Push Notifications

Marketing Cloud Personalization supports Push Notification campaigns for iOS apps using:

For Personalization Push Notification campaigns to work on your iOS apps, you need to generate APNs certificates and configure Personalization to use those certificates.

  1. Access your Apple Developer Certificates and click + in the top right corner.
  2. Select one of the APNs SSL options (Sandbox or Sandbox & Production) and click Continue.
  3. Select the app and click Continue.
  4. Follow the instructions to create and complete the Certificate Signing Request.
  5. Download and install the certificate on your Mac.
  6. Open Keychain Access from the same Mac.
  7. Click on My Certificates and find the app's Push Services certificate you just created.
  8. Check whether the private key is attached to the certificate by clicking the arrow icon to the left of the certificate name.
  9. Right-click the certificate and click Expose....
  10. Name the file and select .p12 as the File Format.
  11. (Optional) Enter a password and click Save.

To upload the APNs certificate and private key .p12 file to Personalization, do the following.

  1. Log in to the Personalization UI and select the Dataset.
  2. From the left-hand menu, click Mobile > your app, and then Mobile Push Setup.
  3. Depending on whether your certificate is Sandbox-only, Production-only, or Sandbox and Production, enter the password for the .p12 file (if any) in the appropriate fields.
  4. Click Upload p12 File and choose your file to upload.
  5. Click Save.

If you're using Personalization to send push notifications to your app via Firebase Cloud Messaging, you'll need to provide your Legacy Server Key. To retrieve your Legacy Server Key and add it to Personalization, do the following.

  1. Open your Firebase Cloud Messaging console for your app.
  2. At the top-right corner of the app card, click the ... menu.
  3. Click Settings.
  4. Open the Cloud Messaging tab.
  5. Copy the Legacy Server Key.
  6. Log in to the Personalization UI and select the Dataset.
  7. From the left-hand menu, click Mobile > your app, and then Mobile Push Setup.
  8. Under Firebase Cloud Messaging, paste your Legacy Server Key.
  9. Click Save.

Additionally, you'll need to provide your APNs certificate to Firebase. For guidance, see Set up a Firebase Cloud Messaging client app on Apple platforms.

If you've provided credentials for both APNs and Firebase, you must pick which one to use when the app is next added to any push notification campaign. Personalization will only send notifications through one channel to prevent duplicating notifications.

To set up your app to use APNs and Firebase Cloud Messaging, do the following.

Additional Details

  • Personalization can send push notifications to the most recent users only. For more information, see [Evergage userId].
  • For information on how to ensure campaign click-tracking when you're app receives push notifications while foregrounded, uses UNNotificationCenterDelegate, and you decide to render custom UI to the user, see [EVGContext trackClickthrough:actionIdentifier:].
  • For information on testing your campaigns, see the Testing guide.
  • To set up mobile data campaigns for your app, see Mobile Data Campaigns.