PushCrew Review (After 20 Days Using this Push Notification Service)

PushCrew Review

  • Effectiveness (at attracting subscribers)
  • Effectiveness (Click through rate)
  • Ease-of-Use
  • Customer Support
  • Price
4.6

Summary

I’m still surprised at how effective PushCrew is at attracting subscribers and the subsequent click-through-rate of the push notifications. It’s one of the easiest traffic sources over which I have a great deal of control.

One of my favorite PushCrew features is the dialog box that pops up on the site to attract subscribers. It actually looks good. You can customize the text as well.

I also love how easy it is to send a push notification. It takes 30 seconds.

The best part is the click through rate of push notification messages is pretty high. I get 18% for my B2C site. 25% plus for Fat Stacks Blog. Other publishers I know with B2C sites are getting 20% plus CTR.

Complaint: My only complaint is that PushCrew doesn’t have an option to send push notifications automatically when new blog posts are published. This would make it truly passive traffic (my favorite kind). They tell me this capability is coming.

Yes it costs money for the good features, but it’s worth it if your site is reasonably well monetized.

It’s great for both B2B and B2C sites.

Click here for PushCrew.

There’s nothing like doing 30 seconds of work to send hundreds (or thousands) of visitors to your website.

[toc wrapping=”right”]I get excited just thinking about it.

That’s what PushCrew push notifications does for my sites.  It’s another extremely low cost, reliable and easy traffic source with a few clicks of the mouse.

While it’s not quite as good as passive organic search traffic, I’ll happily spend 30 seconds for hundreds of website visitors.  That said, you have more control over push notifications than organic search so in that way it’s much better.

Push notifications is one of the easiest, fastest and reliable traffic sources I have.  It’s growing in leaps and bounds for me.  The potential is nuts.

What is PushCrew?

PushCrew is a push notification service.  It’s cloud based, meaning everything to run the service is online via their website.

Once you sign up (I suggest use the free option to see how it goes for you), you add a snippet of code to your site and then popup subscription boxes will pop up on your site.  You can set when (up to 20 second delay) the subscription box pops up.

The popup box asks website visitors if they would like to receive updates from your site.  You can totally customize this text so you can say whatever you want.

The beauty of push notifications is to subscribe, visitors just need to click the “Allow” button.  It’s so easy for people to subscribe.

Here’s the Fat Stacks notification box:

PuchCrew Notification Box

Once subscribed, when you send a push notification, a small pop up box shows up on the device with which they were on when they subscribed.

Is PushCrew Easy to Set Up?

PushCrew is incredibly easy to set up.  It required copying and pasting a snippet of code plus customizing the pop up subscription box.  I added my logo too.  It literally takes 5 to 10 minutes.  No coding knowledge required.

Push Notification Stats Dashboard

Here’s a screenshot from yesterday’s push notification for my B2C site:

PushCrew Dashboard Stats B2C Site

In 20 days, I attracted 1,034 subscribers.  That’s approximately 50 subscribers per day.

At this rate, I’ll have 18,250 subscribers within in 1 year.  I think I’ll have more because I’m optimistic my traffic will grow.

My Favorite PushCrew Features

Send unlimited push notifications:  You can send 1, 2, 5 or more push notifications per day.  I don’t think you want to overdo it, but 1 to 2 times per day isn’t out of the question.

Popup Sign Up Box Delay:  I set my sign up boxes to delay popping up for 17 to 20 seconds.  I don’t want any distractions for visitors for the first 15 seconds upon visiting because that distracts from the ads (my main revenue source).

Decent customization:

  • Popup subscription box: You can customize the welcome text and button text as well as colors.
  • Push Notification:  You have full control over the text, links and you can add an image.

Multiple Browsers and Devices:   Works on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and mobile devices.

Benefits of Push Notifications

Traffic control:  You control the traffic like email marketing.  The more subscribers you have who like your site, the more traffic you can send back to your site or wherever you want.

No loss of ad revenue:  When someone subscribes, they aren’t taken off the page.  They just continue enjoying your site.   I set up PushCrew

Easy sign up:  Subscribers simply click a button to subscriber.  It’s less of a barrier than email marketing.

Fast traffic:  It takes 30 seconds to create and send a push notification.

Excellent CTR:  On average 18% of my B2C subscribers click through.  That’s better than email lists for the same sites.

High sign up rate:  I get more push notification subscribers per day than email subscribers on my B2C website.  That’s likely because the barrier is so minimal – visitors simply click a button.

Unobtrusive:  Now that I use push notifications for my site, I sign up to them.  I don’t find them terribly obtrusive.  They’re easy to close.  Most messages are fairly benign with a link back to the site (instead of a blatant marketing message… although you can push those too).

Almost no work for a lot of traffic:  It takes 30 seconds to create and send a push notification.

Creative Push Notification Tips

Use the Welcome Message:  Set up a welcome message with link that directs subscribers to an important web page on your site.  It could be to one of your most popular posts, an email sign up page, a course, an affiliate promotion, etc.

Offer a great incentive to subscribe:  By default, PushCrew simply asks if visitors want to subscribe.  However, you can offer an incentive like most websites do for email subscribers.  Then deliver the incentive with the automatic welcome message.

Add an image for B2C site push notifications:  Add images in the push notification because this results in a higher CTR.  I’ve tested this and my push notifications with images perform much better.  It doesn’t seem to matter for B2B sites.

Affiliate Marketing Option:  Since you can input any link you want, you can push out affiliate promotions.  However, be sure you follow merchant terms of service here.  For example, I wouldn’t push out Amazon affiliate links.  Moreover, I wouldn’t go too nuts with affiliate promotions because people will unsubscribe and/or ignore your messages.

Potential is Massive

I get giddy thinking about the potential.

Once I get 10,000 push notification subscribers (shouldn’t take too long), I can send 1,500 visitors to my site in seconds… every day or multiple times per day.  That said, there will be diminishing returns at some point.  In other words if I send 6 push notifications per day, I’m sure the CTR will drop quite a bit by message #3 on a given day for the most part.

Imagine having 100,000 subscribers.  Assuming a 15% CTR, that’s 15,000 visitors on almost autopilot… every day (assuming you publish new content).  That’s 450,000 monthly visitors.

How Much Does PushCrew Cost?

You can try it for free.  In fact, you can use it for free up to 500 subscribers.  That’s how I started.  I hit 500 pretty fast so I upgraded and was happy to do so because it was so effective.

The monthly cost premium plans depends on how many subscribers you have.  You can see the pricing *here.

For example, on the Premium plan if you have 20,000 subscribers, it costs you $150 per month.

PushCrew ROI (Hypothetical)

Is $150 per month worth it for 20,000 subscribers?

Let’s do the math.

Assume the following:

  • $6 RPM on your site.
  • 15% push notification CTR rate.
  • Push out 7 push notifications per week.
  • 1.5 page views per visitor.

20,000 subscribers X 1.5 page views/visitor * 15% CTR X 30 days = 135,000 page views per month.

135,000 page views at a $6 RPM is 135 * $6 = $810.  Yup, it’s a no-brainer.  That’s $660 profit/month for practically no work.  That’s a $660 ROI ($660/$150).

You’d earn more if you sent out more push notifications.

The above assumptions are not unrealistic.  I get an average of 18% CTR and have a higher RPM.  That means I’d profit more than $660 with 20,000 subscribers assuming CTR remains steady.

Do I have a free or paid plan?

I have a paid plan.  Specifically, I have the Premium plan for my B2C site.  I’ll be upgrading for Fat Stacks too.

I started with the free 500 subscribers and quickly upgraded because I wanted it to serve mobile as well (plus I hit the 500 freebie limit pretty fast).

=> Click here to try PushCrew for free

4 thoughts on “PushCrew Review (After 20 Days Using this Push Notification Service)”

  1. I subscribed to push notifications for Fat Stacks a while ago and love the idea, but one question for you Jon. I don’t want to have two popups on my website and currently my email subscription rate is about 1.5% with a click through rate of 8-25% depending on the email. Is getting these push subscribers worth eliminating an email subscription pop up in your opinion? Or can you offer this service along side an email sign up?

    1. Hey Ryan,

      I offer push notifications along with email subscriptions. Some people may prefer receiving info via push while others via email. Let them choose. Also, they can easily unsubscribe from either or both so I figure give visitors as many options as possible.

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