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Getting started with in-app messaging is easy

Read our guides for websites and mobile apps

In this guide, you will learn to:

1. Compose your in-app
2. Target an audience
3. Schedule when it must be shown

Composing in-apps is easy and achieved directly from our online dashboard, no coding is necessary.

Step 1. Compose you in-app

First, click the Create in-app button from the In-apps page to access the creation form:

4 types of in-apps are then offered to you:

Card

With cards, you can add a title, a short text, an image and up to 2 buttons. Ideal for binary choices.

Modal

Modals let you display a title, a short text, an image and a single button. Ideal for alerts with a single choice.

Image

This format lets you display a clickable image. Gives you complete control over the look and feel.

Banner

Banners let you display a title, a short text and an icon. Banners are automatically dismissed after some time and can be attached to the top or the bottom of the screen.

Formats comparison chart

Previewing your changes

In-apps adapt their rendering to the user's device, with specific support for mobile phones, tablets and computers.

As you compose your in-app, the preview on the right hand-side of your screen will automatically update to reflect your changes.

Use the device selector at the top of the preview to switch from phone to tablet or computer.

Customizing the display of your in-app

You have complete control over how you in-app message looks. The in-app composition form offers many color and placement options, buttons, as well as entry & exit animations.

Developers can go beyond and handle the display themselves.

There is a complete guide to customizing the display of your in-app message for marketers and developers.

Handling clicks

Whenever a click occurs, you can execute different kind of actions such as prompting for push subscription or setting a tag. It's detailed here.

Step 2. Target your audience

Choosing who will see your in-app is key to its success. To choose the audience of your in-app, you use Segmentation.

In-apps and push notifications use the same segmentation to target an audience, so it's easy to combine push and in-apps to reach the same audience

By default, in-apps are viewed by 100% of your audience. To target users with your in-app, use segmentation criteria by clicking the Add criteria button.

Segmentation is essential to selecting the right audience and it is documented in detail:

• Segmentation overview
• Segmentation reference
• Segments

You can create segmentation criteria based your own data, collected as Tags, Properties and Events.

Step 3. Schedule when it must be shown

Choosing when the in-app appears in the user experience is also essential to its success. We give you the tools to let you display in-apps at exactly the right moment.

Specify start & end dates

By default, your in-app will run indefinitely when activated. With the start and end dates setting you can control when your in-app starts appearing and when it stops.

Specify a trigger event

In-apps are always triggered by an event.

Choosing the right trigger event is a mandatory step in the in-app composition process. Triggering events can be:

• the App launch & Website visit event occurs when the user first opens your app or visits your website after a period of inactivity,
• the App foreground & Page view event occurs every time the user brings your app to the foreground or visits a new page of your website,
• the Exit page event occurs only on websites, never in mobile apps. It occurs every time the user's mouse leaves the page,
• any custom event tracked by your app or website using our SDK's trackEvent method, like a purchase event on a merchant app or website.

Capping

By default, in-apps are capped to be displayed only once to the user.

You can decide to show an in-app more than once to the same user. In this case, we recommend setting the Time between impressions to avoid getting the same message twice in a row.

Step 4. Save and activate

To save your changes, hit the Save button at the bottom of the in-app composition page. By default, in-apps are not active, which means nobody will see them.

To activate an in-app, hit the activation button of your in-app in the list of in-apps:

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Congratulations, your in-app is now live!