7 ways in-app notifications give your brand a competitive advantage
Effective communication is essential for building trust and brand loyalty in today's competitive business environment. One-way in-app messages are emerging as a powerful communication tool for businesses to engage customers. By adopting this strategy early, innovators can leverage the first-mover advantage, establishing themselves as leaders in customer communication and reshaping user experiences.
Capture attention & fuel conversions with in-app notifications. Gain the first-mover advantage.
7 unique benefits of in-app notifications
In-app notifications offer a range of capabilities that make them a superior choice for customer engagement over prevalent emails, SMS, and social platforms or messengers:
In-app notifications: A branded experience
In-app notifications provide businesses with the opportunity to create a cohesive and branded user experience. Unlike generic emails or SMS messages, these notifications can be fully customized to reflect the brand's identity, colors, and tone. This consistency reinforces brand recognition, making customers more likely to engage, as it signifies a professional and thoughtful approach to communication.
How to engage and retain more users with in-app notifications
In-app notifications: Contextual, relevant, & centralized messaging
Unlike traditional messaging methods, in-app notifications are inherently contextual, appearing directly within the app. This strategic placement ensures that users receive relevant information exactly where they expect them to be and when they will be the most receptive to it, leading to higher interaction rates. A message center is also a great way to organize content across promotions, alerts, and updates eliminating the clutter of email and SMS that mix businesses with personal communication, and any sender.
In-app notifications: A media-rich experience
In-app notifications can incorporate rich media elements—images, videos, GIFs, and interactive buttons—making them far more engaging than traditional SMS or email communications. This media-rich approach captures users' attention and encourages interaction. A well-designed notification featuring a promotional video can significantly enhance click-through rates (CTR) and ultimately lead to higher sales. By utilizing compelling visuals, brands can tell their stories more effectively and create memorable user experiences.
In-app notifications: Secure and authenticated
In-app notifications offer a level of security that SMS and email lack. In the app, the brand is naturally authenticated, and users interact in a secure place where they can trust the messages they receive. SMS and email channels, however, are susceptible to smishing (SMS phishing) and phishing attacks, where malicious actors attempt to deceive users into providing sensitive information.
In-app notifications: Higher delivery rates
In-app notifications achieve exceptional delivery rates of 99.99%, significantly above SMS rates, which are affected by carrier filtering due to compliance. The high deliverability ensures businesses can trust each message to reach users effectively. For recipients, this reliability is crucial, especially for critical information such as delivery updates, flight delay alerts, a taxi's new pick-up location, or other important check-in changes. By ensuring high deliverability, businesses can foster a more responsive and engaged customer experience.
In-app notifications: More cost-effective
An omnichannel communication strategy allows businesses to focus on push notifications and in-app notifications while reserving SMS as a backup delivery option.
Many businesses adopt a multichannel strategy that blasts messages simultaneously across various channels, including SMS and WhatsApp, which can be costly. A more effective approach is to start with push notifications—which are great to get people back in the app—and in-app messages, both of which are high-performance and cost-effective channels. Push notifications are essentially free, while delivering in-app messages is significantly cheaper than SMS and WhatsApp in many regions of the world. This strategy allows businesses to reserve these more expensive channels as backups, only using them if the first two methods are ineffective or if they align better with user preferences.
How to build the perfect mix of mobile customer communication channels
In-app notifications: New and actionable insights
In-app messaging provides businesses with full visibility into user interactions, including whether messages are delivered, viewed, and clicked. This observability is a significant advantage, as the "viewed" metric is unavailable for SMS and email, making it difficult to gauge true engagement. Each user's interaction is recorded for future analysis, allowing businesses to improve outreach effectiveness and enhance the overall customer experience. This granular level of data is exclusive to the business, unlike with third-party platforms, which govern data access.
In-app-first, omnichannel customer messaging: The future of digital customer messaging
As businesses increasingly recognize the value of in-app notifications, this method is set to become the de facto standard of customer communication experiences. Early adopters who embrace this shift will not only improve their communication strategies but also create a more engaged and loyal customer base.
The first-mover advantage is critical here; being among the first to implement in-app notifications sets the standards for engagement, builds strong customer relationships, and establishes brand loyalty before competitors can catch up.
In-app omnichannel communication: The innovator's opportunity
For those looking to lead rather than follow, the opportunity is clear: by adopting in-app-first, omnichannel customer messaging early, businesses can differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. The risk of falling behind is significant; competitors who embrace this trend will attract and retain customers more effectively, leaving late adopters struggling to compete.
Delaying the adoption of technology readily available equates to missing out on the chance to enhance customer experiences, improve engagement, and build loyalty. Innovators who have recognized the value of in-app notifications have positioned themselves at the forefront of customer communication, transforming how they interact with their audience.
For example, Maya, the largest fintech ecosystem in the Philippines, achieved a cost savings of 94% per message after shifting from SMS to in-app notifications. Read the full case study.
"Sendbird has immensely improved our user experience and helped optimize our cost by significantly reducing unit cost per sending of message and unit cost per after sales ticket. Sendbird allowed us to implement immediately and realize the benefits in terms of customer experience and cost optimization."
Rose Tendencia, Head of Business Operations at Maya
Porter, one of India’s leading logistics companies providing intra-city and inter-city services, achieved a 78% message open rate and saved 30% on SMS costs after migrating to Sendbird Notifications. Read the full case study.
"Sendbird has proven to be very helpful in significantly increasing engagement for notifications. We have been able to achieve higher conversions along with greater savings on our SMS communications. The successful integration of notification solutions into the system has seen a surge in our brand-to-user communications."
Apurva Shetty, Product Manager at Porter
Introducing Sendbird Business Messaging: The modern notification delivery platform
To help businesses harness the power of omnichannel enhanced by in-app notifications, Sendbird Business Messaging offers an in-app-first, omnichannel solution that seamlessly integrates external channels like SMS and WhatsApp with push notifications and in-app notifications. Sendbird Business Messaging combines:
A unified API for system integration to send transactional, automated messages
SDKs and UIKits to swiftly build custom in-app message notification centers for users
- An easy-to-use software any team can quickly learn to create:
Pixel-perfect customer messages that resonate with the target audience
Templated campaigns to ensure compliance and operational efficiency
Sendbird Business Messaging streamlines communication across multiple channels so that teams can immediately send targeted messages that drive results.
In a world where personalization and the speed of information are critical, Sendbird Business Messaging empowers teams to enhance their email and SMS marketing, as well as transactional and informational notifications, through a more modern and effective channel: their own app.
Step into the future of communication with Sendbird Business Messaging. Contact us for a demo and discover how you’re only a week away from enabling any team and transform your customer experience.
