What is Knock?
Notifications are a critical part of how users engage with products today. They are how we interface with products when we're away from them, and how we find what we need to respond to and get done when we return to them. For product and engineering teams, notifications are how we engage with and retain our customers.
Product and engineering teams at LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Pinterest dedicate entire teams to building and maintaining the in-house notification systems that drive engagement and retention.
But most teams can't afford to spend that much time and effort on a notification system, despite its importance in the end user experience. Instead, notification features get de-prioritized in favor of core product features. The notifications system becomes a ball-of-mud—you slap on a notification here, a new channel there—until over time it becomes a source of technical debt within the organization.
That's where we come in. Knock is a hosted notifications engine that helps you implement notifications your users will love, without the effort of building and maintaining your own in-house notifications system.
What does Knock do?
Knock takes inputs from your product, runs them through workflows built in Knock, and delivers notifications across in-app and out-of-app channels.
The inputs are notify and identify calls made to the Knock API by your engineering team.
These inputs power workflows built in Knock by your product and/or growth teams. Once the necessary calls are being made by your API to Knock, non-technical users can create and update notification routing and design in minutes, without the help of engineers. Knock also provides visibility into logs and analytics so your team can quickly see what's working and iterate towards a notification experience that your end users love.
Knock delivers notifications across in-app and out-of-app channels. For in-app channels we offer pre-built components you can use to drop a fully functioning notification feed into your app in minutes. For out-of-app channels we integrate with the downstream providers you already use today, such as email, push, and SMS service providers, as well as native platforms such as Slack and Apple Push Notification Service.
Product vs promotional notifications
At Knock we're focused on product notifications (sometimes referred to as transactional notifications.) These notifications are usually triggered by a user event in your product (or a time-based query) that one or many of your other users need to be notified about.
In contrast, promotional or marketing notifications are centered around the needs of sending promotions or campaign-based notifications to segments of your users or prospects.
What can Knock do for my users?
Knock delivers the notifications experience your users expect from the best products they use today; timely notifications, delivered to the right channel, with no duplicates. These notifications help your users get back to your app and discover what they missed, while making sure they are not inundated with messages.
Put simply, we help to increase the quality of the notifications your users receive.
What can Knock do for my developers?
Knock gives developers a set of tools that simplify the process of introducing a notifications engine into your product. We provide:
- Backend API clients in many languages, to tie your notifications system into your product.
- Prebuilt components to build in-app user notification feeds and notification preference experiences with ease.
- Delivery partner integrations for all major providers so you can use your current provider(s) with Knock.
- Reliable, scalable infrastructure built from scratch to support the needs of delivering and storing high volumes of notifications.
- Extensive documentation, implementation guides, and examples.
What can Knock do for my business?
Knock provides a dashboard that allows non-technical members of your team to introduce and update notifications on their own. The dashboard enables product and growth teams to add and iterate on the user facing notification experience with ease. With it you can:
- Create and update existing notifications and the logic that powers them
- Test changes to notifications easily
- Get insights about engagement with your notifications
- Debug notifications sent to users