Make the Most of Your Push Notifications with Push Stories, Provisional Push, Rich Push, and Other Push Notification Features

With Braze research from 2024 revealing that mobile push notifications help boost average sessions by 182%, purchases per user by 116%, and average user lifetimes by 73%, there’s never been a better time to maximize this channel’s potential. And it’s all possible thanks to a range of push notification features that enable marketers to fuel customer engagement, monetization, and retention.

Key Push Notification Features to Uplevel Your Campaigns

Rich Push Notifications

While the earliest push notifications were bare bones, consisting of plain text with maybe an emoji or two sprinkled in, things have since come a long way. Rich push notifications make it possible to add rich media to your campaigns, including images, image galleries, GIFs, audio, and video. These types of engaging elements aren’t simply eye-catching, they are action-inspiring, too. By leveraging rich push notifications, NASCAR saw open rates increase and the brand managed to deliver an impressive 40% campaign conversion rate.

Push Notifications with Action Buttons

As the name suggests, push notifications with action buttons give users a range of different actions they can initiate directly within the notification. As they can take action without first having to navigate your brand’s app or website, it streamlines the user experience and saves customers time. Not only that, marketers have complete freedom to customize and tailor the specific action choices featured in each and every campaign. For instance, content brands could use push action buttons to give recipients the choice between viewing, sharing, or favoriting a new piece of content, while social apps may give users the option to reply to or like a specific message or update.

Push action buttons transform traditional push notifications into a 1:1 interactive experience, putting recipients in the driver’s seat.

Push Stories

Push stories are a dynamic type of push notification featuring an interactive carousel or gallery of images, each with its own unique caption. Instead of simply sending one message with one companion image, you can bundle together a collection of messages and images into one cohesive and engaging narrative. Push stories combine the best of rich push notifications and push notifications with action buttons, bringing together an image, click action, title, and description in one campaign. Retailers and eCommerce brands can showcase multiple products that are on sale, restaurants and food delivery apps can highlight top trending menu items, and travel and hospitality brands can present customers with multiple personalized offers. The possibilities are seemingly endless.

Provisional Push Notifications

Provisional push notifications are a type of push notification Apple introduced in 2018 that allows brands to send notifications to app users on a trial basis before they’ve explicitly opted into receiving these messages. These provisional updates are sent “quietly,” meaning without a sound or banner and without appearing on customers’ lock screens. Instead, they only show up in users’ notification centers with a prompt that lets the recipient decide whether to keep receiving these notifications or to turn them off. If the customer selects “Keep,” they have the choice between opting in fully to receive regular push notifications or continuing to receive these messages quietly.

Notification Channels

First introduced by Google in 2017, notification channels serve as a preference center for push notifications and give users control over the types of push campaigns they choose to receive from a brand. For Android apps, notification channels are mandatory. To set up these channels, brands can organize the types of push they send into specific categories, such as promotional and transactional updates, so customers can easily opt out of receiving the types of campaigns they’re not interested in. This means that subscribers won’t see all of your push notifications, but they’ll see the messages that are of the most interest to them. iOS has similar notification groups that also allow brands to categorize their notifications.

Push Primers

Because customers first must opt into receiving push notifications before brands can send them any messages (with one exception being provisional push messages on iOS), push primers are a powerful tool marketers can use to give customers a preview of the value of becoming a push subscriber. Push primers are campaigns that are sent using in-app or in-browser messages that appear prior to system-level mobile or web push prompts. Brands can use push primers to offer up information about the types of messages customers can expect to receive if they choose to opt in, whether that’s deal alerts, breaking news, or delivery updates.

Push Scheduling Features

You’ve learned how you can customize the appearance of your campaigns with rich media, push action buttons, and push stories, but you can also tailor the timing of when you send your campaigns. Let’s walk through the most common ways to schedule push notifications.

• Time-based scheduling: With time-based scheduling, push notifications get sent out to every recipient at once—at a fixed time—such as the moment a new series or episode becomes available on a streaming service app, at the start of a flash sale, when a game ends, or right when a breaking news story gets published.
• Action-based triggering: These campaigns get sent immediately when a specific user takes a given action or enters a given geofenced location, whether that’s scheduling an appointment or completing a workout, to deliver relevant messaging in the moments that matter the most.
• Send-time optimized scheduling: Made possible with predictive BrazeAI™ capabilities like Intelligent Timing, these push notifications are designed to be delivered at the best time for each individual subscriber based on their time zones and when they’re most likely to engage (open or click), i.e. the optimal send time personalized to every unique recipient.
• API-triggered scheduling: This type of conditional scheduling means push notifications only get sent when specific criteria are met, such as in response to customer actions on a brand’s app or website. These notifications can also be triggered by your company’s proprietary systems or third-party APIs, such as APIs for weather information or local databases. For instance, a government may send triggered notifications about a health outbreak or dangerous weather conditions in the area.
• Push Max: If your marketing team sends Android push notifications to users in APAC, it’s important to know that some mobile devices made by Chinese manufacturers are designed to extend the battery life of phones by blocking apps from running in the background, which in turn can lead to delays in the delivery of push campaigns—and even result in some messages not being delivered at all. Braze has developed Push Max, a feature designed to re-send any notifications that fail to be delivered at a time when customers are more likely to be reached.

Final Thoughts

Maximizing the potential of push notifications is an important part of pushing forward your engagement, monetization, and retention goals. With features like rich push notifications, action buttons, and push stories, brands can create dynamic and interactive experiences that resonate with users.

Forward Looking Statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the performance of and expected benefits from Braze and its products. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in Braze’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended July 31, 2024, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on September 6, 2024, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this blog post, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.