Getting started with in-app messaging is easy
Read our guides for websites and mobile apps
In this guide, you will learn to:
- compose beautiful in-apps,
- select an audience using Segmentation,
- set capping and activation dates for your in-app.
Composing in-apps is easy and achieved directly from our online dashboard, no coding is necessary.


Creating an in-app
Click the Create in-app button from the In-apps page:


Content and style
There are 4 types of in-apps:


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
Format | Title | Text | Text color | Background color | Image | Action button | Secondary button | Entry/Exit Animations | Deeplinks | Auto-dismiss |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Card | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
Modal | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
Banner | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
Image only | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
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.
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.


In this example, we target only Android and Web users, leaving iOS users out and reaching an estimated 7% of our total audience.
Segmentation is essential to selecting the right audience and it is documented in detail:
You can create segmentation criteria based your own data, collected as Tags, Properties and Events.
Scheduling
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.


In this example, the in-app will start appearing immediately once activated, until Jan. 13th 2021 at 18:29 CEST.
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 apurchase
event on a merchant app or website.


In this example, the in-app might trigger when you open your app, bring it to the foreground, or make a purchase (when the custom purchase
event is triggered).
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.


In this example, the in-app will be displayed at most twice to the same user, with at least 1 hour between both impressions.
Activation
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:


Congratulations, your in-app is now live!
Updated about a month ago