Jul 11, 2023
Push notifications are a great way to engage your customers via their web browsers or mobile devices as they:
And with the long-awaited launch of web push for iOS and iPad devices, push notifications will only become more popular with marketers looking to maximize their budget and find new ways to drive revenue.
For years, most push notification tools were simple point solutions focused only on web or mobile app push.
They couldn’t take into account how customers interacted with the brand on other channels and couldn’t give brands a clear view of the entire customer journey. This led to push notifications being used as an isolated channel, preventing marketing teams from maximizing their potential by integrating them with their other channels for a seamless customer experience.
Fortunately, today some push notification solutions can help you overcome this issue by:
In this guide, we’ve gathered the 11 best push notification software tools and will explore their key features, use cases, and other supported channels.
Here are the tools we’ll discuss below:
Insider
Braze
Iterable
OneSignal
CleverTap
Pushwoosh
VWO Engage (formerly PushCrew)
PushEngage
iZooto
WonderPush
PushAssist
Make the most out of your push notifications (and your other marketing channels) with Insider
The first six platforms bring lots of marketing channels—like push notifications, email, and SMS—under one roof and have data aggregation, automation, and personalization capabilities. This makes them a better fit for fast-growing mid-sized companies or enterprise businesses.
The final five are simpler solutions that focus mainly on web and mobile app push. They’re more suitable for small businesses that are just getting started with push notifications and don’t need to integrate them with the rest of their marketing channels.
Insider unifies your customer data and lets you personalize every touchpoint customers have with your brand—from your push notifications to your website, mobile app, email, SMS, WhatsApp messages, and more.
To learn more, visit our website or schedule a demo with our team.
Insider brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities for web and mobile app push notifications, as well as for other channels like on-site, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and more.
This broad channel support and advanced personalization can help you save time, effort, and resources by:
Over 1200 brands, including the likes of AVON, Toyota, and Adidas, use Insider to aggregate their customer data, reach customers on every touchpoint, and maximize their marketing spend.
For example, here are some of the brands that used our push notifications to improve key metrics like conversions, revenue, and cart recovery rates:
Insider also ranks as the best and easiest to use personalization software in G2’s rankings (and is also the leader across categories like customer data platforms, mobile marketing software, and more).
In the next section, you’ll see how you can Insider to:
Insider helps you grow your push notification lead database with engaging and compliant opt-in templates. Setting them up on your site is super simple, enabling you to start growing your subscriber base with targeted pop-ups in less than an hour after deploying Insider.
Once you have enough users who’ve agreed to receive push notifications, you can take advantage of:
You can easily create any of these push notifications using a simple drag-and-drop editor. Plus, there are tons of push message templates available for different use cases, like welcoming new customers, promoting newly arrived products, getting their contact info (email, phone number, etc.), and much more.
Insider supports six different types of web push notifications:
Every one of these is quick and easy to create with our drag-and-drop editor shown below. You can use the editor to:
You can just as easily adjust the call-to-action button text and where they lead (e.g., your homepage, a product page, and so on).
Overall, Insider’s simplicity, versatility, and personalization capabilities have made web push into an essential channel for many of our customers:
“The ability to personalize content and promotions with Web Push has also been a game-changer. We have been able to send push notifications that are tailored to each customer’s interests, leading to higher engagement rates. These two products together have helped us see a 14.5% increase in conversion rate.”
When it comes to mobile app push notifications, Insider lets you choose between eight different types, organized into two categories:
1. One-off app pushes
2. Automated app pushes
The mobile app push editor is very similar and just as easy to work with as the web one. As you can see below, it lets you:
With app push, you can also change the notification sound. This is a nice touch in terms of providing a unified customer experience if your brand is already known for a specific sound.
You can also:
Lastly, you can easily track the results of your push campaigns (as well as any other channel you’re using) with your customizable dashboards. Besides metrics like clicks, CTR, conversions, and revenue, our software also tracks which touchpoint combinations produce the best results so you know which channels to pair with your push notifications.
Like all other marketing channels and tactics, push notifications rely on accurate user data in order to achieve the best results.
But for many brands, that data is scattered across disconnected solutions, like:
As a result, many brands use push notifications as an isolated channel, without taking into account user behaviors on other touchpoints. This leads to an inconsistent customer experience and missed revenue.
That’s why Insider comes with a built-in Customer Data Platform (CDP).
Our CDP aggregates your customer data from any online or offline source into a single database to give you accurate, 360-degree profiles of your customers. These profiles contain everything you need to run personalized marketing campaigns, including customers’:
Once Insider is set up, our CDP continuously gathers new behavioral data in real-time to make each profile even more accurate.
Note: If you’re not familiar with CDPs and their importance for today’s digital marketing teams, check out our detailed article on the 7 best CDPs.
With your data aggregated, you can easily create highly targeted segments for your web and mobile app push notifications.
For example, you can choose from pre-made audiences of users who abandoned their carts, abandoned a product page, interacted with your brand on a specific channel, and many more, as shown below.
You can also leverage the power of AI to target users based on their:
In short, Insider’s powerful segmentation helps you zero in on the right target audiences for your push notification campaigns. For example, you can use our segmentation capabilities to:
You can also save your segments and reuse them when creating new push notification campaigns, as shown below.
For more details, you can check out our in-depth guide on the importance of marketing segmentation.
Thanks to Insider’s data aggregation capabilities and broad channel support, you can personalize every customer touchpoint, including:
In short, with Insider, there’s no limit to what you can personalize. Every touchpoint in the customer journey can be tailored to each customer’s behaviors, preferences, and interests.
As you can see, Insider can help you reach leads and customers on all kinds of channels.
You can also take things further by tying each touchpoint on every channel into a consistent customer journey with Architect—our cross-channel journey builder and marketing automation tool.
Architect lets you:
Here’s how:
First, you can trigger customer journeys based on:
Price drops and much more.
You then use a drag-and-drop editor to select how each journey unfolds, i.e., how long Insider waits between interactions and which channels it uses to reach users.
For example, say you have a segment of regular customers with a high discount affinity who visited your site without buying anything. You can have Insider send them a web push notification with a small discount 15 minutes after they leave the site. If they still don’t convert, you can follow up with personalized emails, SMS, or WhatsApp messages.
If you’re not sure which channels would work best, you can:
Just like with the push notifications, you can rely on our STO feature to send each message in the journey at the correct time.
Overall, Insider’s combination of AI-powered automations, broad channel support, and advanced personalization features ensures you’re always sending the right messages to the right audiences at the right times on the right channels.
For more examples and a deeper dive into the topic of marketing automation, check out our articles on:
Braze is a customer engagement platform for:
It also has data aggregation, dynamic segmentation, A/B testing, and marketing automation capabilities, as well as limited on-site and in-app personalization features.
Suggested reading: Top 12 Braze competitors and alternatives for cross-channel marketing.
Iterable is a cross-channel marketing platform. It supports web and mobile app push notifications, email, and SMS. It also has tools for centralizing customer data, segmenting users, and automating campaigns. However, Iterable doesn’t offer an on-site personalization tool, so it can’t help you improve website conversion rates by delivering relevant on-site experiences.
Suggested reading: 10 Best Iterable competitors and alternatives in 2023 (in-depth look).
OneSignal is an email, SMS, in-app messaging, push notification platform. It has various segmentation capabilities for targeting the right customers. It also helps brands build automated customer journeys and deliver relevant content through basic personalization.
CleverTap is an omnichannel user engagement and retention platform. It’s traditionally been focused on mobile engagement and retention with features for real-time analytics, A/B testing, lifecycle optimization, and journey orchestration. In terms of channels, CleverTap supports web and mobile push notifications, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and in-app and web messaging.
Pushwoosh is a cross-channel marketing tool for push notifications, in-app messaging, email, SMS, and WhatsApp. It’s used by companies in industries like eCommerce, gaming, SaaS, and media. While it doesn’t have on-site personalization or data aggregation capabilities, it comes with useful features for brands looking to send targeted messages and build automations across Pushwoosh’s supported channels.
VWO Engage is a web push notification product. It’s a relatively simple tool that used to exist as a standalone product called PushCrew but was later rolled into the larger VWO platform. Besides push notifications, VWO also offers A/B testing, analytics, personalization, and data aggregation features, but it doesn’t support other channels natively.
PushEngage is a web and mobile push notification service. It’s a simpler tool compared to the previous ones as it only supports push notifications. It helps smaller brands send targeted notifications, segment their customer base, set up push notification automations, and A/B test different push notification variants.
Like PushEngage, iZooto is also a simpler push notification solution. It supports both web and mobile app push notifications, as well as Facebook Messenger notifications that help increase Facebook reach. It also has basic segmentation capabilities for targeting users based on their devices, locations, and interests.
WonderPush is a cost-effective push notification service for iOS, Android, and web that lets small brands send unlimited notifications for as little as $1/month. It has a simple setup and basic features that organizations can use to get started with push notifications and set up drip campaigns. It also integrates with various website builders and eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, WordPress, and Wix.
PushAssist is the simplest tool on this list as it only supports web push notifications. It offers basic scheduling, segmentation, and personalization features. This makes it a good choice for small eCommerce stores looking to engage their user base via Chrome, Safari, Opera, or Firefox notifications. There’s also a free plan for getting started, as well as dedicated OpenCart, Shopify and WordPress plugins.
Insider can help you create personalized push notifications that grab your customers’ attention and help you improve acquisition costs, conversion rates, and revenue.
You can also use our platform to:
Lastly, our easy channel integrations, experienced support team, and extensive template library for every channel and use case will ensure you get up and running as fast as possible.
Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.
Written by
Katie Morley
Katie is an award-winning content marketer with over eight years of experience in content strategy, development, and copywriting. As Global Content Director at Insider, she currently oversees content strategy across 26 regions. Fun fact: Katie read 64 books last year (for which she owes a long commute and two week-long holidays where she spent approximately six hours a day with her nose in a book).