The Notices tool allows for your messages to reach even further, by alerting your targeted users through email and mobile push notifications. This article goes into detail about the usage and technical requirements when taking advantage of this functionality.
Both functions begin in the Manage Notices page, accessed by clicking the Manage Notices button in the Notices tool.
Between the Copy and Replies columns, there is a column labeled Send To, holding two icons in each row – the first representing an envelope with a green icon, and the second representing a mobile phone with a speech bubble.
Send by Email
To send a Notice to your users' email addresses, find on this page the Notice you wish to send, and click the first of the two described icons – the envelope with a green arrow. This will take you to a Notice email preview page.
This page shows a number of details regarding the proposed email, including the targeting (targeting for the email recipients, directly related to the in-platform Notice targeting), the email subject (uses the Notice title), and the email content.
Below the content is a section labeled Preview, followed by the name of the email template style that was selected for the Notice (see Email Template Style option in Creating a Notice for more information). Clicking the name of the email template style will reveal a popup, showing how the Notice will look when it is sent.
If you are content with these details, click the Send button, and the emails will be scheduled for sending.
This following page will show the progress of the scheduled emails. If you wish to update this information, simply refresh the page.
Resending a Notice by Email
Once a Notice has been sent by email, this is made known on the Manage Notices page by the replacement of the Send Email icon with a small pie graph, showing the percentage of successfully sent emails against unsuccessful ones. If you wish to resend such a Notice by email, first click this pie graph.
You will be shown an Email Send Status page, similar to the one shown above, but with an additional Send Again button. Press this button, and continue with the instructions at the beginning of this section.
Send by Push Notification
Notices can be distributed so that they appear as a push notification on the phones of targeted users. Anyone that can currently create a Notice in the platform will have this ability when they are creating a new Notice or even after the initial Notice has been published.
For users to receive these notifications, a few requirements will first need to be met:
- Push notifications are sent to users that have installed your
app on supported iOS and Android devices. - The users must already be able to receive push
notifications on their device via the app, meaning any users
who may have installed the app but never actually opened
it and configured their notification settings will not
receive any push notifications. - Notifications will appear on the user’s device with the sender name and subject of the Notice (as shown in
the below iOS example). - Once the user taps on the notification, they will be taken directly to the Notice page in the platform.
There are two ways in which you can begin this process – by clicking the Send button upon creating a new Notice, or by going to the Manage Notices page, finding the Notice you wish to send, and clicking the second of the two icons described at the beginning of this article – the mobile phone with a speech bubble. Either of these methods will take you to the Send To Mobile page.
Potential Recipients – These numbers tell you how many potential recipients there are. We say potential because there are scenarios (app uninstallation, old devices that are no longer used, etc) where a user may never ever see the notification.
Unable To Receive – These are the total number of users that are targeted that do not have any app installed or registered against their account, so they are guaranteed to never see this notification.
Note: Clicking on either of these numbers will show the related list of accounts.
If you are happy to proceed sending the push notification to the users, press the Send button.
From here, you will see the number of users that have marked the notification as Read on their device. This will initially account for 0% of those potential recipients, and gradually increases as people see and read the Notice.