Neither push notifications nor email is always better. Use push for a brief, time-sensitive prompt that leads to an app or browser action; use email when people need more context or a message they may want to find and revisit. If you use both, give each a distinct job—and judge performance by clicks and conversions, not open rates alone.
Push notifications vs. email at a glance
| Decision | Push notifications | |
|---|---|---|
| Best fit | A short, timely alert or prompt with a direct app or browser action. | A longer explanation, update, offer, receipt, or piece of content meant to be revisited. |
| Who can receive it | People with a compatible app or browser context and notification permission; installation and device availability can also affect reach. | People with a valid email address, the required permission or subscription, and a message that gets through inbox filtering. |
| How it reaches people | Appears in a notification surface, where it may be disabled or dismissed. | Arrives in an inbox, where it can be sorted, searched, archived, or ignored. |
| What to measure | Provider handoff or delivery where available, taps, and downstream conversions. | Delivery or inbox placement where available, clicks, and downstream conversions. |
| Content and privacy consideration | Keep sensitive information out of notification payloads unless the data flow and disclosures justify including it. | Review consent, audience data, tracking, and an appropriate preference or unsubscribe path. |
These channels have different eligibility rules, attention patterns, and tracking events, so a simple comparison of reported engagement rates can mislead. For example, Braze displays push total opens alongside email unique opens; those are not identical measures. Its benchmark page says engagement rates are calculated as total opens or clicks divided by total deliveries, but the event and denominator still need to be understood for each channel.
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When should you use push notifications instead of email?
Choose push for a timely, concise action
Push suits information that is useful now and easy to act on from a notification: for example, a reminder or a brief alert that opens a relevant app or web page. It is a poor fit for a message that needs several paragraphs of explanation or should serve as a durable record.
Reach is conditional. People may not have opted in, may revoke permission, uninstall an app, or have a device that is unavailable. A provider status of “sent” may mean the message was handed to Apple or Google rather than confirmed as visible on a particular handset. Treat send counts as distinct from confirmed delivery and human attention. Klaviyo describes a push open as seeing the full notification and tapping it to open the app; that definition is not equivalent to every email open event.
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Choose email for context and later retrieval
Email is usually the better choice when a reader needs detail, a receipt or record, or content they may search for, forward, or revisit. The inbox also gives recipients ways to organize a message, though arrival in a mailbox does not guarantee inbox placement or attention.
Neither channel guarantees that a person sees or acts on a message. The practical question is which format and delivery context best serve the message’s purpose for the people eligible to receive it.
Which channel gets more engagement?
There is no dependable universal winner. Results vary with audience, industry, platform, campaign period, eligibility, and the metric being reported. The available benchmarks describe different populations and methods, rather than a controlled comparison of the same people receiving equivalent email and push messages.
- Braze: Its live benchmark page, accessed in 2026, describes aggregated data from more than 600 brands and over 1,380,000 marketing campaigns across EU and U.S. clusters, covering two years and updated weekly. A displayed 3.96% push total open rate and 13.29% email unique open rate are examples of differently labeled measures—not proof that one channel wins.
- Pushwoosh: Its 2025 benchmark draws on more than 600 apps. For e-commerce and retail, it reports a 3.78% Android push CTR versus 3.05% on iOS for Q4 2024–Q2 2025. The figures are specific to that sector, platform, and period; the study weights CTR by recipient count and excludes silent and transactional pushes.
- Airship: Its 2025 benchmark reports 13% more purchases among customers opted in to push, and up to 39% greater purchase lift for top-performing apps. The comparison is between opted-in and opted-out customers, so it shows an association, not that push permission caused the purchasing difference. Airship says its opt-in benchmark uses monthly rates averaged over 12 months.
- Brevo: The company reported a 927.50% increase in push notifications sent through its platform in 2024. That is a change in platform activity, not evidence that push outperformed email. Brevo also gives approximate platform-level context of around 10% website push opt-in and up to 60% mobile-app opt-in; these are not guaranteed rates.
These numbers should not be combined into a single channel ranking: their populations, time windows, exclusions, and event definitions differ. No controlled, independent, cross-industry comparison of both channels for the same users, message, timing, and outcome is established here. Use benchmarks as context, not as a forecast for your campaign.
How should you compare email and push fairly?
- Define the outcome. Decide whether success means a tap or click, a completed action, a purchase, or revenue. Use the same conversion definition and attribution window for both channels.
- Define who is eligible. Report the reachable, consented audience for each channel before comparing results. Push and email rarely have identical eligible audiences.
- Keep the purpose comparable. Use equivalent offers or information, with a similar send window. Do not compare a timely push prompt with an unrelated newsletter and call the difference a channel effect.
- Report the denominator and delivery status. Separate eligible recipients, messages sent, provider handoffs, confirmed deliveries where available, and clicks or taps. Do not treat a provider’s “sent” status as proof of device-level receipt.
- Compare downstream actions. Evaluate clicks or taps, conversions, and revenue with consistent tracking. Open rates are especially difficult to compare because platform definitions and email-client behavior differ.
- Break out meaningful segments. Where it matters, report results by platform, industry, or other relevant audience characteristics rather than hiding variation in an overall average.
This is a practical test design based on the measurement limitations in the cited benchmarks and platform guidance, not a claim that it has been validated as a universal testing protocol.
Should you use both email and push?
Use both when the channels contribute different value. For example, a brief push can prompt a timely action while an email carries the details or serves as a record. Do not automatically send the same alert through both channels: duplication can add noise without giving the recipient a useful second touch.
Plan the sequence around the recipient’s need. If the push is enough, another message may be unnecessary; if more explanation is useful, email can provide it. Brevo describes email as part of an omnichannel approach, while Airship discusses first-month activation involving push as well as email. These examples support complementary planning, not a guarantee that using two channels will outperform one.
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What do permission and privacy change?
Permission affects both what you can send and how much of your audience you can reach. Salesforce’s operational guidance says Email Studio users need consent for marketing communications and MobilePush users need consent for contacts receiving push notifications. Apple’s privacy disclosure describes marketing emails and push notifications being sent where users agree to receive them. These are platform examples, not a complete legal checklist; requirements depend on geography, audience, and purpose.
Push content also has a privacy consideration beyond the notification shown on screen: the payload may pass through a notification service. A 2024 study by Samarin and colleagues analyzed 21 popular secure messaging apps; detailed results refer to 20 apps in the analyzed set. The study reports that 11 apps included personal information in FCM notification payloads, including four with message contents. This finding concerns the apps examined, not every app or push system. The authors also describe a push-to-sync design in which a service sends little or no message content through the push provider and the app fetches content separately; that is a mitigation discussed in the study, not a blanket guarantee.
For either channel, review the information collected, consent and preference handling, tracking, and what recipients can control. For push specifically, avoid putting sensitive content in third-party payloads unless the architecture and disclosures support that choice.
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