New Custom Event Triggers Help You Create & Automate More Timely, Personalized Mobile Notifications

Automation in the Urban Airship Engage composer just got more powerful, with the addition of both custom event triggers and cancellation events.

Together these features address some key use cases — including following up with users who have made a purchase of a certain value and using push notifications to help address shopping cart abandonment.

These much sought after features were made available through our APIs in June, and now the feature is available directly from the new UI.

Custom Event Triggers

Customers with access to our new Message Composer now have the ability to create automated push notifications, in-app and message center messages triggered by custom  “Events.”

Choose from all types of custom events tracked by your app (e.g. screen views, purchases, preferences set) in the past 30 days. Just search for the event name and select your triggering event.

You can further filter triggering events based on the value of an event. For example, if you only wanted to send a special offer on purchases over $100, you would set an event filter for values greater or equal to 100.

You can trigger by exact numeric values, or ranges of values (e.g. purchases from $100 to $500), whatever best meets your goals.

If you're not already using Urban Airship Engage, you can try it out for free today! 

Cancellation Events

Urban Airship’s automation system can deliver mobile messaging in real time. But for many use cases, that kind of speed is not what you need most. A classic example is shopping cart abandonment.

Businesses frequently send email messages to shoppers who have added an item to their cart but didn’t complete the purchase.

Urban Airship’s new Cancellation Events feature makes sending an abandoned cart notification follow up — in addition to or instead of an email — a snap.

Here’s how: First you set up your message, for example, triggered by an item-added-to-cart event, configured to deliver a reminder message “You have items waiting in your cart!” with a delay of 24 hours.

To prevent users from getting a reminder message if they made the purchase, you can also configure “purchase” as a cancellation event.

​Cancellation events are not limited to only custom event triggers, and can be used with most other trigger types in the composer as well.

Sending Events

There are several options for sending Custom Events to Urban Airship.

One way is to pre-wire them within your app, which requires a small amount of dev effort, and an app update.

If you use interactive notification buttons, Urban Airship automatically records custom events for each button press.

Also, if you use Google Analytics, you can install our Google Analytics Tracker into your app, and automatically repeat each Google Analytics event as a potential triggering event for an Automated Message within Urban Airship.

Get Started Today

You can read about these features in our release notes, including links to more in-depth documentation.

Need help getting started? Get in touch anytime at contact@urbanairship.com or give us a call at (855) 385-3155.