Pushwoosh Platform Overview
Get to know the basics of the Pushwoosh functionality needed to start building the strongest marketing strategies
About Pushwoosh
Pushwoosh is a platform that allows you to connect with your customers and app users through multiple channels: mobile and web push notifications, in-apps, emails, SMS, and WhatsApp. With Pushwoosh, you can unite them in an omnichannel messaging strategy, putting a lifecycle marketing approach into practice.
See how Pushwoosh can help you:
Engage and retain customers
Make your communications more effective by choosing relevant communication channels based on users' preferences and your needs.
Launch campaigns for every stage of the user lifecycle: from onboarding new users to re-engaging those who haven't opened your app in a while.
Build communication strategies for any industry: e-commerce, subscription-based apps, news & media, etc.
Automate communications
Create automated campaigns easily and without coding by using Pushwoosh Customer Journey Builder.
Reach customers when they are most likely to be interested: set the optimal sending time automatically.
Save time using ready-made message presets and AI Composer for creating content.
Personalize your messaging
Target campaigns to specific customer segments or users who perform certain actions in your app.
Create personalized messages by using Dynamic Content.
Below you can learn more about the main features of Pushwoosh.
Projects and platforms
All marketing automation in Pushwoosh is conducted within projects. Usually, one project is enough to work with one app on multiple platforms. If you work with several different apps, you can create a separate project for each one.
You already have a project pre-created for your account — the one called Pushwoosh Demo App. Using the demo project, you can try out the Pushwoosh functionality with no coding and no additional effort, just having the app installed or the website opened in your browser.
Pushwoosh supports the following platforms:
Learn how to create a project and configure it for the platforms you're going to use.
API
Pushwoosh API is a set of publicly accessible methods to communicate to Pushwoosh to send messages, track users' behaviors, gain statistics, etc. It describes all requests needed to automate your Pushwoosh experience and build deeply customized holistic marketing campaigns. You can get more info in the API Reference section of Pushwoosh docs.
Communication channels
Mobile push
Mobile push notifications are short instant messages sent from mobile apps and appearing on a phone's screen. Users don't have to be in the app to receive them; in most cases, users receive push notifications even if their phone is locked.
With Pushwoosh, you have a great automation opportunities for your mobile push messaging: scheduling, behavior-based notifications, personalization based on user data, automated broadcasting of your newsfeeds right into users' devices, etc.
To send mobile push notifications to your app users, first configure your project and integrate the Pushwoosh SDK into your app.
Mobile pushes can be sent individually or via Customer Journey Builder.
Web push
Web push notifications are clickable push messages you receive in your web browser or mobile browser. These alert style messages slide in at the top or bottom right corner of a desktop screen, depending on the browser, or appear on a mobile device screen, almost like mobile app push notifications do.
Web pushes are pretty hard to ignore while they are shown to users right at the time they are surfing the web or doing their work tasks. Web pushes come in handy, for example, when you'd like to immediately respond to some action a user has performed on your site, or send any updates and announcements to your customers.
To start sending web push notifications, first configure your project and integrate the Web SDK 3.0 into your website.
Web pushes can be sent individually or via Customer Journey Builder.
In-app messages
In-app messages are customizable HTML pages shown to your app users while they're having the app launched. In-app messages triggered by users' behavior (see Events) are highly relevant and user-based, which significantly boosts customer engagement. Being an HTML page in its essense, an in-app message can be customized in any way to look like an organic part of your app.
To show in-app messages in your app, you'll need to configure a project, prepare Rich Media pages, and set up Events.
You can set up showing in-apps individually or via Customer Journey Builder.
Emails
Email messaging remains one of the most effective marketing tools — rest reassured, each of your customers has an email address and checks the inbox every day. Personalized and automated emails strengthen your marketing strategies and add value to your customer communications. Emails let you provide your customers with detailed info on every subject you need: transaction details, order status updates, offers and discounts, news of your brand or product updates, etc.
To start sending emails, configure the project, verify your email and domain, and add subscribers to your project by using the API or importing the mailing list.
Emails can be sent individually or as a part of a Customer Journey.
SMS
The SMS channel is indispensable in industries like e-commerce. By using it, you can contact customers who are not reachable via other messaging channels, send transactional notifications, and make marketing offers. You can set up sending SMS using Customer Journey Builder or Pushwoosh API.
WhatsApp and other third-party services
You can use webhooks to share data with WhatsApp and other services, including Slack, CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, etc. Webhooks can be implemented within a Customer Journey.
Automation
Customer Journey Builder
Pushwoosh Customer Journey Builder is a tool for creating automated cross-channel campaigns. It will allow you to keep track of user behavior and send relevant behavior-based messages to your customers at every stage of their lifecycle.
You can create chains of push notifications, emails, in-apps, and SMS launched by users’ actions or specific conditions. Adjust each user's Journey: wait for a particular time or event before the next communication, personalize content based on user attributes, calculate the optimal sending time for each user, and more.
Check out these articles to learn more about Customer Journey Builder:
You can also use the Autopush option to schedule messaging. However, we recommend using Customer Journey Builder for planning and automating your communications.
Audience
Tags
Tags are a tool to collect data associated with a particular user or device. Each Tag is a set of values describing users' info, preferences, and behavior.
Tags contain any arbitrary data that you associate with a particular user or device, whether it's a username, ID, city, favorite football team, preferred news categories, or any other piece of information about your users. By assigning Tag values to specific users or devices, you can target them with personalized user-centric communications. Tags let you run perfectly targeted campaigns with incredibly high open, click-through, and conversion rates.
Events
Events represent actions that users perform in the app or on the website. They are recorded by Pushwoosh SDK and are used to trigger various behavior-based communications. Unlike Tags that are used to store flat data (such as country, device model or installation data), event data is stored historically and can be treated as a history of user behavior rather than a set of information about the device. All the contextual information about the event can be passed as a set of attributes and values.
Once properly collected, this data can be used to:
Build segments of users who perform a specific action in the app;
Set conditions for performing actions in Customer Journey Builder: starting a Journey, sending pushes, displaying in-apps, etc.;
Get insights about user flow in the app, usage metrics, and other statistical data.
Segments
Segments are sets of users and devices complying with specified conditions. You can build Segments based on Tag values or triggered Events.
You can use Segments to create targeted Customer Journeys and set up personalized communications.
You can also use RFM Segmentation (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) to segment users automatically according to their engagement level.
Content
Presets
Deep links
Presets
Presets are push and email messages' configurations saved for further use. You can apply them to set up Customer Journeys.
Presets contain a message itself, scheduling and segmentation settings, custom data, and platform-specific parameters.
More about push and email presets
Rich Media
Rich Media is a deeply customizable HTML page containing images, videos, buttons, and other media content. Rich Media pages are displayed in the app's web view and don't interrupt app performance so users can easily return to their in-app activities after closing the page.
Rich Media can be used as a creative part of in-app messages or displayed once a user taps on a push notification.
Email Templates
An Email Template gives you a preview of what your email looks like including all the texts, images, buttons, links, etc. There are two ways to create an Email Template:
Create an HTML template manually and upload it to Pushwoosh;
Create a template in a block-based editor right in the Pushwoosh interface.
Email Templates can be used when creating Presets.
Deep Links
By default, a tap on a push message opens an app's home screen. Deep Link opens a specified section of the app once a user taps on a push notification. Highlight the new content, promotional pages, or sale offers by taking users there directly from your message.
Personalization
Dynamic Content
Dynamic Content is intended to personalize your push messages by modifying the message content with Tag values you collect from your users. You can address users by name or use any of their preferences to add a personal touch to your messages.
To do so, you have to assign Tag values to users or devices and insert that values into push or email content.
Multi-language messaging
Multi-language messaging allows delivering the same message with different content depending on device locale settings. Since Pushwoosh always knows which language is set on each of your subscribed devices, it will suggest you the most popular languages in your database for consideration. Based on this information, you can create several versions of your text to overcome language barriers, especially for multi-national apps.
More about multi-language messaging
Liquid Templates
Liquid Templates significantly broaden the Dynamic Content usage by implementing the sophisticated logic in addition to regular Dynamic Content capabilities.
Dynamic Content lets you fill in the message's content, title, subtitle, or image with Tag values associated with the user. Liquid Templates, in turn, allow implementing the logic to deal with these Tag values — templates describe the patterns for outputting the data depending on conditions you specify.
Below you can see the Liquid Template code example to set a word's singular or plural form depending on the number of selected items.
Frequency capping
Frequency capping allows you to limit the number of push notifications your users can receive within a certain period. This will help you make your communications continuous but not annoying at the same time.
If no capping is set, the push is sent to every user meeting the conditions you specify for that push or automated pushes series.
Statistics
Project Overview
In the Project Overview section, you can analyze your marketing campaigns' performance with comprehensive stats for your entire project.
Message History
Message History shows the detailed statistics on each sent message. You can easily find information on a specific message using filters by campaign name, text, notification ID, or notification code.
To view the stats for a Customer Journey, use the Customer Journey dashboard.
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