How Atomic works
Atomic is a system for surfacing actionable cards to your customers from right inside your existing apps, and re-engaging users with your app using push notifications.
Unlike other in-app customer engagement systems, Atomic action cards blur the line between information and app functionality, allowing you to send rich media, collect form data, create branching pick-a-path style interactions quickly and easily, so you can go, much further than simple in-app notifications, content cards or alerts.
The Atomic website provides more information about who uses Atomic, how Atomic is used in verticals such as banking, wealth management, government, telco, utilities, health and retail.
Want a quick no-pressure walk through of the Atomic solution? Reach out and we'll set it up.
Core Atomic concepts
Action Flows
Action Flows are sequences you design that tell Atomic when and how to send Action cards and push notifications to your customers. Created via the Workbench, Action Flows describe the steps Atomic will follow, including how and when to start, how to respond to trigger events and how to adapt based on input data and data generated or observed while the flow runs.
Action cards
Atomic surfaces actionable in-app messages called Action cards to customers when they're inside your existing apps. The orchestration of action cards, including how they're personalized, delivered and dynamically responded to is managed by Action Flows. The display and handling of action cards is handled by Atomic SDKs installed in your web and mobile apps.
Core layers of the Atomic solution
Whether you're planning a quick-start implementation of Atomic, or embarking on a deep integration, you will most-likely use three core layers of Atomic:
- The Workbench back-office system and editor.
- The SDKs which surface cards inside your apps.
- The APIs for sending and receiving your data.
If you're planning to trigger Atomic from your existing systems, you will want to learn about our integrations, and how to use webhooks to trigger Action Flows.
If you're wondering what data Atomic needs, how to build dynamic segments using analytics or Atomic-generated data, check out the customer data model, read the triggers article, or better still, reach out so we can point you help answer your questions.
A visual representation of these building blocks and how they fit within your existing architecture can be found in the Introduction to integrating Atomic.
Many customers start with a basic and quick implementation of Atomic, installing Atomic SDKs into their web and mobile apps, then using the Atomic workbench to build simple segments and manually trigger messages. From there, customers turn on Atomic's integrations with marketing platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Adobe Marketo, as well as connecting Atomic to their existing transactional and customer data systems to send triggers to atomic, sync user data, extract analytics, and more.
Want to fast-track your evaluation of Atomic, or need a hand planning your implementation? Reach out so our team can save you time and effort.
Atomic in a nutshell
The following describes an end-to-end journey through the Atomic platform once you have everything set up and installed:
Step 1: You send triggers and data to Atomic
Triggers can be as simple as API events or webhooks from your existing systems, as smart as dynamic segments you build inside Atomic using customer profile and event data, or as easy dragging an Atomic steps into Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Marketo. Triggers can even be done manually by your team by uploading lists, or using the tools in our workbench. Within trigger events you can also send customer data and content to personalize message and notifications templates, or you can sync that data into Atomic separately and store it in customer profiles.
Step 2: We send action cards and push notifications to your customers
Triggers start Action Flows that run through sequences of steps that you've designed, sending action cards to your customers in-app, delivering push notifications, and much more.
Atomic gives you a lot of control of how cards look and behave – check out our card element reference guide and themes and style article guide for more information.
When steps in you Action Flow run, new card instances created from your template and/or push notification are sent to customer(s) you specified in your trigger. To allow us to do this, you will need to integrate the Atomic SDKs into your existing iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter and/or Web apps by following our SDK installation docs.
Step 3: We share analytics data with you
The Workbench gives you various ways to monitor the performance of your Action Flows and view real-time statistical metrics for each card once they’re live. Analytics can also be extracted in bulk, manually downloaded, or sent in near-real time using webhooks to your reporting and operational systems.