Maybe this is your brand right now: Your customers have too much going on in their lives...and they’re ignoring your marketing efforts. So, what do you do? Well, you could use stunts, promotions, and the like to seize their attention—and, yes, it’ll probably get some attention. But the expense of this sort of approach can be quite high and you’re likely going to find that you’re attracting customers more interested in promotional pricing than your value proposition.

What’s the alternative? Well, you could break through the noise by sending your current customers highly relevant messages. The Braze platform makes it possible to use a powerful, mobile-first messaging channel—push notifications—to speak directly and effectively to your users in new, memorable ways.

So, let’s dig into three ways you can use Braze to drive push campaigns that will make a difference for your marketing:

1. Embrace Priming for Push

A lot of brands ask their customers to opt in for push notifications on iOS by triggering a generic push notification request the first time a customer opens their app. But launching right into a push enablement request without explaining the value that recipients will get for opting in can feel blunt and off-putting.

Priming for push does the exact opposite. Instead of just springing a push opt-in request on new customers before you’ve earned their trust, you create an experience that thoughtfully prepares your users for that push request and increases the odds that they agree to let you send them messages using this channel.

Just create a custom opt-in prompt (as seen above) that highlights the value users will see if they agree to enable push. If they say yes, you can trigger the generic prompt and have confidence that they’ll choose to opt in. If they decline, you can simply close the custom prompt and preserve your ability to ask them to opt-in again at a later date. That’s a big advantage, since otherwise a customer who wants to opt back in after opting out will need to manually enable push in an app’s settings (and then wait for another push opt-in request).

With Braze support for in-app messages, it’s easy to create these custom, highly personalized prompts that can lead to stronger enablement rates and increase the impact of push as a channel.

2. Give Your Push Notifications That Personal Touch

According to Martech Advisor, 90% of today’s consumers are annoyed when they receive messages that feel irrelevant to them. That makes personalizing the outreach you send—regardless of the channel you’re sending it in—essential for every brand.

With Braze, it’s easy to personalize push notifications in a variety of different ways, supporting more relevant (and more valued) customer experiences in this channel. From adding a customer’s first name to a notification to dynamically adding relevant products or news into the push notifications you send, it’s all possible with Braze personalization. For more insight on the six types of personalization and how to use them, check out our guide to the Nuts and Bolts of Effective Personalization.

3. Make Push Interactive with Action Buttons

Your customers aren’t passive recipients—they’re people looking to have a two-way relationship with the brands they patronize. To speak to them more effectively via push notifications, you need a way for them to signal their preferences in connection with each message you send.

Braze support for push notification action buttons makes it possible to extend your brand experience beyond the app, and to give customers richer, more responsive options within the notifications you send. By leveraging push action buttons, you give your users more agency, bolstering the chances that they engage with your messages in ways that appeal to them and strengthening their relationship with your brand.

4. Go Beyond Text Only Notifications With Next-Level Push

While push hasn’t been around as long as email, it’s running into the same issues with saturation and overwhelmed customers that email marketers have long faced. To help brands better capture their customers’ attention, Braze has worked to develop next-level push functionality with this key outcome: You no longer have to rely on text alone.

By leveraging so-called “rich” push notifications, it’s now possible to add images, animated GIFs, video, and other media directly into your messages. Braze research has found that including an image with a notification brings a 57% boost to conversions. That’s a powerful way to deliver more results without exceeding your marketing budget. After all, think about the push notifications that you receive every day—how many of them came with images? Or even emojis. This is a key opportunity to stand out from the crowd and drive stronger results, but you need to have the right technology to make it happen.

Final Thoughts

While push notifications are a powerful, flexible channel for customer engagement, the truth is that there’s no single channel that can speak to every one of your customers in every situation. The solution, however, is simple: Use cross-channel marketing to ensure you have the best chance of connecting with your customers no matter what channel they prefer. To give your marketing campaigns the boost they need, check out our exclusive cross-channel data report and learn how leveraging multiple channels in concert can boost engagement by up to 844%.