Notification Category

Based on the nature of the message, Communications can be classified into 3 broad categories - System, Transactional and Promotional.

System:

A system notifications are the ones that are essential for your users to use your website.
OTP, Forgot Password, Verify Email are some of the examples of System Notifications.
Your users should get these communications without any delay or failure.
Your users should not unsubscribe from these type of communications.

Transactional:

Transactional notifications are the ones that are sent in response to some transaction that a user has done with your platform.
Examples could be: Payment Confirmation, Payment Declined, Delivery order status update, booking confirmation, Post shared / liked, Balance alerts, account update alert, reminders etc.
Some of these notifications should go without any failure and delay (eg. Booking Confirmation, Payment Confirmation, Delivery Confirmation), though others could go with some delay. Infact, if you don't send these notifications, your users could be left scared or confused.
Your users should be subscribed to transactional communications by default. And ideally, they should not unsubscribe from these communications, as they have initiated them at the first place. However, they should have an option to unsubscribe from some of these notifications if they do not wish to receive updates about them (eg. On my post getting likes/ comments).
As a company, you should make sure that you use strategies like digests & clever content, so that users do not feel bombarded with transactional notifications. Also, you can cleverly use transactional communications to up-sell, cross-sell, collect feedback, or bring your user back to your platform.
Channel providers do not block transactional communications generally, and consider your users to be implicitly agreeing to these notifications, hence transactional communications should be used judiciously.

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Sending notifications that are not related to user transaction but are very personal to user's profile and interests, like recommended products, cart abandoned, etc could be inferred as transactional, depending on indicators like whether user is subscribed to receive them, or the way content is designed.

Promotional:

Promotional notifications are the ones that are sent out to users to increase sales, promote products, or bring users back to your platform without user doing any interaction in the first place.
Example could be: Newsletters, new products launched, upcoming sale, deals and discounts, price drop alerts, etc
These communications can be delayed.
These communications are generally sent in bulk, thus consume a lot of communication pipeline.
Some channel providers often require explicit users permission to send these communications. Other channel providers could block or tag these communication as promotional marketing.

How is Notification Category used in SuprSend?

At SuprSend, we have made it mandatory to assign a notification category to a workflow.
We have created separate pipelines and infrastructure for these categories, so that your system notifications and transactional notifications are not delayed due to non-urgent promotional notifications that come in bulk.

How to assign a notification category to a Workflow?

When configuring workflow from SuprSend platform:

Go to Workflows tab. Home > Workflows
Click on any workflow name
On the Workflow modal, select a category value in the "Notification Category" drop-down field
Save the Workflow

When configuring workflow from Backend:

In the workflow body, the parameter notification-category is used to assign category to the workflow
It is a mandatory parameter to send with a single value
Permissible values are: System, Transactional, Promotional