Rich Notifications Plus Interactive Buttons: A Compelling Combination

When Apple began rollout of iOS 10 to end users, Urban Airship was there with support for mobile marketers from day one.

Last Wednesday we shipped our final SDK 8.0.0, just hours after Apple finalized iOS 10. Since then, our services team has been working closely with early adopters to get their apps updated in the App Store in time for the public release of iOS 10.

We’re excited to give you the tools you need to integrate powerful rich media — including images, videos, GIFs and sounds — into your mobile engagement efforts through the newly designed Urban Airship Message Composer.

Mix it Up: Combining Rich Notifications and Interactive Buttons

One possibility we’re particularly excited for mobile marketers to explore is mixing rich notifications with interactive buttons — an out-of-the-box feature we released with iOS 8.  

Interactive buttons offer marketers and customers alike some major benefits.

• More — and more nuanced — opportunities to connect: For example, you can offer your mobile audience multiple opportunities to interact with the information you’re providing, giving your campaigns greater nuance and more opportunities to connect.
   

• Drive urgency: Interactive buttons can alert customers to sales and deals they want to take advantage of or be reminded about, and help move them from browsing to conversion. For example, retailers can fine-tune push notification responses with custom buttons that say “View Cart,” “Remind Me in 1 Hour,” or “Skip Sale.”
   

• Make content easy to share: Encourage app users tell their friends about a soon-to-expire sale by offering a social sharing button directly from the rich notification.
   

• Understand what your customers want (and don’t want) more quickly: Button pairs provide double the user paths — and double the user preference data to improve future retargeting results. For example, in the Engage UI you can configure an “Opt-in” button and set a tag you can use to target users with special offers (or other campaigns).

Go for It!

We can't wait to see how enhancements to the look and feel of a traditional push notification shift the landscape of mobile user behavior.

So what are you waiting for? Get started today:

Get the technical how-tos you need to get going:  For those eager to test out the impact of rich notifications you can find all the documentation to get started in our September Release Notes. You can also find our Interactive Notifications Primer which outlines how to get started with interactive buttons in our Docs center.

Get inspired: Check out our Rich Notifications Inspiration Guide  and our Interactive Notification Inspiration Guide. Both are packed with unique messaging use cases that showcase the benefit of using rich media and interactive buttons in your mobile messaging strategy.

Want to talk through your iOS 10 push notification options with an Urban Airship expert? Contact us today and let’s brainstorm!