At Affiliate World Europe 2019, push notifications expert Andrew Payne sat down with Philipp Schoeffmann to discuss strategies, insights, and things about push notifications. Watch his full AWE19 presentation here.

This post, “Andrew Payne’s Push Notifications Strategy” was first seen on the AWC Facebook Page.

AWeurope Interview with Andrew Payne, Founder of Mobrev Media

The Push Notifications, Pop, And Email Combo

Phil:
🎙️ What’s up Affiliate World? We are still in Barcelona, now, with the amazing Andrew Payne, and we are going to speak about?
Andrew:
Push notifications.
Phil:
🎙️ Alright, good one. So we’ve been speaking on this very little stage here about push notifications already, but I think you’re a man of practice, right? So you really know the nitty-gritty, so what I would like to do is, can you walk me through the entire process, from not having a clue to running push notifications like you do?
Andrew:
Correct, yeah. I acquire our own subscribers. So we don’t buy push notifications traffic from networks. We, essentially, are, or I am, essentially, my own private network.
Phil:
🎙️ Okay, cool. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me actually. Okay, so you’re using push notifications to feed that engine because you know it best because it’s cheap, because it’s the right audience.
Andrew:
Well, the main way we acquire subscribers is through pop traffic, which is my background, and push notifications is the way that we send the message to monetise the user. So it’s kind of like a mix between pop and email subscribers. You know, it’s kind of how it is, but we’re sending a message straight to the user’s phone and we can promote a variety of offers to them.
Phil:
🎙️ Okay, that’s cool. So I do a lot of Facebook, so my world is a little bit like Facebook Messenger right? And then again, it’s not, because you have people in your subscriber list, and you can message them and I assume that clickthrough rates are kind of high.
Andrew:
In the very beginning, from a fresh subscriber, is kind of high and then it kind of balances out. Because our users are very broad, so then not like they’re signing up wanting to learn more about, you know, weight lifting or something. They’re just kind of signing up in general. And so users, who don’t want to receive the types of messages we’re sending, will unsubscribe. So it starts off high then it balances out pretty quickly.

Send The Right Push Notifications To Subscribers

Phil:
🎙️ So I guess making sure that you send the right push notifications first is something very important to get your lifetime value up, right?
Andrew:
Exactly. So we run a variety of offers so about nine verticals, but three verticals are where the bulk of our revenue is from. And we send more push notifications of those more often, and the other push notifications we have in rotation, but not just as frequently.
Phil:
🎙️ Okay, did I understand that correctly, that you’re having a broad audience and you’re sending different offers to the same subscriber group? Or is it different groups?
Andrew:
We have both actually. We have different groups that we segment through certain ways. However, most of the audiences are very broad in nature. So we still send them.
Phil:
🎙️ And the offers are broad as well, right.
Andrew:
Correct, they match up that way, but there are certain types of offers that performs better than others. So yes, like you said earlier, we do promote certain offers first for fresh audiences, and then later on, we’ll rotate more types of offers. That way they’re exposed to a variety.

Push Notifications: 100% Mobile

Phil:
🎙️ Cool. Okay, alright, so pop first. Then you have people on your page, they subscribe, you push notifications to them. Mobile, desktop, what’s the split?
Andrew:
We focus 100% on mobile push notifications.
Phil:
🎙️ Okay, interesting. Because it works better for you?
Andrew:
Yeah from the beginning, most users are using mobile. There’s a greater amount of volume on pop traffic from mobile. And so we just found the volume and scalability was much greater and so that’s where I focused and I decided to just keep that and make it my edge.

Subscriber LTV and Retargeting on Push Notifications

Phil:
🎙️ Cool, perfect. Alright, so then you have a customer for a certain lifetime. What do you do then with the customer? It just churns, that’s it?
Andrew:
Well we don’t call them customers. They’re subscribers, but yeah, once we acquire them, depending on how aggressive we’re promoting, how frequently we’re sending push notifications, they may stay on for, you know, a couple of days, a week, six months. We have some subscribers that are with us for over a year now. Not majority though, so yeah.
Phil:
🎙️ Okay, alright, that’s very interesting. Very straightforward actually. Is there any way of additional remarketing? Do you do any? I mean you could potentially use other traffic sources as well.
Andrew:
So what we do is, something I didn’t share on the stage is, yeah, we can. We’ll do promotions around certain types of offers and we’ll pixel them, pixel them for Facebook and then do retargeting, local likes, that kind of stuff. We will also build our own email lists around certain niches as well, and that’s something that is newer that we’re doing but exploring that option, so we convert the users from a push notifications subscriber to an email subscriber.
Phil:
🎙️ Exactly, right. Yeah, and they might stick for long or on email, then you have all the email issues of course.
Andrew:
It’s just that too but you get more of an opportunity to monetise them. So it gives you an extra branch.
Phil:
🎙️ Right, right. Yeah, and not like the Facebook retargeting. So we do a lot of Facebook, Instagram, right, and obviously, that kind of works very well. It’s more expensive traffic but since you have your audience already, it will might work very well.
Andrew:
It helps you narrow down in finding your actual audience when you’re doing the method I mentioned a while ago, yeah.

Takeaways From Andrew’s AWE19 Presentation on Push Notifications

Phil:
🎙️ Alright, okay. Share more with us the things that you shared onstage as well. What’s the main takeaway from your speech?
Andrew:
The main takeaways on my presentation about push notifications. I shared exactly how we acquire subscribers, which is probably something that a lot of people aren’t fully aware of. I did share some aggressive tactics, such as how we recover 30% of subscribers that we would’ve lost if we didn’t have a certain backflow process set up. And then we also have what we call sleeper apps, which allows us to take subscribers who did successfully subscribe and they will, at times, subscribe again to a different domain of ours, giving us yet another opportunity to monetise them at a later point, in case they unsubscribe from our original domain, or, and a lot of times they use those for testing new ideas. But the very non-aggressive way.
Phil:
🎙️ Okay, when you say aggressive, what do you mean with that?
Andrew:
What I mean is like, we’re not going to send them 20 push notifications a day. We’ll send them, like, one push notification every few days.
Phil:
🎙️ Okay, alright. Got you. Okay, that’s pretty cool. And what were verticals, if you can share that, work best?
Andrew:
My strongest verticals have been in dating, sweepstake, and branded SOIs and we’ve also done a good bit of volume and a variety of different apps like utility, VPN offers, as well as, social casino.
Phil:
🎙️ Okay, that’s very interesting. That’s quite a wide variety right.
Andrew:
Sure, and that’s not all. I mean, we’ve worked in nutra, streaming offers, a variety. The great thing about push notifications is that you can really promote a much broader range of offers and find something that will work, whereas my days of pop only was very difficult at times, to find something that worked. So this has been a great change.

My favourite thing about push notifications, the way I’ve been doing it, we’ve not had an unprofitable day since the week I started.

Phil:
🎙️ That’s amazing.
Andrew:
It’s been very consistent
Phil:
🎙️ Cool, that’s amazing.
Andrew:
Thank you.
Phil:
🎙️ Well thank you so much, that’s an inspiration. So thank you Affiliate World. Thanks for watching and thank you, Andrew.