Every growing product eventually faces the same challenge: communicating through simple notification systems and the odd social media post no longer meets customer needs.
Since today’s users expect real-time updates across multiple channels, what began as a straightforward email notification system must grow to support an increasingly complex network.
To be effective, companies need to use an omnichannel approach that spans push notifications, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and in-app notifications for product engagement. For product and engineering teams, this leads to a critical decision: should you continue adding point solutions and integrating various communication tools or build a custom notification system in-house?
The growing complexity of multi-channel notifications
Most products start with basic email notifications through SendGrid or a similar provider. For a time, this approach is both simple and effective.
As the product grows, however, requirements tend to expand:
- Growth teams want push notifications to drive customer engagement.
- Product teams want to add in-app notifications to send important updates.
- Enterprise customers demand Slack or Teams integrations so messages arrive in context.
- Support teams need direct channels like SMS or WhatsApp for critical alerts.
With each new channel comes new and unique challenges. For example, push notifications require device token management and platform-specific payloads. In-app requires building an app front-end for users and backend for the messages. SMS demands careful cost and rate limit management. And Slack needs OAuth handling and workspace-specific configurations.
But the real complexity isn’t getting individual touchpoints to work independently—the challenge is creating a full customer journey with all channels working together perfectly.
These key challenges typically emerge:
- Creating and managing message templates at scale
- Maintaining consistent branding with optimization across formats
- Tracking delivery metrics across providers
- Preventing duplicate notifications
- Handling user preferences for each channel
- Debugging issues across multiple systems
This is where most notification systems start to break down. What began as a manageable set of integrations becomes an increasingly complex system that consumes significant engineering resources.
Why point solutions break down
As a product grows, simple email notifications generally are no longer enough.
Mobile users expect push notifications through Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) for Android and Apple Push Notification Service (APNs) for iOS. Then, you’ll need to integrate platforms like Twilio for SMS, along with WhatsApp, if it makes sense to do so. Enterprise customers will later want tight integration with their workplace tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Before you know it, you’re juggling a dozen different tools and integrations.
An in-app notification system adds another level to the complexity, as it requires real-time updates, user preferences, and perfect sync across devices—not to mention the UI component.
This ad-hoc approach creates several immediate challenges:
- Template management: Managing notification templates across providers quickly becomes one of your major engineering challenges. Each channel demands different formats—from rich HTML emails to character-limited push notifications and custom Slack markup. Every notification needs to work across multiple channels while maintaining branding, so even simple copy changes require updates across several systems.
- Reliability and debugging: When issues arise, debugging becomes a nightmare that requires checking multiple dashboards, logs, and delivery statuses.
- Cross-channel state management: Each of these providers is independent, which makes it difficult to track delivery status and user metrics across channels.
These challenges typically result in a significant drain on engineering resources merely to maintain adequate performance.
Understanding multi-channel communication platforms
When notification systems become unwieldy, engineering teams typically explore three paths forward, each with its own technical and business tradeoffs:
- ### Direct provider integration
Most teams start by trying to improve their existing provider integrations. The appeal of this approach is clear: maintain complete control, use familiar APIs, and avoid introducing new vendors.
But as the innovative staffing platform BlueCrew discovered, this path can create mounting technical debt. The more the team tried to tweak their system, the harder it became to fix problems as they arose.
As BlueCrew’s chief product officer, Cooper Newby, explains, “If the notification was built by an engineer and hard-coded, you had to wait for the next release cycle to update even a small typo or change channels from email to SMS.”
As a result, managing notifications across multiple channels—like Twilio SMS, Mandrill, Slack, and Intercom—became increasingly complex. “It became difficult to keep track of what was being sent and to whom.”
Along with the immediate challenges of integration and maintenance, setting up reliable cross-channel tracking and managing a series of different rate limits and quotas can quickly become impractical.
- ### Marketing automation platforms
Some teams turn to marketing automation platforms to solve their challenges. While these platforms are great for stitching together marketing campaigns, they’re poorly suited for sending product notifications and omnichannel communication.
BlueCrew tried this approach but quickly hit limitations. “Braze’s template editor is really counterintuitive… and the shortcomings with their Segment integration meant we couldn’t reliably trigger event-driven notifications without writing custom code,” Newby says.
Since these platforms are designed for different use cases—batch marketing campaigns rather than multi-channel product notifications—they lack crucial in-app messaging capabilities. These platforms also can’t provide the sophisticated routing, flexibility, and reliability that’s necessary for a multi-channel platform.
Ultimately, BlueCrew turned to Courier to unify their channels. “Now we can manage every notification, for every user, across every channel, in a single view.”
- ### Custom-built solutions
Some engineering teams attempt to build their own custom multi-channel communication platform to meet their expanding notification needs. They might work hard to build two separate apps to handle their notifications, only to find that both apps are a pain to use and a resource drain to maintain.
Notifications are a supplement to your main product, not its core. The opportunity cost of building and maintaining your own system rarely makes sense.
Just consider a few of the challenges that building an individual solution presents:
- Maintaining provider integrations becomes increasingly difficult as APIs evolve and change over time.
- Building and updating template management systems requires significant engineering resources to ensure flexibility and scalability.
- Handling complex cross-channel routing logic introduces overhead, especially as you add new channels or user preferences change.
- Managing delivery queues and retry logic demands solid infrastructure to handle failures and ensure reliability.
- Monitoring and debugging across the entire system grows more complicated as the number of notifications and channels scales.
Let’s look instead at a better alternative: buying a multi-channel platform instead of building one.
What makes a modern multi-channel communication platform
Multi-channel communication platforms are fundamentally different from cobbled-together point solutions or marketing tools. When we built Courier, we were driven by a simple insight: notification infrastructure has become as critical as payment processing or authentication.
Just as companies stopped building their own payment systems and moved to platforms like Stripe, they’re now learning that the same applies to notification infrastructure.
Building reliable notification infrastructure requires solving dozens of technical challenges, including managing multiple provider integrations, coordinating messages across different channels, and ensuring consistent delivery.
It’s much more efficient and effective to have a dedicated service manage and streamline notifications for you. The right platform simplifies complexities using a single unified API and a robust but user-friendly set of tools.
How do multi-channel communication platforms work?
Modern notification systems are like air traffic control for your messages, coordinating millions of real-time updates across various platforms, devices, and channels to reach their target destination efficiently and safely.
Core architecture
At its heart, a multi-channel notification platform is a sophisticated message routing and delivery system. It sits between your app and various communication providers, removing complexities and allowing you to manage messaging through a single API and friendly UI.
Say your application sends the following request: Send notification type X to user Y with data Z.
The platform then does the following:
- Loads templates and evaluates routing rules
- Generates channel-specific content (HTML email, push notification, SMS)
- Delivers through the appropriate providers
- Tracks status and handles retries
Behind the scenes, a distributed queuing system ensures reliable delivery at scale while maintaining provider integrations, user preferences, and delivery rules.
Provider management
Since custom approaches must individually integrate with providers like SendGrid, Twilio, APNS, and FCM, the ad-hoc approach to multi-channel communication typically creates a mess.
On the other hand, a solid multi-channel notification platform automatically provides and maintains the integration layer with all these downstream providers so you don’t have to. This includes handling the intricacies of auth, API versioning, payload formatting, and more.
Also, if APIs change or systems deprecate, the platform should manage updates flawlessly.
Message routing and delivery
One of the challenges of building your own system is delivery logic. With a multi-channel platform, the routing engine handles this process.
When you define simple rules like, “Try push first, fall back to SMS, and always send an email record,” the platform will translate these rules into reliable delivery flows.
LaunchDarkly helps engineering teams safely release new features using feature flags—controls that can turn functionality on or off without deploying code. When a feature flag needs approval before deployment, its notification system springs into action.
Courier automatically routes approval requests through the right channel—Slack webhooks for Slack users, Microsoft Teams for Teams users, or email as a fallback. As a result, LaunchDarkly never has to write custom code for each provider or worry about delivery logic. Its team just defines who needs to approve what, and Courier handles the rest.
That’s the power of a dedicated notification platform. Teams can focus on their notification strategy while Courier handles the underlying routing complexity automatically.
Template and content management
The template system converts your notification into the right format for each channel and automatically adapts a single template into everything from rich HTML emails and character-limited SMS to interactive Slack messages.
This feature allowed BlueCrew to send thousands of personalized notifications about job opportunities and filled positions monthly.
With Courier’s template system, the team was able to easily create dynamic notifications that drove customer engagement by automatically including details like shift start times and cancellation reasons. Whether they went to workers via SMS or employers using Slack, each notification was properly formatted, which improved customer satisfaction, no matter the preferred channel.
With thousands of job notifications flowing weekly, BlueCrew’s team can now update notification content once and know that it will render correctly.
Scaling infrastructure
As your notification volume grows, maintaining delivery reliability becomes a challenge—but a proper multi-channel platform like Courier can handle all the hard parts:
- Rate limits across providers
- Message queueing
- Automatic retries
- Delivery metrics and tracking across various communication channels
Building this infrastructure in-house isn’t just weeks of work—it’s an ongoing burden that pulls engineers away from your core product.
Our customers know that the right platform reduces technical complexity and delivers better results, including faster development cycles and improved user engagement.
Twilio’s Journey
Even Twilio, a company that powers communications for millions of businesses, faced challenges with its internal notification system.
With different teams using different tools to reach the company’s ten million developers, the notification experience was inconsistent and fragmented. As a result, Twilio needed a way to centralize notifications across its console while maintaining enterprise-grade security and reliability.
Thanks to Courier Inbox, Twilio implemented a unified notification system with in-console messaging at its core. This system gives developers timely updates during onboarding and surfaces relevant features at the right moment.
For Twilio, the platform delivered:
- A unified inbox for its console experience, with real-time updates through webhooks and WebSockets
- Integration with existing tools like Segment and SendGrid
- Complete control over notification frequency and user preferences
- Consistent templates across all channels
Most importantly, it solved the company’s core challenge: unifying notifications across the entire developer platform while maintaining enterprise-grade security and reliability.
Since Twilio is a company that serves millions of developers, this wasn’t just about sending messages—it was about nailing a notification system that truly empowers users and enhances the product.
Why choose Courier for your multichannel communication platform?
Building a notification infrastructure is challenging, and creating your own system often leads to engineering teams drowning in provider integrations, struggling with inappropriate marketing tools, or wasting months building custom solutions that become maintenance nightmares.
We built Courier specifically to solve these challenges and provide a complete platform with features that scale with your product:
- Centralized template management makes updates very simple and ensures consistency across channels—this alone dramatically simplifies the multichannel challenge.
- You can drop our complete notification inbox into any mobile or web app, with real-time updates and cross-channel sync.
- Visual tools build complex notification workflows and automations like batching, throttling, and conditional routing.
- Our design studio provides automatic channel formatting and version control.
- User preference controls give you full control over delivery rules.
- Integrations with dozens of major notification providers are accessible through a single API.
When Courier handles all of this for you, your product and engineering teams can focus on serving your users and improving your product. Instead of maintaining complex infrastructure in-house, you’ll get better notification capabilities than you could build in-house and a platform that scales with your needs.
To start sending notifications for free, try Courier today.