Why Rich Push Notifications Are a Powerful Tool to Elevate Your Marketing Game

Push notifications are the best-kept secret in marketing.

Cheaper than SMS, more direct than email, push notifications are an amazing way to communicate with your customers and generate engagement.

Part of what makes push notifications great is the ability to add rich media to your messages, which delivers even higher engagement and some amazing possibilities for how you can get content in front of your audience that’s almost impossible to ignore.

Keep reading and we’ll explain all there is to know about rich push notifications, and how you can start using this amazing tool in your business.

MobiLoud lets businesses harness the full power of push notifications, but converting their site to native apps. To learn more, plus get a free preview of your site as an app, book a free demo now.

What Are Rich Push Notifications?

Rich push notifications are push notifications with “rich media”, such as images, gifs, videos, audio, or in-message functionality.

A standard push notification is a text-only message that pops up on a user’s mobile device with a short message, typically opening the app when the user taps on it.

A rich push notification works the same, but comes with the ability to customize the experience far more, by adding images, videos, etc (outside of just plain text).

Most push notification services (such as OneSignal, Klaviyo) allow you to send push notifications with rich media, and sending rich push notifications generally comes with no extra cost (unlike sending multimedia text messages, aka MMS).

Note that you can send push notifications from websites (using the web browser) or directly from a mobile app. In this article, we focus on native mobile push notifications (sent from an app). To learn more about the difference between web and mobile push notifications, check out this post.

Rich Push Notifications on iOS vs Android

There’s some difference between what you can do with rich push notifications on Android vs iOS.

iOS allows you to send a wider variety of media and file types, including:

• PNG, JPEG, images
• GIFs
• AIFF, WAV, MP3, M4A videos
• MPEG, MPEG2, MP4, AVI audio

Android only allows PNG, JPEG and WEBP images (you can use GIFs as well, but they freeze at the first frame, rather than playing through).

Benefits of Rich Push Notifications Over Basic Push Notifications

What benefits are there to sending push notifications with rich media, compared to plain text push notifications?

Let’s look at a few.

Greater Visibility

Rich media is a great way to make your push notifications stand out, and increase the chance of being seen (and capturing the user’s attention).

The average app user gets 46 push notifications per day, and with so many push notifications competing for visibility, your messages might get lost in the shuffle.

A visually striking image, gif or video is the perfect way to stand out from the crowd and actually get noticed.

More Likely to Generate Engagement

Rich media has been shown to increase click rates for push notifications by 25%, while OneSignal claims a 10% increase in user engagement from rich push notifications.

Part of this comes from the increased visibility and attention that rich push notifications have. If they’re more likely to be seen, they’re also more likely to generate engagement.

But also, with more ways to customize your push messages and create unique user experiences, you’re going to have a better time convincing people to tap on your notification, rather than swiping it off to the side.

Personalization & Relevance

The increased possibilities means more potential to personalize your push notifications and ensure they’re hyper-relevant and targeted to the user.

For example, instead of just telling someone they have an item left in their cart, you can send a push notification with an image of the product, reminding them of why they were excited enough about it to add it to their cart in the first place.

Personalized push notifications have 4x higher reaction rates, so it’s always worthwhile to think about how you can craft customized, unique notifications for each user.

Delivering More Information to the Lock Screen

One of the difficult parts about engaging users with push notifications is the limited space you have to work with.

You have to try to write convincing, compelling copy in around 100-200 characters max. That really limits how much you can communicate.

But with an image, a video, or an audio file, you can communicate so much more. The old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is not too far off. 

From snippets and images from articles, to video highlights and trailers, rich media allows you to tell a whole story while staying within strict text limits.

More Value, Less Chance of Opt-Outs

Rich push notifications also have more value to the user.

They may be able to see a trailer for a new movie directly on their lock screen, or hear a snippet from a newly released song.

They could get live delivery updates, or get alerted to breaking news, that they can consume without having to open the app.

A more valuable user experience means users are more likely to stay subscribed to push notifications, which is vital for your app’s reach, when it’s so easy for the user to turn off notifications and cut all communication if they feel they’re not getting any value out of them.

Rich Push Notification Examples

Now let’s take a look at a few examples of how apps use rich push notifications, to give you some examples of what you can do for your app/brand.

Media from Articles/Breaking News Stories

You can send new content or breaking news stories accompanied with images or videos that give the user a preview of the content within, getting them hooked and eager to read more.

Product Images

Images (or even gifs and videos) are a great tool for eCommerce stores to use to boost visibility and engagement from their push notifications, accompanying new product releases, sales or abandoned cart notifications with an image of the product(s) mentioned.

Social Media Avatars/Previews

Social media apps like Instagram and TikTok make great use of rich media in push notifications, adding user avatars or previews of content within messages (including images/videos) to let recipients get more information right on their lock screen.

Trailers and Video/Audio Snippets

Rich push notifications are great for apps like Netflix to send trailers for movies or TV shows and build excitement for new releases, while music and podcast apps like Spotify can do the same with audio snippets.

Sports Clips/Highlights

Sports apps can send clips and highlights in push notifications to allow a seamless user experience, where they can consume content on their lock screen, on the go.

Real-Time App Alerts and Updates

Delivery apps and ride-sharing apps like Instacart and Uber use push notifications to share ride/delivery updates, which update in real time, making for an amazing user experience where you can get important updates without having to unlock your phone.

Unlocking the Benefits of Push Notifications

Push notifications continue to be vastly underrated and underutilized by brands today.

Part of that is because, to use push notifications to their fullest potential, you need a mobile app, and many businesses see this as a massive expense that they don’t have the time or budget for.

But with MobiLoud, it’s easy for any web-based business to launch their own app and start generating engagement with push notifications.

MobiLoud converts any website or web app into native mobile apps. You’ll be able to get your brand in the app stores, place an icon on your users’ home screens, and reach your users basically for free with push notifications.

It’s extremely affordable, at a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands you’d usually send to create a high-quality app, and our team does everything for you.

Best of all, the apps are fully synced with your website. You’ll retain all the features of your website, and once live, you don’t have to maintain a whole new platform and codebase.

You can learn more about MobiLoud here, and if you’re ready to start building powerful customer relationships with push notifications, get on a free demo call to discuss how MobiLoud can help you do it.