Publishers are always looking at ways to drive traffic. If you are a publisher, I’m sure you nodded while reading this. While there are multiple channels that can be used to drive traffic, most of them have strings attached. The organic channel is heavily influenced by Google’s algorithms, while social media has its own limitations. Push notifications and email newsletters are two channels that give publishers complete control.
If you are a publisher looking to securely grow your audience using these reliable channels, our comprehensive list would help you decide. Our curated list has the best push notification services and providers that cater to news and media publishers.
Why Publishers Cannot Ignore Push Notifications
Publishers have traditionally relied on Google for their traffic. While this method of optimising for SEO and outranking the competition did work, it wasn’t assured that Google would send traffic your way all the time. It also resulted in flyby visitors; readers who visited your website, consumed content, and bounced off without any guarantee of ever returning again.
Push notifications help publishers to convert these flyby visitors into subscribers, their owned audience. These subscribers can be reached at any point, giving publishers the opportunity to share meaningful updates and drive traffic instantly.
The right push notification provider should enable you to engage with subscribers at the right time, help segment your audience, and even monetize your subscribers to help generate some additional revenue. We looked at these criteria when curating this list.
Checklist For Picking The Best Push Notification Provider
Push notifications are used for different applications, they are implemented for quick commerce, e-commerce, ticketing, publishing, and a lot more. As a result push notification providers build their service for a wide variety of applications. It is in your best interest that you pick a provider specialised in your niche. But how do you identify which one suits your niche the best? Here are certain features that you must look for when finalising a push notification service as a publisher.
- Advanced Segmentation Capabilities
- Ability to automate push campaigns
- Integration Support for your CMS
- Custom opt-in prompts
- Cross-browser support
- A/B Test Push notifications
- Detailed Analytics and reporting
- Monetization support
Best Push Notification Services and Providers for Publishers
1. iZooto
iZooto is a push notification provider catering primarily to news and media publishers. This is evident from their client list of top enterprise publishers from around the world. This web push notification tool is preferred by enterprise publishers for its ability to push over 17B push notifications in a single day. iZooto also offers other audience marketing tools that cater to publishers, making it our first pick.
iZooto can be integrated with a wide range of CMSes right from WordPress to even custom CMS built by news publishers. For WordPress-based publishers, iZooto offers a plugin making it a one-click process from install to pushing your first notification.
Publishers using iZooto have been able to successfully convert their visitors into subscribers and drive additional pageviews to their website. Popular Indian publisher Lokmat was able to gain 44M pageviews using web push notifications. For news publishers with an app, iZooto also offers app push notifications which makes it effortless to push notifications to subscribers on both web and app subscribers.
Unlike other push notification providers, iZooto offers additional engagement tools such as on-site interactions, email newsletters, and News Hub. These tools make iZooto a full audience marketing suite for news and media publishers.
Features
Ability to push web notifications at a massive scale.
Monetization features for news and media publishers.
Other audience marketing and retention tools tailored for publishers.
Playbooks catering to publisher needs
Pricing
Monetize Plan : Free for life for unlimited subscribers
Rise plan: $85/ month for 3 websites, unlimited notifications
Grow Plan: $250/ month with advanced segmenting and targeting features.
2. OneSignal
OneSignal positions itself as a customer messaging and engagement solution. It offers email, mobile, and web push notifications, in-app messaging, and SMS. It offers cross-channel messaging, which makes it ideal for businesses looking for a single solution for multi-channel marketing.
Setting up OneSignal is easy, and it works with multiple CMSes and eCommerce platforms. It has advanced segmentation and personalization options and great segmentation settings to create personalized push notifications. If you are looking for a single product to help you with omnichannel marketing, this tool does the job.
OneSignal offers a free plan that offers unlimited push notification sends but it is capped to 10,000 subscribers, post which you have to $4 per 1000 subscribers under its Growth plan, While the Enterprise plan would be ideal for big publishers, the details aren’t known. But the price of $4 per 1000 subscribers will be steep for enterprise users
While OneSignal is a popular and powerful tool, it presents specific drawbacks that make it less than ideal for publishers, particularly concerning cost and feature limitations:
- High Cost for Publishers: The paid plans are considered too expensive for publishers. As your subscriber base grows, the cost significantly increases; for instance, it costs $340 for around 100k subscribers. The paid plans start at $19/month for up to 10,000 subscribers, charging an additional $4/month for every 1000 subscribers over that limit.
- Feature Limitations: Some advanced features may require a higher-tier plan, and the free plan has limitations on certain functionalities.
- Fewer Automation/Personalization Features: OneSignal has fewer automation, personalization, and customization options compared to Push Engage and iZooto.
3. LaraPush
LaraPush positions itself as a self-hosted push notification software. It claims to be the best solution for users with no coding experience, and it highlights its pay once and enjoy unlimited subscribers model. This arrangement puts the onus on the publishers, which could mean an additional burden along with juggling editorial duties. It does claim no subscriber slabs and no limitation on sending push notifications. But it lacks monetization features that iZooto offers.
- Here are some of the features that LaraPush has to offer.
Unlimited Capacity: Since LaraPush is self-hosted, there is no limit on the number of domains you can host, collect unlimited subscribers, and send notifications without any limits. - Analytics and Segmentation: It provides advanced analytics, in-depth analytics, and valuable insights, detailed campaign reports for web and mobile phone push notifications, and easy segmentation of subscribers.
- Pricing: LaraPush only offers two plans, Startup and Pro, priced at $499 and $799 charged as a one-time fee.
LaraPush lacks monetization support. So while there is no limit on the number of subscribers you grow, there is no way to monetize them for some additional revenue. This could be a deal-breaker for enterprise publishers that have a huge subscriber base.
4. PushEngage
PushEngage is often preferred by bloggers, marketing teams, and content creators since it integrates with WordPress. It excels through its hefty marketing automation suite, which includes sophisticated tools such as A/B testing, drip campaigns, triggered campaigns (like abandoned cart notifications), and custom interactive messages. Its most significant features involve advanced segmentation rules and dynamic segmentation capabilities, which help deliver highly targeted messages based on specific user actions, thus boosting conversions. Moreover, it offers good reporting and analytics, allowing users to track campaign metrics and calculate the transactional revenue generated from push notifications using goal tracking.
These features make PushEngage a good tool for e-commerce and D2C websites, given its focus on consumer conversion. While some features are usable by publishers, most aren’t created with a news publisher in mind. This could cause you to pay for features that you don’t actively use, inflating your bill every month.
5. CleverTap
CleverTap is a comprehensive customer engagement platform that is suitable for businesses looking for an all-in-one solution. It offers a suite of other marketing tools alongside push notifications.. CleverTap excels in providing deep insights and advanced targeting capabilities for a more personalized user experience. It supports both web and mobile notifications, facilitating personalized and targeted messaging capabilities. The platform is designed to provide advanced analytics and segmentation options for sophisticated customer engagement. While the sources don’t provide a precise starting price, CleverTap offers various pricing tiers based on features and scale, requiring businesses to contact them directly for detailed pricing information.
Features
Clever tap Integrates push notifications with a suite of other marketing tools, and has support for both web and mobile notifications.
Offers advanced analytics and segmentation options, and provides personalized and targeted messaging capabilities.
However, it can be very expensive for small publishers since there is no monetization options either. CleverTap has a steep learning curve due to extensive features which might seem like an overkill for simple notification needs.
Conclusion
Choosing a good notification provider is important since a lot of effort is required in capturing and nurturing subscribers. While each provider on the list offers web and app push notifications,
iZooto is clearly the preferred push notification solution tailored for media publishers, specifically those managing content-heavy websites like online magazines and news outlets. While competitor platforms like CleverTap offer a comprehensive customer engagement suite that may be overkill for simple notification needs and can be very expensive for small businesses, iZooto provides specialized features dedicated to audience retention and revenue generation for content creators.
A primary benefit is the ability to retarget users across multiple sites, encouraging them to return and explore more content. Furthermore, iZooto offers an essential monetization avenue, allowing publishers to monetize their audience with native content ads through push notifications. This strategy has yielded strong results, with publishers reporting a traffic boost of up to 18% and an overall increase in revenue of up to 15%. By focusing on publisher needs, including features like multi-language support and highly personalized notifications, iZooto delivers measurable growth in traffic (generating 15-22% of their traffic) and revenue. This specialized approach ensures it meets the specific commercial demands of the publishing ecosystem more effectively than general marketing platforms.
