How SendGrid Enables Our Unified Mobile Communications Platform

This guest post comes from Jim Barnes of Moblico, a mobile platform for loyalty management.

Mobile apps have naturally become the answer to interacting with the ever-connected consumer. We all know that it doesn’t stop at making an app. There are a number of ways you can communicate with your customer. Chiefly among them are email, SMS, and push notifications. To be able to hit all of these well, Moblico uses SendGrid and other cloud-based backend messaging services so that we can focus on our loyalty management tools for application marketers.

Over the last three years developers, including our own, have built over 300 apps on our platform, which has grown to support the needs of hundreds of thousands of users. During that time, our platform has been shaped by the demands of our clients and marketers. We know what developers want because we are developers. We know what clients want because we have hundreds of them.

Users choose their preferred method of communication. Apps written on Moblico allow users to opt into email, SMS, and in-app push notifications. Then, in a single API call, you can ensure that the right message is sent to the right customer.

For example, here is how you can use the Moblico SDK in an iPhone app:

MLCMessageService *service = [MLCMessageService
sendMessageWithText:@"Sent from app using push"
toDeviceIds:@[@"DEVICE-TOKEN"]
phoneNumbers:nil
emailAddresses:nil
handler:^(MLCStatus *status, NSError *error, NSHTTPURLResponse *response) {
// handle response here
}
];
[service start];


With one API you can see that you are able to send a message via in-app push (toDeviceIds), SMS (phoneNumbers) and email (emailAddresses). Note that you can send to all three at once by providing the destination addresses for all three–you can also send to multiple destination addresses on one call, i.e. by passing three phone numbers.

The same way SendGrid simplifies email deliverability, Moblico makes it easy to combine the three common ways of communicating with users. With our framework for engagement and loyalty, you can also build in triggers for those communications. Perhaps customers earn points for first time registration, scanning a QR code, and checking into a location.

Developers shouldn’t be focusing on email servers, SMS gateways, differences in push protocols or common loyalty exercises. Developers should focus on creating something new and fun, the stuff that makes your app different.

Try Moblico for free and put your developer time where it belongs.