In this article, you'll learn about Site Messages, how to create your first Site Message, and how to incorporate a Site Message into an automation to be displayed to your contacts.
Take note
Site Messages require our Site Tracking snippet. That means that in order to display a Site Message to your contacts you will need to have it installed.
What are site messages?
Site Messages are lightweight notifications that appear on your website. Site Messages will only be displayed to your contacts, or a segment of your contacts. They will not be shown to anonymous users.
By default Site Messages are displayed first as an “Initial Message” in the bottom-right corner of your website. You may customize where they appear. They will display either; bottom-right, bottom-left, top-left, or top-right. Site Message position is defined globally, so any change you make to the position of one Site Message will affect any other Site Messages.
When a contact clicks on a Site Message it will expand into a “Detailed Message.” When creating a Site Message you are able to customize the appearance of both the “Initial Message” and the “Detailed Message.”
Personalization tags are available to be used inside a Site Message so that you can refer to a contact by their first name for example. You will have access to personalization information like date, geographic information, regular contact fields, and ecommerce deep data.
Creating a site message
Similar to an SMS message, Site Messages can only be sent as an Automation Action. Create or select an Automation to use to host your site message. If you have never created an Automation before you can read this guide to get started.
From the Automation Action selection menu, chose “Send a Site Message” from the “Sending Options” sub menu. Click on “create a message” to create your first Site Message.
Give your Site Message a clear name that describes it in a way that will make sense to you in the future, or to your team. The name of the Site Message won't be visible to your contacts.
When creating a Site Message, you are given the option to display the Site Message on any of your web pages, or you may also restrict the Site Message to display only on specific pages. You may use an asterisk character as a wildcard placeholder.
After creating a name for your Site Message, you will be redirected to the Site Message composer screen.
Navigating the Site Message composer
You can toggle between the “Initial Message” and the “Detailed Message” in the upper left of the composer screen. The “Initial Message” is the version of the Site Message that will be displayed to your contacts. The “Detailed Message” is the version of the Site Message that will be displayed to your contact after they click on the “Initial Message.”
Editing the text of the Site Message is easy, simply click on the text in the Site Message itself in order to edit. You will be presented with the option to include an emoji, or any data attributes that are available. You may decorate a selection of your text with bold, italics or underline. Highlight the portion of text you want to decorate and a new menu will appear with the B, I, or U options.
In the right-hand menu, you are presented with several options to customize the look of your Initial Message.
The “Layout” represents the format of the Site Message. You may choose between 4 options: simple, simple with a title, simple image, and image with a title. In order to edit the image for layouts that include an image, click on the image in the template and you will be presented with the option to select an image from your image library, or upload a new image.
The “Theme” represents the style of the Site Message. You may choose between “Basic,” “Colored,” or “Dark Stripe.” If you select “Colored” or “Dark Stripe” an additional “Highlight Color” color selector will appear in the right hand menu. You may use this to customize the effect to best match your site.
Between Layout and Theme, you should have 12 different customization options available to use.
The “Initial Effect” customizes how the Initial Message will animate when it is displayed to your contacts. You can choose between “Slide in,” “Fade in,” or “none.” When you toggle between effects the example will animate for you to preview.
Once you have customized your Initial Message to match your website, click on “Detailed Message” in the upper left corner to personalize the message that appears after a contact clicks on your initial message.
“Detailed Messages” are larger and come in one of two formats. You may toggle between the two styles by using the drop-down menu in the grey right-hand panel. Detailed messages can either appear as “Pinned” or “Floating.”
“Pinned” Detailed Messages appear as stuck to the right-hand side of the browser on your website, over any additional content on your site.
“Floating” Detailed Messages appear as a modal in the center of your website in the contact's browser window.
You may customize the title of the Detailed Message, adjust the text of the message, upload an image, and include a button with a link. Text can only be center-formatted, but buttons can be either centered, left-justified, or right-justified.
You may also customize the colors of the button to match your site.
Once you have customized the Detailed Message to match your site, click the green “Done” button in the upper right of the website to return to your automation.
Sending a site message
Site Messages are sent in the same way as a an SMS or an email is sent from within an automation. Once a contact has entered an automation, if they encounter the “Site Message” action on their path, the Site Message will be queued to be displayed.
The next time the contact visits your website (or the specific pages described when you initially created the Site Message) the Site Message will be displayed to them.
Sending multiple site messages
Right now it is not possible to “pull back” a Site Message that has already been sent to a contact. That is coming soon. However, if you edit the Site Message that went out, the contact will receive the updated version of the Site Message.
If a contact receives multiple Site Messages, they will appear “stacked” vertically until the contact dismisses them.