Make Your Notifications Pop With Braze Rich Push Support

Over the past decade, push notifications—the first mobile native messaging channel to capture marketers’ imaginations—have increasingly matured from the short, simple, text-focused blasts of yesteryear into an increasingly rich, full messaging option, capable of sending eye-catching, highly visual messages known as “rich push.”

Rich push notifications are perfect for building meaningful connections with mobile users. This feature lets you leverage rich media attachments—images, GIFs, audio, and video—to create memorable experiences that drive results. An essential part of many of today’s cross-channel campaigns, rich push deserves recognition for its flexibility and creativity. That’s why we’re shining a spotlight on how brands can use it to reach their engagement goals.

Experimenting With Rich Media

Push notifications don’t need to be complex to make a splash. Simply adding an image can lead to a 57% increase in conversions. Curious how rich push campaigns play out in real life? Take a gander at how NASCAR leveraged them earlier this year to drive stronger engagement.

When the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in spring 2020, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) needed to find ways to keep at-home fans engaged while their racing schedule was put on hold. So NASCAR created the iRacing Pro Invitational Series, with virtual cars raced on virtual tracks by real NASCAR drivers like Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kyle Busch and leveraged Braze to spread the word about the virtual competitions, using Braze rich push notifications to drive traffic to the NASCAR app.

By delivering attention-getting push notifications that attracted users with images, NASCAR successfully reached racing fans who were encouraged to stick with a new form of the sport. These rich push campaigns saw an Android open rate of 9% and an iOS open rate of 4%, significantly outpacing industry standards, and led to a conversion rate of 40%, driving stronger engagement across the board.

Creating Interactive Experiences with Push Action Buttons

Although push action buttons aren’t technically rich media attachments, they’re powerful enough to deserve a shout out. Like the name states, push action buttons are buttons associated with rich push notifications that give recipients the option of taking action right from the message. Possible actions include snoozing a message, sharing it on social, opening a specific page in the website or app, and more.

Action buttons work well when you want to re-welcome users, encourage social engagement, or conduct transactional outreach. You can even add up to four different actions to make a message more interactive and drive engagement. The key is to ensure that the actions you’re laying out are adding value to the customer experience and corresponding to the actions that recipients are likely to want to take in connection with your outreach. After all, you’re only going to see value from this interactive feature if your audience chooses to interact with them.

Bringing Messages to Life with Push Stories

Push Stories take your push notifications to the next level. Similar to social media carousel posts, this feature combines scrollable interactive image galleries with action buttons to create personalized, interactive experiences. Push Stories are great for re-engaging lapsed users because they can be tailored to capture their attention.

The global food delivery brand Delivery Hero learned this first-hand when partnered with Braze to launch one of the first ever Push Stories campaigns. The brand wanted to re-engage lapsed users for their Talabat food delivery brand in the run-up to the 2018 World Cup. Using Push Stories, they built engaging, personalized notifications built around menu options and targeted them to lapsing users in order to nudge these customers to come back.

Building Push Campaigns With Braze

As you can see, push notifications have come a long way since the days of plain text. However, new features and creative campaigns are all for naught if they don’t connect with customers. Testing can help you decide which type of message to send and when, but no single channel speaks to every customer in every situation. Push notifications, while powerful, work best when they’re part of a broader cross-channel marketing strategy.

Fortunately, the Braze customer engagement platform seamlessly supports your overall cross-channel marketing strategy—including advanced push features and use cases. By using Braze to drive push campaigns, you’ll create more valuable and more memorable customer experiences.

To learn more about rich push notifications and how you can integrate them into your cross-channel strategy, check out Push Notifications: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Matter.