Push Notifications allow you to communicate with your users in real-time. You can draft a message and send it immediately or schedule notifications to go out at a specific date and time.

Send A Notification

1. From the Push Notification section of the CMS, click the Send a Notification button
2. In the Title field, you can add the main heading for your message. This typically appears in bold on your message. A good example of a title is "Lineup Change!".
3. In the Message field, you can enter the body of your message. An example of a message is, "Artist A has moved from 6 pm to 8 pm!" The message field has a character limit of 140.
4. Decide if you'd like to redirect users to a certain section of the app when the user clicks on the message. If so, you can set it up in the Redirection field. This field works the same as the other In-App Redirect fields found around the CMS. 
   1. For more information about this dropdown, please reference the In-App Redirection Article.
5. Decide if you'd like to Segment this message to a certain subset of users. The vast majority of the time, you'll leave this field set to "Everyone," but you can see this article about Audience Segments that describes some use cases for segmenting your messages.
6. The last field will allow you to randomly send your message to a select number of recipients. The majority of the time, you'll leave this as "No Maximum." You could, for example, set this to "100" and send you a message such as "You've won a prize! Please come to the Merch Booth to claim your prize".
7. Finally, you can decide when you want to send your message. If you want to send your message now, click the SendNow button, and it will trigger the message. 
8. If you want to send this message at a specific date and time, you can use the "Publishing Options" to the right of the screen. 
9. When you've selected your Date and Time, you'll click the Send Notification... button at the bottom of the screen to save your changes.

Push Notifications Table

On the Push Notification page of the CMS, you'll see a table that shows you all of your scheduled and previously sent push notifications.

In the Status Column, there is a clock icon to show that your push notification is waiting for the scheduled date/time to send. Once it's sent, you'll see a checkmark to note that it's complete.

In the Recipients Column, you'll see the number of devices that received your message. Note that this number can be significantly lower than your total users, depending on users who have accepted the Push Notification Permission and your Audience Segment.

Best Practices

1. Schedule as many push notifications before your event as you can. The scheduling feature can help automate your messages so you don't need to remember to send them during your event.
2. The In-App Redirect is very useful for your users. For the best experience, you shouldn't add a new page/webview in the app and immediately direct a push notification to that page. We recommend waiting 24 hours between adding a new page and directing a push notification to that page. This will give your users more time to download the new page you added.
3. For the greatest reach, you'll want to use the "Everyone" segment whenever possible. Users have to opt in to push notifications, so the narrower your segment gets, the fewer people will see it.
4. However, it's important not to bombard the users with too many messages, as this can cause users to turn off their notifications entirely. We suggest 1-2 a day leading up to the event and 1-2 an hour during the event.