What Are Slack Notifications, and Why Are They Important?

Whether you own a business or have worked in the corporate or tech world, you’re likely familiar with workflow and communication platforms like Slack. Slack is a business application and software that helps unify teams, enhance collaboration, and add transparency to workflow. Slack has proliferated since its creation in 2013 and continues to dominate its competitors.

One of the many reasons Slack has become such a popular tool for businesses is its finely tuned notification system. If you're looking for a handy tool to organize and grow your business, look no further! Slack notifications just may be the answer, and here you’ll learn what they are, how they work, and how they promote business growth.

What Are Slack Notifications?

Slack notifications are important alerts that allow users to know what’s happening within their organization's workstream. More specifically, notifications are the direct way Slack communicates with its users. Slack notifications can alert users of specific interactions or messages that are relevant to them. Notifications can appear as badges, bolded channels, a push message to a mobile app, web browser or desktop, or an email.

How Slack Notifications Work

Slack has excelled in the world of notifications by dialing in to how users want to receive information and considering what would benefit their users the most. Slack aims to transform the typical work-life into a more productive and collaborative life for internal and external teams. However, this can become tricky when hundreds of tasks, projects, and people work within it.

Slack uses notifications to command users’ attention and allow them to focus on what matters the most. This helps cut out the noise and limits distractions from conversations, projects, and tasks that aren’t relevant.

The primary purpose of Slack notifications is to sort out the relevant information from the noise, thereby enabling each user to successfully remain productive. Here are the basics of how slack notifications work:

The Basics

Slack created a flowchart of how they decide to send notifications, but as a user, how do you know when your input is needed within Slack? Well, it all depends on how you customize your notification settings. Here’s how it works.

Slack has a global organizational view, which includes its entire workstream and what they refer to as “channels” to which teams can subscribe. Slack’s preloaded settings will notify users if any of the following events occur:

• Direct message (DM)
• Reply to a thread the user follows
• Activity on a channel the user is subscribed to
• Someone mentions the user by name by using the @ tag
• Someone triggers a keyword the user is following

Users can receive notifications through their desktop, web browser, mobile app, and email. Notifications can appear as banners, sidebar badges or highlighted messages, mobile app badges, taskbar badges, and emails.

Badges

Slack notification “badges” are displayed using two different colors, as outlined below:

• Blue badges = Unread or unseen activity
• Red badges = A user has received a DM, an @ mention, or keyword trigger

Customizing Notifications

Slack has made it easy for users to customize their individual notification settings. Users can customize notifications by:

• Selecting Specific Keywords: You can add keywords that will trigger an alert by going to a specific channel’s or organization’s preference settings.
• Disabling Alerts: Minimize noise that doesn’t pertain to you by disabling organizational level notifications such as channels you aren’t a part of.
• Channel Details: If you’re a project manager, you’ll want to follow your projects closely. To do this, click on Channel Details to set your preferences and never miss an update or message.
• Muting Channels: You can mute #random, which mutes notifications from bots and software integrations. You can also mute specific channels that you don’t need regular notifications from.
• Enabling Do Not Disturb (DND): If you need to buckle down and don’t want to receive notifications that may distract you, you can enable the DND mode. Select a pre-set or customized amount of time for focusing and your original notification settings will automatically re-enable at the end of the desired time.
• Customizing email settings: You’ll receive email notifications if you haven’t opted-in to receive mobile alerts. If you don’t want to receive in-app alerts or emails, you can customize your settings or disable email notifications.

Slack has designed a sophisticated notification system that allows alert settings to sync across all platforms (mobile app, desktop, browser, and email). Users also won’t receive notifications to every single device. For instance, if a user is not using their browser or desktop app, Slack notifications will only be sent to their mobile device or email. This helps prevent notification fatigue and reaches users where they’re active, so they never miss an alert or message.

The Long-Term Value of Slack Notifications

Slack notifications essentially allow you to automatically capture your employees' or clients' attention and save time by skipping multiple desk visits, unnecessary meetings, and emails no one reads. Slack notifications offer long-term value for your business by allowing you, your internal teams, and clients to:

• Manage workflow
• Effectively communicate across teams with ease and in real-time
• Efficiently engage with clients in one system
• Deliver higher overall value and enhance the user experience
• Keep your company organized, efficient, and increase productivity
• Enables efficient and time-sensitive sharing of information, documents, marketing campaigns, and other assets across teams, whether remote or in-office
• Receive notifications from integrated business software and APIs, making it easy to stay up-to-date across all platforms

Conclusion

As more companies implement more remote employee policies, it’s crucial to have an effective workflow and communication plan in place. Slack has been the solution for many businesses, and with over 12 million users working within the platform daily, Slack notifications ensure the software is an effective tool.

Slack's notification system can help grow your business through genuine collaboration in real-time. Slack notifications reduce in-person interactions while keeping teams connected, decrease communication mishaps from lost or unread emails, and hold teams accountable and productive with transparent workflow management.

By partnering with MagicBell, you can maximize the value Slack offers without dealing with the complexities of designing a notification system or relying on your employees to appropriately customize and utilize their notifications.

MagicBell can help you level up your notification system by designing, organizing, and managing your notifications across every channel. MagicBell's solutions can also be set up within minutes so that you can focus on growing your business.