One of my greatest joys working at OneSignal has been building our email platform. Although we’ve always allowed our customers to utilize other email providers within our product, we recently announced the launch of our new OneSignal email offering. Does the world need yet another email point solution? Honestly, no. But it does need a robust and omnichannel provider – and it’s our mission to deliver just that.

Why Choose OneSignal Email?

The future is omnichannel

When we use the term omnichannel, we're referring to more than just messaging customers across multiple channels. That approach is considered multichannel and the distinction between the two is subtle but critical – a topic we’ve written about in-depth. In a multichannel world, each channel is treated independently of the others. This works initially but quickly becomes unmanageable. The better approach is omnichannel – one provider to power every channel.

In addition to simply allowing users to send messages through multiple channels, there are three key features an omnichannel provider must deliver: scalability, customer obsession, and extensibility. Businesses are built to grow and need to know the software partners they choose can scale with them. They need solutions for their problems, and they need to know that the providers they rely on are future-proof. In short, the future is omnichannel and businesses that adapt today will stay ahead of their competition.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

Early in my career, I witnessed firsthand why companies need a robust omnichannel platform with a strong email component. I was building companies from the ground up that relied upon email as the primary way to message customers. We built all of our messaging around email until one day we realized…we needed to add SMS messaging to our wheelhouse. So we embarked on the task of adding SMS messaging to our system. We slotted it into our product roadmap, ran discovery, performed a build-vs-buy analysis, analyzed and contacted every major vendor, and then chose a vendor. Then it was time to build — yes, even when a business “buys” software, they still need to “build” an integration with that provider. A handful of months and way too many Starbucks trips later, we finally had SMS!

Once we had both email and SMS integrated, we realized we needed to do some light synchronization between the systems. We wrote code to handle this. In the end we had to manage two external providers, two integrations, and the synchronization between the two. The value we gained from adding SMS more than made up for these costs, especially considering there were no robust omnichannel providers back then. However, if I had to redo the process today, I would choose OneSignal in a heartbeat.

OneSignal Email is built on a strong foundation

Scalable

As we send over 10 billion notifications per day, we are built and bred for scale. If a business is just starting out, scale might not yet be top-of-mind. However, once their email campaigns take off, they’ll want their provider to simply work. From a technical standpoint, it’s not that hard to send out a high volume of emails – anyone can do that. However, some aspects of email that are complex to scale include…

• Segmentation of a business' audience that’s real-time and useful. Perhaps they want to send only to users that are actively engaged or users in a specific geographic area.
• Orchestrating campaigns based on actions and events across channels.
• Intelligently delivering notifications at the optimal time for their users. This feature is coming soon for email!

The foundational systems we have at OneSignal support truly mega-scale use cases and we’re just beginning to see them be used for email.

Customer-Obsessed

Our customers are at the center of what we do at OneSignal. We have diverse customers across various industries, sizes, and roles. We support mobile app developers, marketers, and product managers at companies of all sizes.

The key to our versatility is investing up-front effort in building as clean a foundation as possible. It all starts from our API, which not only powers our dashboard, but also allows customers to integrate directly with us. By dogfooding our own API, we’re able to build out tools that add value for both the developers and marketers that use our platform – an all-around win!

Being customer-obsessed has also made us future-proof. Fulfilling all of our customers’ use cases has meant building a product that is completely extensible, flexible, and agile. In this world, the only way to truly be future-proof is to adapt to change as fast as possible.

Fully Extensible

OneSignal has always been focused on providing a flexible and lightweight solution that works as part of just about any workflow. A number of products integrate directly with our platform, such as Amplitude, HubSpot, and Mixpanel. Although we aim to provide everything our customers need within OneSignal when it comes to messaging, we aren’t trying to be a CDP or CRM and want to make sure our customers have everything they require to be successful. Additionally, we offer a robust and clean API for developers to build on top of. Providing a great developer experience is one of our core passions. We’re always looking for ways to empower our customers and help them build adaptable businesses that can change as quickly as the times do – and not lock them into our software.

Get Started with OneSignal

OneSignal is designed to help you send notifications and seamlessly manage your user communication across various channels, including mobile push notifications, web push notifications, bulk SMS, in-app messaging, and email. Our platform is quick to set up and makes it easy to send eye-catching messages without doing any development work. If you don't have a OneSignal account, you can create one for free and start sending push notifications to your users today. Don't take our word for it — simply sign up and see for yourself!