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Natalya Ustymenko
Head of Direct Marketing, Reteno
March 24, 2023
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Push notifications are important for businesses as they enable direct and timely communication with customers. The notifications can re-engage users and boost sales if planned and designed correctly.
In this article, you’ll learn push notification design rules and how to avoid common mistakes. We also prepared inspiring examples of effective notifications and tech requirements for your convenience.
What can be more reassuring than numbers? Below are a few interesting facts you should consider when working on your push notifications:
Push notification UI design directly influences how consumers engage with apps and websites and have the potential to alter how they perceive a company. They encourage users to return to your app by keeping your brand in their minds; when users who haven't used your mobile app in a while see appealing offers relevant to them, they tend to use this app.
When built correctly, push notifications allow you to personalize your message, communicate important information to the right users, and not waste money on irrelevant ad campaigns. But bear in mind that poorly-designed, aggressive, and unclear notifications annoy users and may lead to the app or webpage being deleted from their phone.
Designing a push notification is not only about visual appearance. There are actually quite a few steps to take to create even a simple notification.
Below, Reteno’s team added the main requirements and links to support pages where you can find more tech details regarding different platforms.
Character limits: For the title — 30 characters; for the message body — 256 characters.
Demands for rich format: iOS enables rich format, including images, audio, and video. The media content's size should not exceed 4 MB.
Enabled CTA buttons: Up to four custom CTA buttons in a push notification. The text should have a maximum length of 12 characters.
Character limits: For the title — 65 characters; the maximum character limit for the message body is 240 characters.
Demands for rich format: Android supports the rich format, including images, audio, and video. The size of the media content should not exceed 10 MB and must be a 2:1 ratio.
Enabled CTA buttons: Up to three custom buttons. The text on these buttons can have a maximum length of 20 characters.
Character limits: For the title — 45 characters; for the message body — 100 characters.
Demands for rich format: The maximum file size for an image is 2 MB.
Enabled CTA buttons: Up to two custom CTA buttons. The text's maximum length is 20 characters.
Character limits: For the title — 60 characters; for the message body — 200 characters.
Demands for rich format: No rich format. Only adding a logo is available.
Enabled CTA buttons: No CTA buttons.
Character limits: For the title — 45 characters; for the message body — 90 characters.
Demands for rich format: No rich format. Only adding a logo is available.
Enabled CTA buttons: No CTA buttons.
Businesses can reach their customers, interact with them, and increase user retention using push notifications. But creating useful push alerts is a difficult task. We summed up eight essential rules for designing efficient push notifications.
Before designing mobile and web push notifications, it's important to establish a clear strategy. What are the goals of your push notifications? What actions do you want your users to take? Having a clear strategy, you can create push messages aligned with your overall business goals.
Businesses should create push alerts that provide pertinent material at every phase of a client's journey by evaluating consumer data. Of course, you can use standard messages with a discount, but why act like everyone on the market? Get info about your previous ad campaigns, analyze the bottlenecks, and build push notifications specifically to improve those mishaps and stimulate users to interact more actively.
Push notification design must prioritize personalization. With tailored data, businesses can produce push notifications that appeal to certain individuals with specific needs, user behavior, and requirements. Such push notifications can boost user retention and increase engagement rates.
Keep your push message informative, short, and relevant. Instead of wasting those precious characters, better write only the necessary information, and add push notification CTAs that direct viewers to a particular page or activity.
Mobile push notifications with interactive elements can improve user engagement. Utilize the most features you can. Adding a picture with additional text along with a short description can bring an exciting user experience.
Like in the example above — a simple icon with a weather description gave added value, and now clients don’t need to search the weather conditions by themselves and prepare properly for the trip.
Once you start thinking about a user as your friend, not just a buyer, you can bring your business to a new level.
Ensure that your brand identity is reflected before you send push notifications. Businesses can strengthen their brand identification and improve brand recognition by, for starters, utilizing brand colors and a company logo.
A/B testing is a critical aspect of any marketing activity. You can test out which push notification styles are most successful by experimenting with several variations. Work with design components like message length, button positioning, or color palettes.
With the tech development and various competitors, users are more picky about what they engage with. Web and mobile push notifications must be designed to stand out with a user-friendly interface. In addition to the eight main rules, try these four to get even better results.
Users are more likely to engage with a notification they can understand at a glance, rather than having to decipher what the message is trying to say. Be short, to the point, and don't get carried away with too many idioms and puns.
Utilize not just brand colors but the tone of voice, different brand fonts, and special visual styles. Do you have other distinctions? Add them so users can recognize your app immediately and pick you when scanning through their list of alerts.
A well-designed thumbnail can convey the message of the notification quickly and effectively. This can be a picture of your product or of something else related to the message. In the case of YouTube, sometimes it adds a thumbnail of the video that is being promoted.
CTAs are an essential aspect of a push notification. Using action-oriented words, adding a sense of urgency, or providing an incentive can increase the click-through rate of the notification. Don't be afraid to improvise and use more than one CTA. For example, for promo notifications, you can add two CTAs with the button “Check it out” and “View similar bids.”
Learn more about trends and anti-trends of designing push alerts in our article.
Push notification design can be demanding, and there are some typical pitfalls that companies should be aware of.
One slip-up is not informing consumers about the notification’s content. Recipients want to know what to expect, which means a summary or a sneak peek of the notification's content. It's like with the permissions for your app. With every permission notification, you try to explain better why your app needs access to some gentle information. In the same way, describe what benefits they will get from your notifications. Otherwise, how can users permit an app to send them messages?
Make CTA more engaging
CTAs are an essential aspect of a push notification. Using action-oriented words, adding a sense of urgency, or providing an incentive can increase the click-through rate of the notification. Don't be afraid to improvise and use more than one CTA. For example, for promo notifications, you can add two CTAs with the button “Check it out” and “View similar bids.”
Learn more about trends and anti-trends of designing push alerts in our article.
Push notification design can be demanding, and there are some typical pitfalls that companies should be aware of.
One slip-up is not informing consumers about the notification’s content. Recipients want to know what to expect, which means a summary or a sneak peek of the notification's content. It's like with the permissions for your app. With every permission notification, you try to explain better why your app needs access to some gentle information. In the same way, describe what benefits they will get from your notifications. Otherwise, how can users permit an app to send them messages?
CTAs are an essential aspect of a push notification. Using action-oriented words, adding a sense of urgency, or providing an incentive can increase the click-through rate of the notification. Don't be afraid to improvise and use more than one CTA. For example, for promo notifications, you can add two CTAs with the button “Check it out” and “View similar bids.”
Learn more about trends and anti-trends of designing push alerts in our article.
Push notification design can be demanding, and there are some typical pitfalls that companies should be aware of.
One slip-up is not informing consumers about the notification’s content. Recipients want to know what to expect, which means a summary or a sneak peek of the notification's content. It's like with the permissions for your app. With every permission notification, you try to explain better why your app needs access to some gentle information. In the same way, describe what benefits they will get from your notifications. Otherwise, how can users permit an app to send them messages?
This mistake is so widely popular that it’s scary. It happens with almost every marketing activity, especially email campaigns — it might seem like it’s the right choice to hide the unsubscribe button, so you won’t lose a prospect. But, as you can guess, it only makes them angry. Same with push alerts, it’s better to focus on the valuable content, not the tricks. For example, add to your app settings option disabling notifications or at least pause them. This way, people will be able to customize their notifications and receive only the information they are interested in.
We can forgive our friends sending us dozens of funny Instagram Reels or TikTok videos, but not the companies bombarding us with irrelevant messages. Repeatedly sending unclear notifications can lead to users ignoring them, unsubscribing, or deleting your app altogether.
By avoiding these frequent pitfalls, you can send push notifications that captivate and entertain the audience, cultivate loyalty, and promote company success.
We added a couple of additional examples of push notifications for mobile apps, which reflect the mentioned above rules and tips. Also, you can look through our push notification best practices to get the whole picture.
A simple notification that shows how much you’ve just spent and on what. These notifications are useful as they help you keep your finances in order. Each such notification provides valuable information that you can use later to fill your spending in this finance-controlling app. The good thing here is that after you receive a few such messages in the last hour, it gives you the option to silence them.
This is a good example of a push notification with the company logo, so you know who’s messaging you at a glance, plus bright relevant emojis to notice it quickly, among other alerts. And it’s relevant — if you were looking for car accessories earlier, it would give you a notification as in the picture “Is it time to change tires?” The same goes for household appliances, office supplies, etc. It is also very helpful that thumbnails give you some view of how the product looks.
Simple, in line with the brand, brings healthy value and no irrelevance. Even if a user might feel lazy, two words, “Glowing skin,” reminds them why they downloaded the app in the first place and motivates them to exercise more.
We hope this article clarifies details about the winning side of push notifications. They can help you increase and keep your consumer base if you use them wisely and keep your company objectives in mind. If you need a partner in crime to work on a push notification strategy, contact us. To make sure of Reteno's progressiveness and democratic pricing, look at the OneSignal vs Reteno comparison.
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Are your pushes as compelling as they could be? Find out with our free preview tool. Instantly see how your notifications will display on iOS and Android, in both expanded and collapsed views.
This is your chance to fine-tune your messages to ensure they're not just seen but felt. Make every character and every push work harder for your engagement goals
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