If you’re like me, when you saw mobile push open rate for the first time, you were absolutely shocked. In my case, I found myself asking, “how are these open rates so low?!”
But this was because I was used to other channels. A strong email open rate for example is 30%+, but mobile push is an entirely different animal - it’s not uncommon to see push open rates in the 3% to 4% range. If this is what you’re seeing, this is absolutely normal.
The hidden truth here is that people interact with mobile devices differently than they do email inboxes. - Many mobile users will look at a push message, but then open their phone instead of opening the push. This means that while push notifications often aren’t tracked as opened, they very much still influence and drive actions. And the best part is this is measurable! We have a whole separate article about how to measure this kind of push engagement using Customer.io conversions.
So now that we understand why a 3-4% open rate is normal and that we can use conversions to measure success, what do we do next? Isn’t there still some room for improvement? Might we be able to find ways to encourage more people to interact directly with our push messages?
The answer is yes. Absolutely.
Like all messaging channels, technology is always changing and iterating, and it would be a waste to not take advantage of it. Trends industry-wide are moving toward more dynamic multimedia content. For email, it shows up as AMP. The SMS version is MMS. And for mobile push it’s (wait for it…) rich push!
One great way to drive engagement is by making your pushes more interactive using rich push! Customer.io’s rich push functionality allows you to include videos and text in your push messages, making them much more engaging and more likely to catch your customer’s attention (and fingertips)! One study found that rich push drove an 18% increase in engagement over simple push, and another experiment reported that rich push could effectively double open rates.
Push is still an emerging channel - while it’s been around quite some time, it’s much newer than channels like email and SMS with long-established best practices. This means you should be utilizing all the emerging tools available, and Rich Push is very much one of those technologies! By pairing it with other features like Customer.io conversions and A/B testing to measure engagement, rich push will quickly become an impactful and important element of your ongoing mobile strategy.