Getting started with Amazon pinpoint

Table of contents

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What is Amazon pinpoint

Amazon Pinpoint is a flexible and scalable outbound and inbound communications service. You can use it to easily push real-time notification messages to users over multichannel engagement across email, push, SMS, voice, etc. It is available in several AWS Regions in North America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania.

To get started with Amazon Pinpoint, an AWS user adds a project to the AWS Mobile Hub and then chooses the project in the pinpoint console. Through the console, a user can define audience segments, send out messages to customers and view analytics.

Architecture Diagram

Features

Define audience segments

You can define a segment based on data reported by your application to send customized notifications. You can also import static segments that you define outside of Amazon Pinpoint.

Engage your audience with messaging campaigns

You can create campaigns that send push notifications, email, SMS text messages, and voice messages on a schedule that you define.

Provide consistent messaging with templates

A message template contains content and settings that you want to reuse in messages that you send for any of your Amazon Pinpoint projects. You can create templates for email, push notifications, in-app messages, SMS messages, and voice messages.

Analyze user behavior

Through the Amazon Pinpoint API, your application can also report custom data, which it makes available for analysis.

Amazon Pinpoint Channels

A channel represents the platform through which you engage your audience segment with messages. For example, to send push notifications to users of your apps, you must have an Amazon Pinpoint project in which the push notifications channel is enabled. It supports the following channels:

Push Notification: You can send push notifications through a push notification channel to Android and iOS apps.
Email: You can send email message using email channel. By default your account is in the email sandbox with some limitations. But you can request to have your account removed from the sandbox by requesting production access for email.
SMS: You can send SMS messages using SMS channel. You can send SMS messages to recipients in over 200 countries and regions. It also support two-way SMS feature in some countries.
Voice: You can use the voice channel to create voice messages from a text script, and then send those messages to your customers over the phone. You can send voice messages using Voice channel in Amzon Pinpoint. It is beneficial for users who use landlines or VoIP services.

Voice message limitations

You can send a maximum of five voice messages to a single recipient during a 24-hour period.
You can send a maximum of 20 calls per minute.
It supports voice message length of 5 minutes.
It supports specific countries for sending voice message.

Use Cases

Marketing Messages
Transactional Messages
Bulk Communication
Authentication Messages

Conclusion

In this article, we have gone through amazon pinpoint, services, channels, use cases, etc. Stay tuned for the next part where we will implement a notification service using amazon pinpoint.