Braze Push: Push Subscription vs Push Enablement

How do Braze Push Subscription States work?

What does it mean to be Push Enabled?

🗣️ WATCH FULL YOUTUBE VIDEO HERE 🗣

[Braze-mas 2023, Day 11]

What’s up everyone, my name is Allan, Founder and Consultant at For Now Marketing, and welcome to Day 11 of Braze-mas 2023!

In our last video, we talked about Email Subscription States. Today, we are going to talk about Push Subscription States. There’s quite a bit of similarities between the two topics, but we are working with two different channels, so we’ll go over some of the push-specific details when it comes to Push Subscription.

Let’s get started!

Push Subscription States

First, let’s talk about Push Subscription States, which are very very similar to the Email Subscription States that we discussed. So just like Email Subscription States, Push Subscription has the exact same 3 states with the same definition.

Subscribed is the default state when a user profile is first created in Braze.

A user’s push subscription state moves to Opted-in when the user accepts the Operating System’s push prompt. Here are examples of what the prompts look like for iOS, Android, and Web, I’m sure you’ve seen at least one of these before.

So I am opted-in to push from For Now Marketing, and you can see on my user profile that my Push Subscription State is set to opted-in.

One big difference between push and email is that for push, in order to be able to send push to your users, your users will have to accept one of these OS-specific prompts. For email, this explicit opt-in was a strong recommendation, but for push, this is a requirement.

And lastly, unsubscribed state is reserved for users who do not wish to receive any push from your brand. There’s a few things to note here:

1. “A user’s push subscription state applies to their entire user profile, which includes all of the user’s devices.” This means that even if your user is able to receive push from multiple platforms, for example iOS and Web, if the user’s push subscription state changes to Unsubscribed, that means they are unsubscribed from all push messages from your brand, both iOS and Web in our example.
2. “Braze does not automatically change a user’s push subscription state to Unsubscribed.” So it is up to your brand to set up the logic to change the Push Subscription State to unsubscribed which will result in your users being unsubscribed from push from all their devices.

So that covers the 3 Push Subscription States, but you might be wondering, what does it mean to be Push Enabled? Let’s see what the documentation page says.

Push Enabled filter takes into account the following:

1. The ability for Braze to send a push notification (foreground push token)
2. The user’s overall preference to receive push on any of their devices (push subscription state)

So the Push Subscription State that we just talked about is actually the 2nd part of the definition of being Push Enabled.

But what does the first part mean, and what is a foreground push token?

Push token is just a fancy term for a unique, anonymous ID that’s generated by a user’s device that allows brands to send push notifications to that device.

When you accept any one of these OS push prompts, that generates a push token which is sent to Braze which allows the brands to send you push notifications.

So being Push Enabled means that 1. you have a valid push token by accepting these push prompts and 2. your Braze Push Subscription State is either Subscribed or Opted-in.

Simply put, if you’re hoping to launch a push campaign, the best filter to segment your audience is Push Enabled equals true, because that filter will check for both 1. a valid push token and 2. users who are Subscribed or Opted-in.

Here’s why the Push Enabled filter is better to use than the Push Subscription State filter.

Let’s say a user just installed your app and accepted the push prompt. Now this user’s push state is Opted-in, and they have a valid push token by accepting the push prompt. However, let’s say that after a few days, the user uninstalled your app. Now, this user’s push state is still opted-in, because Braze isn’t going to change the user’s push subscription state to unsubscribed. However, by uninstalling the app, the user no longer has a push token, and of course, your brand will not be able to send push notifications to this user.

If you still use the audience filter Push Subscription State equals Subscribed or Opted-in, this user is technically included in the audience, but Braze is still not going to be able to send any push to this user because there is no longer a valid push token, and obviously, the app is uninstalled.

So both filters will still only be able to send to the same, eligible users, but the Push Enabled filter will give you a more accurate estimate of the number of eligible recipients of your Push campaigns.

The last note I’ll make is on the documentation page, there’s a bit of circular definition going on here. So towards the top, it says, “By default, for your user to receive your messages through push, their push subscription state must be either Subscribed or Opted-In, and they must be push enabled.”

However, if we click Push Enabled, we jump down to the middle of the page where we see that the user’s push subscription state is actually part of the definition of being Push Enabled.

So, to avoid any confusion, I always tell my Braze customers to use the Push Enabled filter, and this will target all users who are eligible to receive Push from your Braze dashboard.

Thank you!

That’s it for Day 11.

If you have any questions, please share them in the comments. We’re happy to help! 🙏

If you learned something from this video, please subscribe for more awesome Braze videos in the future!

Thank you for watching, and see you next time!

allan@fornowmarketing.com

fornowmarketing.com