Online businesses, websites and mobile apps spend thousands of dollars to automate their communication with their users through emails, texts and push notifications. They do so to achieve the holy grail of putting ‘right thing at the right time’ in front of their users; to stand out from everyone else who wants to grab their users’ attention. But the problem is: everyone else, including the ones they want to stand out from, are using the same tools to automate their communications.
Without automation, your push notifications would be lost in the crowd. With automation, your push notifications would be lost among a punctual crowd.
While automation is great, it isn’t enough. This is how the notification drawer of your user looks like:
Can you locate your brand’s notification in the photo? Exactly.
Neither can your user locate it.
Every marketing automation tool is trying to fit you in but you’ll need to stand out to your user for her to notice you.
Horntell claims to make your push notifications stand out through their Actionable Cards.
Actionable Cards
Think of Actionable Cards as version 2.0 of push notifications. They allow your app to embed richer content in them and allow the intended action to be completed from the notification itself. Horntell comes as an Android SDK (also as a Website Javascript SDK) that sits in your application/website and creates a feed of Actionable Cards when you push some using their API.
A feed of Actionable Cards look like this:
Each Card has following characteristics:
1. Rich Content
Unlike notifications, Cards allow you to embed richer content than just a simple sentence. You can embed quotes, lists, photos and videos in the Cards itself.
2. Actions
Cards will never have a link to them and will always have some intended action embedded inside it. The hypothesis behind Cards is that anything that has to happen must happen from the Card itself.
3. Cross Platform
Cards provide exact same experience on Android and on Websites and work in sync. Horntell would be bringing out Cards on more platforms in months ahead.
4. CardRank
Cards are sorted by a proprietary algorithm that ranks the cards in the feed in the manner such that the cards that are most likely to be acted upon are shown on the top. It takes several factors like content of Cards, past behaviour of the user on a similar Card and date/time of the Card.
Payment Card
However, Cards allow various actions to be embedded in them, the one that stands out is the Payment Card. It allows you to make a sale from the notification itself.
The Payment Card allows you, the business, to put required information like price, photo, whether you allow cash on delivery option etc in the card. Upon receiving the Card, the user can initiate the action, choose a payment method, provide shipping address and complete the transaction ‐ all within the notification itself.
Partners
Horntell is available for free to businesses all over the world. But the Payment Card is available only to selected partners right now. Currently, in works with TrulyMadly, Nearbuy, InnerChef and MakeMyTrip, they are on‐boarding businesses one at a time for the Payment Cards.
Video:
Horntell wants to partner with people across various verticals to see various use cases being made possible via Cards. We see Cards as a new UI for apps. An app is nothing but a collection of tiny actionable pieces of content. We provide a platform for these apps to take that tiny actionable piece of content outside the boundary of their apps and pass it to their users through a common medium ‐ Horntell.
What’s Next
We raised our first round of external funding few months back and we are at full throttle in building the next best platform for businesses to make their service used. Currently, their services can be consumed via their websites or apps. We are adding one more medium to their kitty ‐ Cards.
Over a period of next six months, when we would raise our Series A, we plan to focus on being available on only Android & Web and double down the resources in creating amazing experiences through the Cards. By the end of six months, we see ourselves partnered with some of the amazing companies from India and the US.
This is just the beginning.
