Event Streams allow you to send message engagement events in real-time from OneSignal to the rest of your tech stack. By streaming this data continuously to the rest of your marketing ecosystem, you unlock the ability to act on these events as they happen and store this information for longer-term analysis and auditing.

Common challenges this addresses:

1. Data fragmentation: valuable customer data often resides in separate tools (such as customer engagement platforms, CRMs, analytics tools, and data warehouses). Event streaming helps centralize this data, increasing visibility into valuable first-party data and allowing for faster revenue outcomes.
2. Slow communication between systems: by sending live engagement events to other systems, you can trigger actions immediately after an event occurs, rather than waiting hours or days for batched updates. This eliminates reliance on manual imports or data syncs.
3. Spend bloat and technical debt: instead of managing multiple intermediary tools, you can directly connect OneSignal with your data warehouse. This reduces the costly overhead of managing multiple integrations or custom data pipelines, lessens technical debt, and preserves valuable technical resources for product and marketing.

What Event Streams do:

Event Streams allow you to send event data (e.g., push notification clicks, email unsubscribes) in real-time to any tool in your marketing stack. This means your BI tool, CRM, or data warehouse can be updated with data as soon as it becomes available.

Setting up this feature is fairly straightforward but requires collaboration with your technical team to configure and connect the endpoints (where the data is sent). Depending on the volume of data you’re sending, you may need to assist in setting up an endpoint that can handle events at scale.

Common use cases:

1. Customer journey mapping and personalization: stream events to a CRM or Customer Data Platform (CDP) to build comprehensive customer profiles and tailor campaigns across various touchpoints.
2. Analysis and reporting: send message events (e.g., sends, opens, clicks) to a data warehouse to analyze engagement patterns or long-term trends across channels.
3. Compliance and regulatory reporting: stream all message-sent data to a data warehouse for auditing and compliance purposes.
4. AI and predictive models: send message event data to in-house AI or predictive models to create comprehensive customer cohorts and understand churn risks—such as email unsubscribes or message dismissals, which may indicate potential churn.
5. Marketing automation: send engagement events (like message opens or clicks) to other tools to automatically trigger the next steps in the user journey or update customer profiles and recent activity.

How to partner with your technical team

Setting up Event Streams requires collaboration with your technical team. Here are some tips to facilitate the conversation:

1. Explain the benefits: share your strategy for using this data and how it can enhance marketing campaigns, personalize user experiences, consolidate data, and reduce technical debt.

2. Define the scope: identify where you want the data to be sent, which events you want to track, and the estimated data volume. This will aid in configuring the proper endpoint setup.

3. Provide technical documentation: share OneSignal’s technical documentation and setup instructions. Your development team will need to configure the recipient endpoints and the event stream in OneSignal, ensuring data is routed correctly.

4. Discuss data volume and management: confirm that your systems can handle real-time data flows. It’s recommended that the API handler records events without additional online processing to maintain low response times.

5. Test and troubleshoot: conduct tests to ensure everything is functioning smoothly before going live.

By working closely with your technical team, you can unlock the power of event streaming to enhance your growth strategy.