Using Segment to Send Effortless Product Notifications

TLDR

Easily connect your existing Segment events to trigger and send product notifications.

Background

We’re excited to announce that we now easily integrate with Segment, the leading customer data platform.

After 2.5 years and hundreds of customers, our community has convinced us that having additional event sources to act as notification triggers would help expand use cases and reduce the effort required to get up and running with Courier.

Now, Segment and Courier users can:

• Configure Courier as a Segment destination
• Trigger product notifications without writing any additional code
• Take advantage of Courier’s complete product notification platform, including omni-channel routing, dynamic templates, preference management, automation, and more

Don’t use Segment? Remember that you can easily integrate the Courier Send API into your codebase — a single API that can notify your users over any channel. See all of our channel providers in our Integrations section.

Product Notification Infrastructure Without Additional Code

While Courier is still a developer API first and foremost, Segment users can now take advantage of the complete Courier platform, including omnichannel routing, dynamic templates, preference management, automation, and more by simply adding Courier as a Segment destination. The only requirement is that you are currently sending any events you would want to use to trigger a Courier notification to Segment.

Courier + Segment Use Cases

While the ways in which you can use Courier and Segment to automate your product notifications are endless, below are a few highlighted examples of how customers are using Courier and Segment today. Also, check out Courier's case study with Hospitable.com to learn how they use our Segment integration.

Transactional Notification

Using the Segment ‘account created’ or ‘signup’ event, you could send a welcome message to all new users. While the most common channel for welcome messages is email, you could also send a welcome SMS, Slack message, in-app notification, or one of many other channels supported by Courier. You could even set up an automated sequence to nurture new signups as they progress through your product funnel.

Segment integration in Courier: Segment events, once triggered on your application, can be located in Courier and linked to automations. In this example, our events are linked to the “Account Created/Sign Up” automation that sends a Welcome email to the user when triggered.

User activity notification

Using any segment events you have configured that track user activity that other users may need to know about, for example a product being purchased in a two-sided marketplace, you can easily set up notification automations. One common use case is to send the seller a notification whenever one of their items has been purchased, and then to send the buyer a notification when the seller has shipped their item.

Segment API sample call: Segment can make calls to Courier that pass along information about how your user is interacting with the application.

Marketplace automations triggered by Segment API call

Action Requested Notification

You can use any Segment event that requires action from a user to build notification automation in Courier. For example, if your app facilitates employee performance reviews, you may want to begin sending managers both email and Slack reminders to complete their reviews two weeks before they are due. You may then want to send a notification to the manager’s manager, letting them know there are incomplete performance reviews, two days after the due date. All of this is easily achieved, without writing any code, using Courier and Segment together.

How to Get Started

The first step is to sign up for a free Courier account and then to configure Courier as a Segment destination. Once that is complete, you can start triggering notifications from Segment events by triggering notification automations from Segment events. A complete getting started guide can be found here.