Inbox
Inbox for Mobile SDK is a pre-built inbox solution that allows you to communicate with all active mobile users without dependency on poor push performance or users not paying attention to their push notifications.
On average, smartphone users receive 46 push notifications a day, but the average click-through rate for push notifications is relatively low on Android (10.7%) and iOS (4.9%). At the same time, 10-25% of messages don’t deliver because of GCM/APNS errors. This raises the question of how we can engage mobile users that don't receive mobile push notifications or are indifferent to them.
Inbox helps you overcome this challenge. It is widely used across different types of mobile applications and allows users to navigate back to push message content that they receive and interact with the content at a time that suits them. For businesses, Inbox increases engagement and gives businesses the opportunity to communicate with users who didn't see the push notification when it is first delivered, or if the user didn't receive the push message at all.
What can you do with Inbox?
- Save push notifications as messages in a cloud-based Inbox with all the content from initial push messages. By default, all contents of a message including placeholders and images are retained by the Inbox to ensure that it is unchanged when the customer decides to interact with the content.
- Use all targeting capabilities that are available for mobile push in Broadcast and Mobile push notifications API. Use External User ID for sending inbox messages to particular user.
- Organize messages into topics so your users can easily keep track of the messages that matter most to them. As well as filtering messages by date in the mobile app UI using delivery data that is provided for each message.
- Include a 'seen' status of inbox messages to identify new messages from messages that have already been read. A message will be marked as seen when the user opens the message in Inbox.
Inbox is only available for authorized users and allows for 100 messages (maximum) to be saved per inbox. Messages are retained for 6 months from the send date, after which they will be deleted and no longer accessible to the user.
Configure Inbox
Technical Setup Guides
To configure Inbox you first need to set it up in the Mobile SDK for the operating systems of mobile platforms we support:
Topics
To save push notifications into inbox you first need to define topics. You can use one topic, or several if you would like to put messages into different groups and help keep your messaging organized for your users. For example, you could create separate topics for promo messages, news items, and system notifications and messages.
To create a Topic, select the Topic tab in the Mobile Application section of Apps. Give the topic a simple name for ease of use and identification. Click Save to create the topic. From here you can manage all your topics including editing the topic name and deleting the topic. Any changes you make to a topic will immediately be reflected within the system moving forward.
Once a topic has been created it will be available to select in the web interface when you are creating your push notification in Flow and Broadcast or via the API as a parameter called Topic which you would include in your request. As soon as the message or push notification is sent the topic will be applied.
If a topic is deleted, it will not be able to be selected in the web interface for new configurations. Messages that exist under the deleted topic will not be removed.
Send to Inbox in Flow and Broadcast
Toggle the Save to Inbox button inside the Send Push Notification element of Flow or Broadcast to mark that a message or notification should be saved to the Inbox.
Once you have toggled the push notification to be saved to the inbox you will need to select the topic that notification should be filed under.
Send to Inbox via API
You can also send to inbox via API using the send single push notification method or send multiple push notifications method depending on your needs.
If you use OMNI API to send push notifications with failover for another channel you can also send messages into Inbox by adding the inboxTopic parameter.
Delete Messages
If you would like to delete messages from the Inbox you can do so via the API. You can choose to delete a particular message or messages via their campaign ID in API. Please take a look at the Delete Push Inbox Message API documentation to learn more.
Local Inbox / Message Storage
There may be times when you want to store delivered messages in the local storage of a device. This is possible using the Mobile SDK that uses Message Storage to store push notifications.
Local message storage only saves messages that are delivered while the user is logged in. If a message is sent but is not delivered then it can be fetched by a local inbox.
The local inbox does not store messages. On user logout, the inbox will be emptied so on the next login the user will see an empty inbox.
To configure local message storage select the platform below and follow the instructions in the GitHub repository: