Why Your App Needs A Notification System (And How To Build One In A Minute)

An orange envelope on Reddit, a globe on Facebook, and a bell on Twitter; notifications come in many different shapes and forms. To consumers, those icons mean updates about friends’ travel pictures or snarky retorts from trolls. To web developers and SaaS marketers, however, a notification system is a powerful way to get their products in front of the people who matter.

A Brief History of Attention on the Internet

In days gone by, search engines were our exclusive point of access to all the information on the Internet. Want to learn how to design a website? Ask Google. Want to teach your dog to fetch the morning newspaper? Ask Google. Wondering how you can start using the Google search engine? Ask Internet Explorer.

Search-based discovery meant that marketers got used to people coming to their content. This was especially beneficial to large companies like Amazon, who were able to dominate search rankings with a combination of organic methods and paid advertising. But with the advent of the mobile-first world, Internet search is not the only way to command user attention.

Now, apps and websites get to their users through notifications. Research shows that people spend a lot of time using apps on their smartphones, but the majority of that time is spent on just five apps. All the other ones must rely on notifications if they are to draw users away from their preferred services. Similarly, websites now have the ability to draw page views using browser-based push notifications.

Going The Notification Way

On the one hand, the current Internet landscape can be seen as challenging to new apps or SaaS providers. There’s mountains of information out there but people have only so much time and storage space to give away. That means that only the most compelling services are able to woo their target market effectively.

At the same time, the prevalence of native notification systems across web browsers and mobile operating systems is a boon to Internet businesses. Leveraging notifications the right way gives Internet businesses the ability to go straight to the consumer. While Google or Facebook are walled gardens whose algorithms you have to game sometimes, a notification (whether in an app or an email) goes straight to your users. These timely alerts can do wonders for customer retention and engagement metrics.

A Notification System For Your Web App or SaaS in A Minute

There are two ways you could go about building a notification system for your web app. The first would be to build it from scratch, which is something web developers do repetitively for various projects. Taking this route gives you ultimate control over how the notification system works and appears to users. At the same time, it means spending a large amount of development time over a feature that isn’t central to your product.

You could also use a solution like Notific.io (shameless plug), which lets you have a notification system up and running in about 60 seconds. All it takes is the following line of code being added to your website:

<script src="https://cdn.notific.io/<unique_app_id>.js"></script>

Check out this blog post to find out how you can integrate Notific.io’s powerful notification system with your app in no time.