How to Use OneSignal User Journeys

Mobile push notifications are among the top reasons to convert your website into mobile apps. Push notifications boast impressive open rates and engagement rates, and help you boost key metrics such as retention and usage.

OneSignal’s Journeys feature expands the possibilities for what you can do with push notifications. Journeys let you build automated, personalized workflows that guide your users along the path you want them to take.

Keep reading to learn how OneSignal User Journeys work, and how to leverage them in your app.

The Power of Push Notifications

Traditional ways of reaching your users are becoming less and less effective. Email open rates are dropping, and it’s harder to reach people on social media.

Push notifications, however, are a powerful and undiluted communication channel. Where email has open rates of less than 2% on average, the average open rate for push notifications is around 20%.

It’s even better when you consider engagement rates. Compared to an average 1% clickthrough rate for email, push notifications score on average 28% - with some industries scoring as high as 44% clickthrough rates.

Whatever your business type, there’s a way push notifications can help you get in front of your users, get them into your app more often, and boost revenue. 

This includes sending promotional offers, abandoned cart notifications and order updates for e-commerce apps, to new content alerts, account updates, and re-engagement campaigns.

The figures above are even more impressive when you consider that many businesses are not using push notifications to their full potential. Push notifications that hit users at exactly the right time, personalized for where they are on their user journey, have the potential to deliver even higher metrics, which is exciting.

How OneSignal User Journeys Work

The “Journeys” feature from leading push notification service OneSignal, allows you to craft automated and personalized workflows with your push notifications.

Journeys is a drag-and-drop workflow builder that you can use to send push notifications based on certain triggers or timings.

You can send users along various paths depending on the actions they take, and send the right message at the right touchpoint.

Messages can even be personalized with user attributes, such as their name or purchase details.

Once set up, these workflows operate on autopilot, delivering increased engagement with minimal time investment.

How to Start Using Journeys

The Journeys feature is available on OneSignal’s Professional and Enterprise plan levels, starting from $99 per month.

If you’ve got an account at the Professional level or higher, you can get started and publish a workflow within minutes.

While you can set up push notifications from within the MobiLouod builder, or (for WordPress users) within your WordPress dashboard, to set up a Journeys workflow, you’ll need to go into the OneSignal app.

Go here to log in: https://dashboard.onesignal.com/login 

From here, select your app, and navigate to the Journeys tab.

Hit New Journey to get started. You’ll be sent to the visual Journeys builder, where you can start putting your workflow together.

Here’s an example of what your workflow might look like:

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When you’re happy, just hit Set Live to let your workflow run.

Check out OneSignal’s Journeys documentation for more on how to use this feature, and see more detailed examples here.

Benefits of OneSignal’s Journeys

Here are a few reasons why Journeys are so powerful.

Relevant and personalized notifications

User communications work so much better when they’re personalized, and relevant to the user.

Though not as hard as with email, you still need to compete for the user’s attention with push notifications.

If the user sees a clearly generic notification, most of the time it gets automatically dismissed. 

The segmentation and personalization that Journeys offers means you can send notifications that actually interest users and speak to where they are on their own user journey.

Automated to save time and resources

Save time by not having to manually write and send individual notifications and campaigns over and over.

A small time investment in setting up your workflow allows it to run in the background, delivering the benefits of targeted push notifications with very little in the way of labor.

Great for engagement (and re-engagement)

These workflows are an excellent way to bring people back into your app - especially when they’ve gone cold.

You can time messages to send just at the right time to keep your users interested and your brand in the user’s mind. And when a user hasn’t been active in some time, you can have an automated workflow set up to re-engage them and make them a loyal user once again.

No-code setup

OneSignal Journeys require zero coding to set up. This allows anyone to set up and execute workflows, no matter their background. The user-friendly nature of the workflow builder means you spend more time thinking about what really matters - when and how to engage with your users.

Cross-channel capability

OneSignal Journeys even work across different channels - not just push notifications, but email, SMS and in-app messaging as well.

This just gives you even more options to generate engagement and build a loyal following of app users.

What Kind of User Journeys Can You Create?

User Journeys are relevant for any business. There’s always an ideal path you’d like your users to follow, and Journeys helps you push users towards that path.

Here are some examples:

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• Onboarding: push users to take the necessary actions to learn all the compelling features within your app.
• Re-engagement: touch back with users who haven’t logged in for a while, and give them an incentive to become active again.
• Promotional campaigns: send users relevant promotions, and increase the offer for those who don’t convert from the first message.
• Personalized content: send content, offers or recommendations tailored to each individual, based on their actions in your app.
• Account and order updates: keep users up to date with the status of their delivery, changes to their account, and other important information.
• Post-purchase: follow up after someone makes a purchase, or a similar action, to deliver information or push users to take the next steps towards becoming power users.
• Upgrades & upsells: use segmentation to identify your power users, and encourage them to upgrade or take more valuable actions.

Get Started with MobiLoud & OneSignal User Journeys

Converting your site to mobile apps with MobiLoud is a big step towards scaling your business. Get started with a free preview of your app, or schedule a free, personalized demo and get a first-hand look at the platform's possibilities with one of our app experts.

The next step is to harness the full power of push notifications. Even seemingly simple user journey workflows have the power to deliver huge benefits for your apps over time.

Anyone who is familiar with email marketing knows the power of segmentation and personalization. OneSignal Journeys brings this same power to push notifications, letting you do the same thing in a much more personal communication channel.

Enable push notifications in your apps, then head over to OneSignal to use their workflow builder to start crafting the path you want your power users to follow.