigns because it’s direct communication without a third party. You can change your strategy at any time.
Along with a range of in-built push notifications features that are out of the box in your push service, you can customize whatever you want using REST API. And as your business grows, push notifications can serve it without any limitations for any number of subscribers. If you need to be in touch with more people, just upgrade your plan.
Effectiveness
The push notifications opt-in process doesn’t require any personal information from a subscriber. So, it gets subscriptions much faster than email opt-in forms. The average web push opt-in rate is roughly 30%, and you build your subscription base in just 1-3 months. You can send campaigns either to your all subscribers or to specific subscriber segments. Depending on this, your campaign CTR changes from 2% to 30%. So, with push notifications, you can additionally generate up to 15% of your current website traffic. And, with push notifications services like Gravitec.net, you have access to statistics to measure your results, and if needed can change your campaign settings.
Please note, that until July 1, if you get any of the Gravitec.net FIX plan, your payment will be credited to your Gravitec.net account.
If you have any questions about push notifications, please contact the Gravitec.net support team.
