Complete Guide to Creating Rich Push Notifications with Examples

Push notifications have the power to enhance your engagement with your target audience. There are different types of notifications and rich push notification is one such major type that you should know to ensure maximum interactivity with the users.

This article will explore the numerous benefits of rich push notifications and examples that will demonstrate their importance.

So, let’s start this thorough discussion with some basics.

What are Rich Push Notifications?

Rich push notifications are different from simple notifications. They allow you to include an engaging image, video, or GIF to enhance your notification’s message and compel the recipient to take some action.

In other words, rich push notifications are pop-up messages that a user gets with a media attachment, such as audio, video, GIF, interactive, and CTAs. Hence, these notifications are also considered like mini emails.

Rich push notifications on both Android and iOS devices are useful in interacting with users, even if they are not regularly using your app or website. One of the most useful features of these notifications is that they have content extensions through which users can complete an action from the screen’s lock, even without launching an app.

Apps, websites, brands, and numerous types of companies use rich push notifications to encourage users to buy a particular product or register for an upcoming event.

How Do Rich Push Notifications Work?

Push technology forms the basis of any rich push notification. This technology is used to push information to the users whenever the sender wants instead of a user specifically requesting the information.

Here are the major steps involved in working on a rich push notification:

• Development: An app that intends to send rich push notifications must be developed with suitable tools, technologies, and permissions to ensure its code supports sending them.
• Triggers: Triggers or a suitable notification schedule are added to the app’s code to ensure it can send notifications at suitable times. For example, a trigger can be that a user added some items to their shopping cart, but did not place the order.
• Notification Creation: The app will create the notification as per the schedule or trigger. It should contain suitable copy and multimedia content.
• Service Provider: The rich push notification is sent to a service provider like Apple Push Notification service for rich push notifications iOS.
• Send Notification: The service provider is responsible for sending the rich push notification to the user’s device where the user will view the notification and interact with

Which Devices Support Rich Push Notifications?

While all major operating systems and devices support rich push notifications, there are some significant differences between iOS-rich push notifications and on other devices.

iOS Rich Push Notifications

Apple offers maximum support to rich push notifications as you can include a wide range of media files, such as:

• PNG, JPEG, and GIF image files
• AIFF, WAV, MP3, and M4A video files
• MPEG, MPEG2, MP4, and AVI audio files

Moreover, rich push notifications on iOS devices also allow you to include alternative texts for unsupported browsers and operating systems. It is recommended that you always add alternative text to ensure the notifications are accessible for each of your target audiences.

Android Rich Push Notifications

Unlike iOS rich push notifications, Android devices have limited support for such notifications. Android allows you to send only large images in JPEG or PNG file formats. If you want to share any other type of media content, you can do it in the form of links instead of direct attachments in notifications.

You should also be careful while sending GIFs in Android rich push notifications. You can attach such files, but they will freeze on the very first frame. So, the notification recipient will not be able to see the complete GIF.

Browsers

Support for rich push notifications in desktop browsers is extremely limited. The latest versions, such as Chrome 56, do support push notifications with large images on Android and Windows devices, but this support does not cover iOS or Mac devices.

When Should I Use Rich Push Notifications? (+ Examples)

Rich push notifications have many use cases as they can be customized to fulfill a wide range of requirements. You can use different types of videos and images in rich push notifications to impress your user and stand out from the competitors who might be using simple, and often boring, notifications.

Here are some of the many situations, along with examples, in which you can use rich push notifications:

Promote an upcoming app update, product launch, or a particular service with an engaging image or video.

Send prompt updates about the latest happenings in a local area or even national news.

Source: https://www.jeeng.com/

Encourage users to use your app or visit the website by sending discounts, sales, and promotional codes.

Source: https://clevertap.com/

Ask the users to register for upcoming events.

Source:https://leanplum-wordpress.storage.googleapis.com/

Remind users about the abandoned products in their shopping cards.

Source:https://www.notifyvisitors.com/

Give product recommendations to users based on their purchase or product viewing history.

Source:https://clevertap.com/

Welcome new users through a humorous or engaging GIF in rich push notifications.

Source: https://clevertap.com/

Overall, there are numerous creative ways of using rich push notifications to engage with your audience and increase interaction. The primary goal of any rich push notification should be to be as attractive and engaging as possible so it becomes difficult for the users to simply ignore them.

How to Build Clean, Easy-To-Access, Rich Push Notifications

Since the entire purpose of using rich push notifications is to enhance engagement with users, there are certain things you must keep in mind to enhance their effectiveness and ensure they convey the intended message.

1. Write Engaging Content

While media attachments are an integral part of a rich push notification, the content is still its heart and soul. You should write an engaging copy within a suitable character limit to ensure the recipients get the message quickly and easily.

Exceeding the character limit can end up boring the users. Moreover, the entire message might not be visible to the recipients. Hence, it is important to write a short, crisp, and concise message.

2. Optimize your Content

Using optimized content is important to ensure high deliverability and send notifications to the target users. Optimization, in simple words, is aiming for the smallest size files while ensuring high quality. Ideally, you should use an image within the 5MB limit, a video within the 50MB limit, and an audio within the 10MB limit.

Following the optimization guidelines and size limits will allow you to send attractive content successfully and make sure the specific goal of your rich push notification is fulfilled. It is also important to use a suitable push notification sender like EngageLab to ensure the platform can handle even the heavy content and deliver it.

3. Use a Customer Engagement Platform

Using a modern and reliable customer engagement platform is important to make sure the platform of your choice can fulfill your requirement of sending rich push notifications across different operating systems and devices.

You might have multiple apps through which you want to send the push notifications. Moreover, you might want to automate the entire process to save your time and energy.

In such situations, you should consider using EngageLab as it offers a wide range of options to configure and automate rich push notifications.

Choose a Suitable Sending Time

Selecting a suitable time to send a rich push notification is an important part of the entire process. You don’t want to send these notifications again and again as they can annoy the users and they might even delete the app.

Instead, you should focus on setting up smart triggers to send rich push notifications. With EngageLab, you can easily set a suitable schedule and select the date or time to ensure your target audience is getting the notification when it is likely to be more effective.

Add CTAs

Sending a rich push notification means you want the recipient to take some action. Therefore, you have to include an interactive call-to-action CTA in the notification, along with engaging media content.

For instance, CTA can be related to placing an order or opening the website to view a certain product or service. You can also add a simple CTA of remind me later to allow the app to send another rich push notification at a later time. In this way, you can increase engagement with the user even further.

Add Engaging Media

The media content you choose to add to your push notification must be relevant to the brand and captivating for the users. You don’t want to add irrelevant or generic images as the users are quite smart enough to know when something is just a general copy-paste and does not have an original thought behind it.

Brands should consider creating their unique images to ensure that users do not simply skip the notification. At the same time, you must consider the format and size limitations of both Android and iOS rich push notifications while attaching a media file to ensure all the recipients can receive and view the file.

FAQs

• 1

  What is the importance of rich push notifications?

  Rich push notifications include text content as well as media files. Hence, they are important in increasing engagement and interaction with the users. Different apps can use such notifications to promote products, events, and discounts, and encourage users to come back to the app.
• 2

  Are rich push notifications more effective than simple notifications?

  Yes! Rich push notifications have media files and visually appealing content is known to be more effective in marketing and branding strategies than simple text-based strategies like notifications.
• 3

  How can I use notifications for my new business?

  You can use rich push notifications for your new business by welcoming new subscribers and sending them details about your current as well as upcoming products and services.

Conclusion

When used correctly, rich push notifications have a lot of potential to generate buzz around an app or a business. They are vital in attracting users through visual content and turning them into a loyal user.

EngageLab is one such customer engagement platform that can also help you in this journey. You can learn more about EngageLab and use it to automate rich push notification campaigns and interact with your users through suitably scheduled notifications.

Learn more EngageLab and make it easier for your business.

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