What’s New: Improved Integrations, Push-to-Start Live Activities, and More

As digital engagement strategies evolve, so do we. Over the last quarter, we've made strides in enhancing the capabilities of our platform. By focusing on new ways to engage users, improving access to customer data, and making email more accessible, we’re helping brands of all sizes around the world nurture and retain their audiences. Here are some of the key advancements we've made to help you connect with your users.

Activate Your Data with Improved Integrations

We’ve made it even easier to control the data you send from OneSignal to your customer data and analytics platforms with our improved integrations. Our integration with Twilio Segment is now bidirectional, allowing you to send message engagement data from OneSignal to Segment to unify and store real-time data on all touchpoints and user interactions.

We’ve also enhanced our bidirectional integrations with Mixpanel and Amplitude. Our customers can now exercise granular control over which events to send out of OneSignal, simplifying data management and controlling costs. Additional events for email and SMS, along with new event properties, provide a more comprehensive view of your omnichannel engagement strategy.

Stay Top-of-Mind with Push-to-Start Live Activities & Android Live Notifications

Since Apple released Live Activities in 2022, apps across industries have adopted this functionality to stand out from the competition and engage users with their real-time content and app experiences. However, the original version required an app to be open for a Live Activity to begin. This year, Apple released “push-to-start” Live Activities, which removed this requirement altogether. Now, OneSignal is among the first platforms to offer a solution for push-to-start Live Activities, so you can initiate a Live Activity even when your app isn’t open.

Push-to-start Live Activities keep your app’s content at the forefront during key events—live sports, breaking news, deliveries, and more—ultimately driving users back to your app in new, more powerful ways than previously possible. While push-to-start Live Activities are currently iOS-exclusive, we offer a guide for creating Android Live Notifications, which offer a similarly dynamic experience for Android users.

Explore Email with No Strings Attached, and Get Set up Faster

Email has long been a marketing workhorse—after all, 99% of consumers check their email daily and $1 investment in email has an ROI of $42. But even though email has existed for decades, many mobile apps are new to this channel. That’s why, at OneSignal, we’re working to help more mobile apps understand, experiment with, and leverage email.

We know that new things can be easy to put off. That’s why we’ve made it easier to explore what email can do for you and your brand. Now you can play around with this channel before making any commitments or going through technical onboarding. We've introduced the ability to explore building an email before setup, allowing you to experience the channel's potential before committing to a sender identity.

Try building an eye-catching design with our drag-and-drop or HTML builders, and then send it to your own Inbox to get a glimpse of what this channel can do. Once you're ready to get set up, we've streamlined the process of purchasing a domain directly from our onboarding flow and included 10,000 emails a month for Free plans, accelerating your time to your first official send.

Making Journeys Accessible to Free Plans

Many marketers and businesses are now expected to do more with less. That’s why we’ve become the only omnichannel solution to offer our powerful Journeys tool to Free plans. Journeys unlock the ability to efficiently drive customer engagement across channels and key phases of your customer lifecycle.

Try automating onboarding, re-engagement, and promotional sequences to drive users toward key milestones, purchases, and actions. Combine timely push notifications, creative emails, contextual in-app messages, and attention-grabbing SMS to get your message across in new, engaging ways. For inspiration on how to get started with Journeys, visit our past blog posts that cover how to build a Journey for onboarding, re-engagement, and retention.

This quarter, we’ve introduced new tools and improved integrations to help brands drive better outcomes. We are committed to supporting your journey toward more effective and engaging customer messaging. If you’re ready to get started with OneSignal, please reach out to our sales team, who can provide consultation on what makes sense for your business. You can also get started on your own for free by creating an account and consulting our documentation.