Crypto Marketing with Ty Smith
What We Use OneSignal For | Ep. 23
About this episode
Ty, TJ, and Kylie walk through OneSignal, a free tool for adding push notifications to a website or app. They explain how a single line of code turns site visitors into subscribers who can be re-engaged with automated messages based on how long it's been since their last visit.
The team shares how Coinbound actually uses it: a message after one week of inactivity promoting influencer marketing services, a different message after two weeks pushing a YouTube subscribe, and a rotating cadence after that. They report about 5% of sent notifications bring someone back to the site, which they frame as free traffic that most brands are leaving on the table. They also cover a real client case, a content creator whose blog visitors got nudged toward subscribing to his YouTube channel.
The episode closes with practical setup advice: OneSignal is free up to 30,000 subscribers before hitting roughly $100 a month, it supports A/B testing by splitting messages across subscriber segments, and it has an "intelligent delivery" feature that times notifications for when a user is most likely to check their phone. Data pulled from buildfire.com shows shorter messages win, with 10-words-or-less notifications hitting an 8.8% click-through rate compared to 3.2% for anything over 20 words.
Key takeaways
- Add OneSignal's single line of code to your site header to start collecting push notification subscribers for free.
- Set up automated triggers based on inactivity, like a message after one week and a different one after two weeks.
- Expect roughly 5% of push notifications sent to bring someone back to your site.
- Keep messages to 10 words or less for the highest click-through rate (8.8% versus 3.2% for 21+ words).
- Use OneSignal's built-in A/B testing to automatically send the better-performing message to the majority of your list.
- Turn on intelligent delivery so notifications go out when each subscriber is most likely to be active on their phone.
- OneSignal stays free up to 30,000 subscribers, which covers most brands before they need the paid plan.
Questions this episode answers
What is OneSignal used for?
OneSignal is a free tool that lets you add push notifications to your website or app with a single line of code. Once visitors opt in, you can send them promotions, updates, and automated messages based on their behavior, like how long it's been since they last visited.
How effective are push notifications for bringing back website visitors?
Ty says about 5% of push notifications sent result in someone revisiting the website. That is free traffic you miss out on if you skip setting up push notifications.
How long should a push notification message be?
Data from buildfire.com shows notifications with 10 words or less get an 8.8% click-through rate, 11 to 20 words get 4.9%, and 21 words or more drops to 3.2%. Shorter messages consistently perform better.
Is OneSignal free to use?
Yes, OneSignal is free up to 30,000 subscribers, which covers most brands in the short term. After that it moves to a paid plan around $100 per month.
What is intelligent delivery in OneSignal?
Intelligent delivery is a feature that tracks when a user is most active on their phone and times the push notification to send when they are most likely to see it, rather than sending it at a fixed time.
Can you A/B test push notifications in OneSignal?
Yes, OneSignal lets you create two versions of a message, send each to 25% of your subscriber base, then automatically send the better-performing version to the remaining 50%.
Full transcriptShow
Ty Smith0:04
Welcome to another episode of the Crypto Marketing Show. My name is Ty Daniel Smith, with me is TJ and Kylie, and today we are going to discuss OneSignal. We're going to talk about what push notifications are, what OneSignal is, how we use it, and things to keep in mind before setting them up. So OneSignal is a super useful free piece of software that lets you re-engage with site visitors, put them on automated drip campaigns, and engage with them in an additional really effective method. So let's start with what push notifications are.
Kylie0:26
Push notifications are notifications that are sent to your phone or computer outside of an app or browser. So for me, I know when I log into my work computer, the first thing that pops up are a bunch of push notifications from various platforms like YouTube, Twitter, the ones that I have turned on that make my job easier.
Ty Smith1:04
Yeah, so if you've ever gone to a website and the first thing that pops up it says is, 'This website wants to show you notifications. Will you allow or decline?' If you press allow, get ready for some push notifications.
Ty Smith1:12
So let's talk about what OneSignal is and what it does. So OneSignal is probably the most popular way of implementing push notifications on your website or app. It's just a line of code that you add to the header of your website and then now you have that notification when people go on your site. And if they click allow, now you can send them push notifications. They're now a subscriber in OneSignal.
Ty Smith1:27
So we use it for a lot of stuff. It can be used for promotions, for updates, and again, there's a lot of automated stuff you can do with it. So, for example, based on the amount of time it's been since someone's visited a website, you can send them like an article or a message. So what we do is if someone hasn't been on the site for a week and they've enabled push notifications, they'll get hit up with a message that says, I forget exactly what it says, basically it's a prompt just saying to check out our influencer marketing services.
Ty Smith2:11
If they don't visit for two weeks, they get another notification that prompts them to subscribe to our channel on YouTube, and every week there's something a little different. And it sounds annoying, but it works. So we see about 5% of the messages we send result in someone re-visiting our website. So that's 5% of that's just free visitors that you're missing out on by not having push notifications set up.
TJ2:26
Well, and I think that's the one thing to keep in mind, too. Like no matter who you are, how you're going to use it, and what the implementation is, it's advantageous to have this on your website no matter what, gathering this information, whether you hit whether you want to use it once a week or in any type of format, or just once a month, once a year, or just decide.
TJ3:05
Basically, it's giving you a way to interact with people that have shown an interest in your business, product, or anything in one push button right to their phones, which is a huge capability to be able to have. Even if it's just like, 'Hey, this one time of year we're doing this big giveaway, I want all of you to know about it.' So you send out that push notification. It's pretty cool.
Kylie3:16
People subscribing to hear you more.
Ty Smith3:19
Right. Yeah, and you can send the notification or not.
TJ3:20
Yeah. And basically what it is is people in general are used to are getting more accustomed to the concept of subscribing to a person, a brand, a business because they're used to following them or subscribing to them on social media. So basically what this does is gives people a way to subscribe to you, your brand, your content on your own platform that you're building yourself, which is really cool.
Ty Smith3:31
Yeah, so we've set up OneSignal for a bunch of clients and content creators. So one example is a content creator that we work with. He has a blog, and we set up OneSignal on his blog. So again, if someone doesn't re-visit his site for a week, we know they're interested in his content because they visited his site, so they're much more likely to want to also subscribe to his YouTube channel. So if someone doesn't visit for a week, they get a notification that says subscribe to this YouTube channel, and it works.
Ty Smith4:14
Some things to it also it's cool because it well, it's free up to 30k subscribers, which is more than most brands are going to need, especially in the short term, and then it goes to I think $100 per month. And it also allows you to do AB testing. So you can see all the data based on click-through rates, people that delivered, unsubscribed, and you can AB test.
Ty Smith4:27
So it will give you the option to create two of the same messages that are similar. It'll send 25% of your subscriber base one message, 25% to the other, and then the remaining 50% will get whatever the optimized higher-performing push notification is. So that's a pretty cool feature. And it also tracks when users are on their phone the most, if it's a mobile subscriber, and they call it intelligent delivery, and you could actually have it send it to them when they're most likely to actually see it.
TJ5:08
That's cool. And that's actually something new I've noticed on my phone. That's interesting that it's coming from the push notification software. I always assumed it maybe came from Android or Apple. But where you do my phone's been sitting there, doesn't have any notifications, and it knows I just picked it up, I just interacted, I did something, and then all of a sudden a couple of new notifications come through. They're getting crazy with it. TikTok does that a lot, doesn't it? TikTok's really good. Yeah, I think Twitter just started with that as well.
Ty Smith5:23
So some things to keep in mind before you start sending push notifications is that shorter is better.
TJ5:27
Yeah.
Ty Smith5:28
So we pulled some data from buildfire.com, which is a marketing company. They saw that when you have 10 words or less in your push notification, the click-through rate is 8.8%. Which is pretty high for anything that you're going to send out.
TJ5:36
Yeah, it's very high.
Ty Smith5:38
Yeah. For 11 to 20 words, it's 4.9%, and for 21 words or more, it's 3.2%. I'm actually surprised it's 3.2% because 21 words or more is a big notification. It's definitely getting cut off on most devices.
TJ6:10
And I would imagine though that's probably why there's not a huge difference between 20 and 21 plus is because either way they're both getting cut off.
Ty Smith6:15
Well, think of all the notifications you get on your phone. It's only a couple of words that fit on that screen.
TJ6:17
Well, and if you think about it, too, less is more when it comes to marketing and word count, I feel like, most of the time, less is more.
Kylie6:21
In this day and age, hell yeah.
TJ6:22
In this day and age, yeah. You want to be able to get it the more you can say with less words, the better you are.
Ty Smith6:25
Yeah, you can also add images to push notifications in OneSignal, which is cool.
TJ6:28
Yeah.
Ty Smith6:28
So that is all for today. Please remember to rate, review, and recommend this podcast. The reviews on Apple Podcasts definitely help us grow and continue to create content like this. Join us on Slack at coinbound.io/joinslack and follow us on Twitter @coinbound_io. I can be found on Twitter @TyDanielSmith, Kylie is @cryptokylie, and TJ is @YoungDumCrypto.
TJ6:43
Yeah, and also if you guys have any cool tools or things that you guys are finding useful, feel free to share them with us and maybe we can try them out. Anything that you find that's useful for marketing, automation, project management, we're always looking for cool new resources. So let us know the ones that you guys like.
Kylie7:16
And if you have any questions or want us to discuss a certain topic, hit us up, let us know.
Ty Smith7:20
Yeah, especially on Slack.
TJ7:20
Yeah.
Ty Smith7:20
All right, that's all for today, guys. Thanks.
