Rich Push Notifications and How It Can Drive Your Conversions

In 2018, desktop internet usage was eclipsed by mobile for the first time ever. Since then, smartphone internet usage has soared, with as many as 80% of internet users owning these devices today.

This stark increase in smartphone usage has had a ripple effect on advertising and how it is conducted, with new and engaging forms of marketing emerging at every turn. Among this newly-surfacing spate of mobile-focused marketing channels lies an immersive novelty by the name of rich push notifications, which looks set to become the way to communicate with your audience.

What are rich push notifications?

The more suave cousin of the humble push notifications, rich push notifications replace and/or include the conventional push notification text with multimedia content, such as images, videos, or audios. These notifications sometimes also include interactive buttons that redirect you to content within or outside of your app.

An extremely powerful and flexible channel, rich push notifications are more than providing just a ritzy experience for the optics. In fact, they are so remunerative that a study found rich-content-enabled messages provide 20 times higher customer engagement than SMS. Courtesy of the added features in the texting channel, rich content with videos and other functions is able to attract more customers than a plain old SMS.

How do rich push notifications drive conversions?

In an age inundated by mobile devices, rich push notifications allow you to meet customers in their mobile moments.

These mobile moments are many and sundry, and all it takes to determine them is an accurate comprehension of the user’s position in terms of their relationship with your brand and their interests through their interactions with your app.

Below are a few ideas for this end:

• Delivering notifications to users who are exploring your product (mobile moment) with a short video of how it works
• Sending notifications that contain a map for the users to track their purchase after they have ordered (mobile moment) it
• Providing real-time alerts to users who have requested breaking news through a video clip or news coverage that they can play right from the notification bar (mobile moment)

Gain insight into customer interactions

Every action by the user, such as taps or clicks on interactive buttons and/or the media, can provide you with a deep insight into how they interact with the app while also enriching user profiles and triggering conditional automation.

Take, for instance, a restaurant booking app that could send the user a bill for their food along with emoji buttons to rate their experience. Courtesy of it, you can not only understand how customers generally perceive your service but also take measures to improve it.

In the above scenario itself, you could request unimpressed customers to provide feedback to you on how to improve your services and also ask satisfied visitors to share their experience via interactive buttons, which redirect them to their respective in-app pages.

Given below are a variety of other ways you can use interactive buttons to level up your mobile engagement to drive higher conversions:

• An event management/planning app could deliver the invites a soft copy of their ticket in the form of an image with “Add” and “Remind Me Later” buttons to store the ticket and remind the user of the event in due time, respectively.
• News apps can send rich-media-enabled notifications or news coverage along with “Share” and “Follow” buttons to enhance user reach and engagement.
• An online retail store can provide users with real-time product category updates through “Opt-in” and “Share” interactive buttons to receive notifications about deals in a particular category.

What’s more, brands can also configure notifications to create custom button pairs to derive higher engagement.

For instance, a video subscription service can have an update that might appeal to various users differently. In such cases, the app can send updates with “Buy box set” or “Watch trailer” buttons for the more interested users, while also including a “Remind me later” button for less keen users.

Rich push in practice

Rich push isn’t exactly novel and has been used to great effect by brands as part of their marketing efforts to drive higher engagement and boost conversions. The most recent and memorable instance of it arrived during the pandemic last year when the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) used it as part of its marketing campaign to keep fans at home engaged as races were put on hold.

To this end, NASCAR came up with the iRacing Pro Invitational Series, where virtual cars were made to race each other by real NASCAR drivers as NASCAR leveraged rich notifications to direct traffic to the app.

Courtesy of their attention-garnering push notifications, NASCAR was able to successfully reel in racing fans. The push campaign saw NASCAR achieve an open rate of 9% on Android devices and 4% on iOS devices, ultimately leading to a conversion rate of 40%, which helped it drive stronger engagement across its entire user base.

The advantages of rich push can be availed by any vertical or industry. For online retailers, rich notifications can be used to draw the attention of customers to engineer purchases. This could mean utilizing image-enabled rich notifications for a host of different purposes, from onboarding users to offering deals or providing personalized recommendations.

However, it is the latency for interactivity where rich notification reigns supreme. A real-life instance of this functionality was provided by the ride-hailing app Uber, which leveraged rich notifications to let users track their rides.

Summary

With the abundance of mobile devices, consumers have started interacting with brands in a variety of new ways. From smartphones to wearables, the potentiality that rich push holds to engage customers will only continue to grow with time.

It is certain that rich media is the future of notifications, what with them being able to evoke emotional responses from the users. This affords marketers the ability to capitalize on their users’ natural curiosity and expand the boundaries of the actions that push can deliver to discover tantalizing possibilities that help them blur the line between outreach and engagement.