These days, people are all about seeing ads that involve custom images, sounds or videos. Imagine what adding these to push notifications could potentially do for customer engagement and retention!

Although not every platform supports rich media, OneSignal makes it quick and easy to include this in your notification campaigns. Using our platform, you can send rich notifications to both iOS 10 and Android devices. Over 700,000 developers use OneSignal to send over 4 billion notifications full of engaging content every day.

What Are Rich Notifications and When Should We Use Them?

Rich notifications include images, short videos, action buttons, and icons that improve the visuals and enhance the user experience. These eliminate the need to open the app, and instead create opportunities for short but meaningful interactions within the notification itself.

Rich notifications are ideal for:

  • Announcing news stories
  • Calendar invites with scheduling capability
  • Maintaining brand consistency
  • Playing short videos without loading the full app

How to Use Rich Media in Your Push Campaign

One benefit of rich notifications is that users could still engage with your app even without even having it open.

There are two ways to do this:

  • Content extensions
  • Media attachments

Content extensions can be used when your notification contains a calendar invite to some event. Instead of sending users to their own calendars and entering the event themselves, users could tap the notification, display the meeting details (hence “content extensions”), and accept the invitation, all without unlocking their phone.

Media attachments allow you to tag photos, videos, and audio, which displays personalized content to each user. Our system supports this capability up to certain file size limits. OneSignal also allows you to send large pictures within notifications to Android devices using our Big Picture feature.

Mic Uses Rich Media to Increase Engagement by 10%

Mic, an internet and media company that champions independent and original reporting recently launched a new app and wanted to include rich media in their push notification campaigns.

Mic turned to OneSignal to send rich notifications allowing their readers to watch short videos and read news summaries without unlocking their iPhone screens. Users could also decide whether they wanted the full news story which would bring them directly into the app.

They also used rich media in their web notifications which kept users up to date on recent news stories that they might be interested in.

The result? An instant 10% increase in user engagement.

Platforms Supported by OneSignal for Rich Media

OneSignal supports rich media for the following platforms to increase user engagement by at least 10%:

  • iOS
  • Android
  • Web

Check out OneSignal’s full documentation on rich notifications.