Messages Actions, Events, Audience, and Schedule
Messages Actions are the call to action you want to display to your visitor. Events define when to show the Message to your visitor. The Audience lets you control who sees the Message. Schedule defines the timing of your Message.
Check out Create and Manage Messages for help creating your Message. Looking for more inspiration? Use cases has you covered there!
In this article
Actions
The Action setting allows you to define the action your visitor will take when clicking the button in your Message. In the example below Join a Live Class is the button text defined, and clicking that button will take the visitor to https://www.helpscout.com/classes/.
In Messages settings on the Customize tab, select the Action you would like the button to take when clicked, and define the text for the button.
Actions that are available to be selected depend on other settings in your Beacon. For example, if Chat is disabled in your Beacon, then Start Chat will not be an Action your Message can use.
| Action | Description |
|---|---|
| No Action | No button will be displayed. The Message will display your Title, Subtitle, and Message text only. |
| Open Beacon | Beacon opens as if the visitor had clicked on the Beacon icon, to the default Beacon screen as determined by your Beacon's mode setting. |
| Respond to a Survey | Displays survey responses visitors will use to answer a question from your Message. The responses are shown in Messages Performance Reports. |
| Search Docs | Beacon opens and performs a search for your specified search query. |
| Start a Chat (if available) | Opens the Beacon and initiates a chat. Select Show message even if team is unavailable for chat to show the Message even when there are no Users available to chat; Beacon will fallback and provide a link to the Send a Message screen instead. Check out User Availability and Maximum Chats for more about availability. There is an additional option to repeat/show this Message to the customer multiple times, which is limited to once every 24 hours. |
| New Conversation | Beacon opens to the Send a Message screen. Options here are determined by your Contact Form Options settings. |
| Go to a URL | Link to any website address. |
Respond to a Survey
The Respond to a Survey Action contains different survey types to help you gather feedback from your customers.
Click the Ask for comment upon selection button to also request text feedback from customers after they complete a survey. This is available for all survey types, except for the Text survey type.
A list of available survey types is below.
| Survey Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Faces | There are three faces available to quickly gauge customer sentiment - positive, neutral and negative. You can de-select one of the faces if you would just like to provide two options. |
| Thumbs up/down | Gives a simple thumbs up or down reaction for the customer to choose. |
| Emoji | A very customizable survey type. Click the default emojis showing to change the options for the customer. You can also de-select one of the emojis if you would just like to provide two options. |
| Multiple Choice | Insert up to six text-based options for a customer to choose from. The list can be re-ordered by using the six-dot icon to the left and you can rename the choice by clicking on the field. Note: the customer can only select a single choice in the survey. |
| Text | A simple text box for customers to enter feedback. |
Events
An Event is what determines when a Message appears on your page. A Message will appear the first time a visitor matches the conditions when using the First visit or Sequence of events options unless you've chosen to have it repeat once every 24 hours in the settings.
To control how frequently your Message displays to visitors more specifically, select the Manual event and build your custom code to control when and where you show a Message.
First visit
The first time a visitor accesses the page, show the Message.
Sequence of events
Conditional trigger values can be combined using AND/OR logic. Each conditional type can only be used once per Message. The available conditions are described below.
| Condition Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Last page viewed | Show Message if the referring URL matches your specified page. Up to 5 URLs can be specified. Wildcards ( * ) and relative URLs are supported. |
| Page scroll | When the page is scrolled, the Message will appear. |
| Page views | After your visitor views the specified number of pages with Beacon, Message will appear. |
| Repeat page views | Message appears after visitors have viewed the same page with the Beacon your specified number of times. |
| Specific URL | Message is displayed on load when specified page is visited. Up to 5 URLs can be specified. Wildcards ( * ) and relative URLs are supported. |
| Time on page | Message will appear after the time specified. |
Manual
Use Beacon JavaScript API to custom code the Message initialization. Select this option to show the JavaScript snippet you'll need to call to show your Message, then you can custom code when you show it.
To show your Message more than once, add in the {force: true} option to your custom code to make the Message show every time that page is loaded. For example:
<script>
Beacon('show-message', 'MESSAGE_ID', { force: true })
</script>
Note: The {force: true} setting will override any other Event or Audience settings and always show the Message any time it is called.
Audience
The Audience setting determines which visitors see the Message.
Everyone
Use this option to show the message to all visitors on your site or app that match any other event criteria.
Selected people
Choose this option to target your Message using Customer Properties.
Note: The Selected people option relies on Beacon's identify method and the Customer Properties feature. See Beacon JavaScript API: Identify for the information your developer team will need to implement Beacon so that it is identifying the customer when initialized, which allows it to check Customer Properties for Messages.
Choose the Customer Property you want to target, then choose the condition or conditions you want to match. For example, the settings below would show the Message to any customer who has the Customer Property Plan Name set as Small or Enterprise.
- Is will match if the property on the customer record or being sent with identify is an exact match the value you specify.
- Is not will match if the property on the customer record or being sent with identify is set to any other option than the value you specify.
- Is not set will match if the property is empty on the customer record and not being sent with identify.
You can use AND or OR to set different combinations of properties. You cannot combine AND with OR conditions, and you cannot use AND with multiple conditions on the same property.
Schedule
The Schedule settings determine when a Message starts or ends. There are different options available depending on whether you create a Standard message or NPS or Microsurvey message.
See Create and Manage Messages for more on Message type.
Now - Choose this to activate the message immediately after you click Start.
At a certain time - Standard message
This option provides greater flexibility on when the message is displayed. You can choose whether to start the message now or later and also choose if the message has a specific end date.
Schedule - NPS or Microsurvey message
There are additional scheduling options that are exclusive to NPS and Microsurvey messages when using Per customer scheduling, which requires customer identification from your Beacon implementation.
Note: The Per customer option relies on Beacon's identify method. See Beacon JavaScript API: Identify for the information your developer team will need to implement Beacon so that it is identifying the customer.
Repeat determines how often an individual customer will see the NPS or Microsurvey Message — for example, set this to 3 months and each customer will see this survey once a quarter.
Pause allows you to stop an NPS or Microsurvey Message after you receive a certain number of occurrences. To continue the example above, set this to 4 occurrences and each customer will see this NPS message only four times. In this example, you would now have one year's worth of data for each customer!
See Messages Performance Reports for more information on survey data.