Style Your Message
Messages, the proactive messaging feature built into Beacon, offers a number of formatting and style options so you can get creative and really catch some eyes! Add a video or image, format the text in various ways, and greet your visitors by name. This article explains how to use Messages styling options.
In this article
Format Text
You can add some styling to make your Message really pop! Highlight the text you want to format, and an action menu will appear with the options. Make your text bold, italic, or underlined and add a list or add a link.
Messages can also support the following Markdown formatting and keyboard shortcuts if you'd rather style as you type:
Bold
Wrap your text in **, or highlight the text and press Cmd+B (Ctrl+B on Windows) on your keyboard
Italic
Wrap your text in *, or highlight the text and press Cmd+I (Ctrl+I on Windows)
Underline
Wrap your text in ++, or highlight the text and press Cmd+U (Ctrl+U on Windows)
Strikethrough
Wrap your text in ~ (tilde), or highlight the text and press Option+Cmd+S (Alt+Ctrl+S on Windows)
Link Text
Wrap your text in brackets and then follow it immediately with the URL in parentheses. For example, [The Help Scout Blog](https://www.helpscout.com/blog/) would give you The Help Scout Blog. Or highlight the text and use the Cmd+K (Ctrl+K on Windows) keyboard shortcut.
Blockquote
Start a line with > (the greater than symbol) to set quoted text, or use the shortcut menu option Blockquote.
Code
Wrap your text in ` (backtick) for inline code snippets, or choose Code from the shortcut menu to use a code block.
Bulleted List
Type - or * to start a bulleted list or choose Bulleted list in the shortcut menu.
Numbered list
Type 1. to start a numbered list or choose Numbered list in the shortcut menu.
Insert an Image or a Video
Type a slash / or click the plus sign in the bottom right corner of your message body to open the shortcut menu to find the options for Image or Video.
Note: You can only add one image or one video to a single Message.
Insert an Image
Click the plus sign and choose Image to upload an image from your computer. Supported file types are JPG, PNG, BMP, or GIF, which includes animated GIFs.
If you change your mind and want to remove the image, just hover over the image preview in the bottom left corner and click the X that appears.
Insert a Video
Click the plus sign and select Video, then paste in the URL to your video. Messages supports embedding videos hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, or Wistia.
If you change your mind and want to remove the video, just hover over the video title in the bottom left corner and click the X that appears.
Greet Customers by First Name
Use the customer.firstName variable to speak directly to your customers when you're using Beacon's identify feature. See Beacon JavaScript API: Beacon(‘identify’, userObject) for more information on how your developers can implement that option if you're not using it now.
Click the plus sign, select Variable (or type a curly brace { to use the keyboard shortcut), then select First Name. Type in the word you'd like to show when the first name isn't known in the field after fallback=.
In the example above, it's using (customer.firstName, fallback=there). When that Message appears, if the customer is identified and the first name is known, it will show their name. For a customer named Rashida then, it would say Hello Rashida.
If the first name is unknown, it will show the word there in place of the name, because that is set as the fallback text.
