Increase the Impact of Your Notifications with Push Stories

Since their launch back in 2009, push notifications have been a powerful tool for marketers looking to reach, engage, and retain their digital user base. Back then, messages sent via this early mobile-native messaging channel tended to be short, catchy, and sent in blasts to every user associated with a given app. That drove a lot of engagement, but also led a lot of consumers to opt out of receiving future push—forcing marketers to be more thoughtful about the ways they leveraged this key channel.

Now, more than a decade later, we’ve seen push grow into an increasingly rich, full messaging option, capable of sending both the kinds of simple urgent messages that made it famous and more visual, interactive messages—known as rich push notifications—that can open up new user experiences and deepen the impact of messaging campaigns.

Given this trend toward the visual, we at Braze thought push notifications could use an update to become as multidimensional as other marketing channels, like email, rich push, and in-app messaging. So we decided to create Push Stories.

What Are Push Stories?

Think of Push Stories as "push notifications 2.0" or like rich media push notifications for the visual web. This feature takes the photo carousel functionality popularized in Instagram and Facebook and allows marketers to create a carousel of photos within a push that tells a rich, cohesive story. In addition to an image or GIF, each “slide” within the carousel can include a title and description, as well as push notification action buttons, allowing users to interact directly with the message.

The Value of Push Stories

By leveraging Push Stories, marketers can take advantage of the visual nature and built-in interactivity of this feature to expand what’s possible with traditional push notifications. picture may be worth a thousand words, but what's it worth when you add one (or more) photos to your push notifications? Quite a lot when it comes to boosting conversions, it turns out. In fact, adding visual elements like photos, videos, and GIFs to push notifications has been shown to increase conversions by up to 57%.

But the benefits don’t stop there. Imagine that you’re a retailer—with Push Stories, it’s now possible to serve up multiple product recommendations in vivid, eye-catching ways, all within a single message. That means that you don’t have to send one push highlighting your brand’s sweater sale, another for your promotion on boots, and another for a discount on hats; all three deals can be highlighted in one message, allowing consumers to pick the sale that speak to them and then jump directly to the deal they’re interested in within your app or website via deep links. That’s a convenient, cohesive experience, one that allows each recipient to self-curate their own brand experience.

What Push Stories Look Like in Practice

Global delivery platform Delivery Hero was among the very first brands leveraging Push Stories to add some zip to their messaging campaigns. Back in 2018, the company was looking to reconnect with lapsed users who hadn’t interacted with their Middle East–based Talabat food delivery brand over the previous week. Playing off the upcoming World Cup, the brand used Push Stories to send personalized, highly-visual push notifications to relevant Talabat customers, creating fun, engaging stories that made the case for those users to re-engage.

Final Thoughts

Interested in diving deeper into push notifications as a channel and what they can do to boost your brand’s customer relationships and bottom line? Check out our exclusive guide to push and become a notifications expert today!