Use low-code to send scheduled emails and reminder notifications from your app
By: Ranjith Kumaran
Tags: Low Code, Full Stack, Notifications, No Code, Product Management

Use low-code to send scheduled emails and reminder notifications from your app Ranjith Kumaran Jun 8·4 min read

How we got here

So you’ve launched your new feature, service or app and you’re threatening to achieve product-market fit. Now it’s time to really figure out onboarding, engagement and retention to build that funnel. Teaching new users about your product and reminding them to come back to complete tasks is easy, right? Just send the right email at the right time and watch the magic happen.

Not so fast! There is a lot of complexity hidden behind the simplest onboarding email and reminder notification that you’ll need to figure out sooner or later:

At what frequency / time should you alert potential customers?

How do you test messaging or sequences of messages for best performance?

How do you maintain branding and design consistency across channels?

Usually the bias is to figure these things out later and this leads to a lot of engagement being left on the table. Truthfully this is why most companies end up punting on doing the work until they can hire a team to build tools, integrate systems and execute messaging campaigns.

Here’s a recent (and fascinating) before and after example of this evolution from Racket, a great new “audio blogging” service, check them out!

Observe that during the waiting period the scheduled onboarding emails were bare-bones and functional but later we can see a more branded, polished and welcoming experience. This comparison is especially compelling because these messages were sent a mere 10 days apart so things were happening in real time.

This is a common problem that we all face with new projects. We know we need to put something together to notify new users about what’s going on and what happens next but given all the constraints these important touch points end up being under-optimized. In a lot of cases the company is stuck with this thinking for far too long.

Resources and tools

To understand the notification platform choices being made from when companies launch to maturity let’s look at the tools and resources available.

As an early product team our focus tends to be on building the functional MVP. This usually means focusing on core features that will validate our hypotheses and satisfy early adopters we’ve identified, interviewed and turned into personas. All good things. But messaging should be treated as a very important part of this MVP and there are usually two ways to tackle this: build or buy.

Google a little for how to set up and send your own delayed emails and all roads eventually lead to a flavor of cron, an API-based delivery platform, and hand-coded / hard-coded templates. Though unpleasant, you can use this approach to get the first version of your onboarding or reminder messages out the door with some promise of reliability.

If you decide to shop around for third party systems that the pros use you’ll quickly realize that setting up, integrating, writing and designing for, and optimizing these platforms is a full time job for an entire team. A team you haven’t hired yet because, well, you’re still proving things out.

A simpler way

Last month we released an important update to Notivize’s low code notification-builder for product teams that makes everything we’ve talked about a lot simpler. If you’ve been following this space you probably already know that notification template-management, logic-building and multi-channel delivery are all things you’ve been able to use for free with Notivize. Our customers are easily able to create, deliver, and optimize transactional app notifications. A big request has been to enable the scheduling of said notifications for a future date / time.

This is now available in the form of the following drop down (simple!):

With this we’ve introduced the simplest way any product team can launch, test, and optimize onboarding campaigns, delayed notifications and anything else that requires traveling through time. No more hard-coded templates, messy cron jobs or expensive marketing automation solutions that require an entire team to administer.

Just build your template, select your delivery channels, schedule and we’ll generate a snippet of code that you can copy and paste to get all the functionality you need. Whether it’s your first implementation or you’re upgrading your existing home-brewed system it’s super simple.

What are you waiting for? Don’t delay!

Get started today with Notivize’s easy-to-use notification templates for free. We’ll be adding a lot more richness to the experience, stay tuned. We’d love to hear about your use cases for delayed notifications and how they’ve shaped your product so share them below with the community below.