Push notifications are powerful.

For starters, they reach users at exactly the right moment across devices—from phones, tablets, wearables, and smart devices to mobile and desktop web browsers—and touchpoints, from new users as they’re onboarding to loyal fans as they re-engage with your brand. But that’s just the beginning. The true staying power of push notifications lies in their ability to increase activation, monetization, and retention—and to do so by a sizable amount.

Let’s dive into the key reasons why push notifications are important for marketing and customer engagement teams and how to get an even stronger return on your investment in push by leveraging push as part of a broader cross-channel engagement strategy.

Why Push Notifications Are Important

Push notifications are the secret weapon of top-performing brands

In 2021, we developed a proprietary framework for evaluating the customer engagement maturity of organizations across key factors that shape success, known as the Braze Customer Engagement Index, that classifies the most advanced practitioners as “Ace” brands. Our latest findings released in 2024 are based on our Customer Engagement Review, a worldwide survey of 1,900 VP+ marketing decision-makers based in 14 countries, and the interactions of 9 billion customers with nearly 1,000 companies. According to this research, top-performing Ace brands are 13% more likely to use mobile push to effectively activate, monetize, and retain their customers.

And Ace brands achieve impressive results, unlocking 145% uplift in sessions per user, 2.7X more purchases per user, and a 43% higher 90-day retention.

Push notifications help brands increase user sessions, customer lifetimes, and purchases per customer

According to Braze findings, mobile push helps companies boost average sessions per user by 182%, purchases per user by 116%, and average user lifetimes by 73%.

However, the benefits don’t stop there. Push notifications also enable marketers to:

• Reach Customers Even When They’re Not Directly Engaging: Since push is highly visible on phones, watches, and computers, the odds are good that a message sent in this channel will be seen. So when you absolutely, positively need to reach a customer, push may well be the best way.

• Prompt Customers to Engage (and Lapsing Audience Members to Re-Engage): Use push well, and you can drive up engagement, conversions, and ROI, and hold onto customers who might otherwise slip away. Push is especially powerful when it comes to re-engagement, giving your outreach a second chance to resonate.

• Enhance Overall Cross-Channel Support: While some brands only send push, this channel performs best as part of a comprehensive cross-channel strategy. Pair push’s ability to reach customers beyond the app or website with in-app messages’s power to engage active users and you’ll see engagement results beyond what any one channel can achieve on its own. We’ll dig deeper into this point below.

Winning Cross-Channel Combinations Featuring Push Notifications That Increase Customer Activation, Monetization, and Retention

It’s clear that push notifications are a powerful tool for reaching users across devices—but they can deliver an even greater impact when they’re used as part of a comprehensive cross-channel campaign.

To find out how push plus other channels work together to accelerate results, we’ve analyzed billions of customer interactions with hundreds of global brands to determine the following top-performing customer engagement channel combinations for increasing sessions, purchases per user, and retention.

How to Maximize Push Notifications and Cross-Channel Engagement for Stronger Outcomes

In our new guide Mix and Match: Supercharge Engagement, Monetization, and Retention with Cross-Channel Experiences, we break down how different channel combinations impact engagement, monetization, and retention, and offer the latest research-backed insight into how to optimize your customer engagement results channel by channel. Check it out for exclusive insights on how to leverage push notifications and other key channels to drive stronger performance.