Why Should Startups Invest in White Label Push Notification Platforms Early?

Product usage statistics over the past years have shown how crucial push notifications are to getting users re-engaged with a product.

Although important, building a notification platform cost a lot of engineering time and resources to maintain and scale as the user base increases. What could be the way out for startups in their early stage with regards to notifications?

Within this article, we'll put while-labeled push notification platforms at the center stage. You will learn about applications that will benefit from using white-labeled push notifications, how they compare to in-house solutions, and the benefits they offer to startups at an early stage.

Notifications aside, white labeling refers to the process where the service delivered by a third party is fully rebranded to serve the end users of another brand. As the name "white label" implies, the third party provides the brand with a blank service, allowing them to customize the service with their own brand details before the service is delivered.

What is a white label push notification platform?

Now bringing the white labeling concept to the massive push notifications industry, a white label push notification platform provides developers with services to leverage when designing and delivering push notifications to users.

By applying the white labeling concept, startups retain their brand identity using a third-party notification provider, as the notifications are fully customized to include most of their brand details.

A white label push notification platform is often easily integrated into an application through scripts. t can deliver messages in-app, through a mobile application as a push notification, or through the browser as a web push notification. There might also be an additional feature for sending customized emails in specific scenarios.

What types of products can benefit the most from white label push notifications?

Products have varying use-cases for push notifications as a part of their user engagement and retention strategy. Let's consider three types of applications that will benefit the most from buying into a white label push notification platform to serve their push notifications.

Collaborative Applications

Communication is key to the success of a collaborative application. From leisure collaborative applications to task management applications used at work, every user of a collaborative application has the desire to be kept within the team communication tool. Hence, users expect to be notified when a new activity or message is posted.

The push notifications statistics for 2022 further showed that users only want to receive notifications about an activity that relates to them directly. This could be a challenge as collaborative applications tend to generate several notifications due to a large number of teams and their participants.

Without having to build a complex machine learning-driven notification platform, white label push notifications allow developers to put together a customizable notification flow tailored to the needs of each user within the team.

eCommerce Applications

One of the long-term goals of every eCommerce store is to have existing customers make a purchase when new stocks or discounts are listed within their catalog. To achieve this goal, eCommerce stores need to notify and re-engage their customers when new supplies are available.

There is a significant need for push notifications in the e-Commerce sector. The 2021 VWO Engage statistics showed that e-commerce stores were the largest senders of push notifications at a 22.03% share of total sent notifications.

Despite the importance of push notifications, you'll often find a small number of eCommerce stores that have the engineering capacity to build a scalable notification platform for sending push notifications.

Asides from providing the feature to send push notifications to shoppers, rich push notifications and segmentation are two features offered by white label push notification platforms which are beneficial to e-commerce applications.

Delivery Applications

Due to the urgency attached to the delivery of physical goods, delivery applications need time-sensitive push notifications to keep customers informed of every step during the delivery process. A single delivery involves end users, vendors, and couriers, all of which need to be kept aware of the current status of item delivery.

As highlighted within the customer success story of Blink, relying on SMS and emails as the notification channel for delivery applications is not scalable as the notifications would often go unnoticed, thus leading to a communication gap between each party involved in a delivery.

Whitelabel push notification platforms provide the developers of delivery applications with the ability to centralize multiple notifications into a single interface and deliver them instantly to all subscribed clients.

What are the core benefits of a white label push notification platform?

• Business Customization

Without the ability of a customer to customize the notifications being sent from a white labeling notification platform, the entire concept of white labeling is invalid.
Most white label push notification platforms offer their customers a web-based dashboard to either use a pre-made template or design their notifications using their brand details before they are sent out.

• An Increased Development Speed

Building a scalable notification platform for your product will cost your team a huge chunk of their engineering hours.

Leveraging an efficient white label notification platform will allow your team to focus on building their core application while the support for push notifications is added to the application in a few minutes through the use of embedded scripts.

• Notification Analytics

Without being able to aggregate and view the statistics of notifications sent, the marketing team behind a product can't evaluate and determine the success of the notifications sent through a white label notification platform.

For most white label notification platforms, one of the items within the dashboard page will be a graph to visualize the statistics of the notifications sent within a time interval.

White label push notification platform vs. Building notifications in-house

Without the option of white label notifications platforms, software engineers building a product often have to develop a dedicated service within the entire product to send notifications.

Building from scratch puts the team in complete control of everything about the notification service, including data security and integrity, how the service operates, and the metrics of resources consumed to keep it running when deployed to the cloud through a public cloud provider such as the Amazon Web Services (AWS).

While building your notification service in-house may seem ideal, keep in mind that it will require a lot of engineering expertise, sprints, and a large technical budget to develop and operate a scalable and resilient notification platform. After development, the engineering team will have to put the notification service through rigorous tests to ensure it is stable before its final use.

For startups with a limited engineering capacity, a higher priority is often placed on building the core business logic while notifications are customized and sent through a white label push notification platform.

White label push notification platforms allow developers to pay and integrate an already built notification service into their application. These platforms are often feature-rich as they provide everything needed from an in-house solution, such as a seamless installation, multiple delivery channels, and even a management console for the non-technical members of the team.

How to choose the best white label push notification platform?

Since all products have varying needs with regard to notifications, the best white label push notification platform for your product should be based on your product and customer needs.

Identifying your product needs is the first step before you begin evaluating the white label push notification platforms available in the market. As you evaluate multiple notification platforms, you will discover that some platforms were developed to meet specific applications' needs better.

Below are a few questions worth asking as you identify the notification needs of your product:

1. Will my product be used by users across multiple geographic regions, and do I want to deliver personalized notifications for each user?
2. Will my product require multiple notification channels such as web, mobile and smart devices to deliver notifications?
3. Will my product give users a control-center-like feature to tailor the notifications they receive to their specific needs?
4. Will each notification benefit from adding additional value-added features such as batch, scheduled, or rich push notifications to improve user engagement?
5. Will my internal product management team require a user-friendly dashboard to manage all product notifications in a central location?

Depending on your answer to each question, you will know the exact features to check for before deciding what platform to adopt for your product.

As we have learned through this article, developing a custom notification solution for your product is a daunting and time-gulping task. A reliable white label push notification platform such as MagicBell provides you with a one-stop notification platform having all the tools and features you could need already built out.

Related resources:

• Web Push Notifications - All You Need to Know
• Mobile Push Notifications - A Lifeblood of Modern Apps

Thank you, Nwani Victory, for crafting this article for MagicBell.

Nwani Victory works remotely as a Frontend Engineer. Outside work, he enjoys writing technical articles on JAMstack, Headless CMS, and Cloud technologies for developer-focused organizations.