In-app announcements are valuable for driving engagement in other areas of your product's ecosystem, such as webinars, blog posts, conferences, etc. An announcement should:

• Clearly articulate the event/item and the value
• Contain information about when and where
• Provide a clear call to action and method of dismissal

Let's walk through building an announcement. We'll cover:

Building the Slideout

Step 1: Open the Appcues Builder and create a new Flow with a Slideout

Step 2: Add a piece of media

Visuals, especially people, draw the attention of the viewer. And, in the case of the announcement we're making, the person shown is also going to be hosting the webinar in the announcement.

Step 3: Add texts

A headline should be concise and clearly define the content of the announcement

Once the headline has been added, repeat to add paragraph text content.

Step 4: Add a button

Step 5: Change the button action to suit your use case

In this example, we will be using the Trigger Action to "Go to URL", adding the full URL, selecting to open in a new window, and also selecting to mark the flow as complete.

Now it's time to customize!

Customizing the look and feel

Button Text

While we're working on buttons, let's customize the text to match the context of the announcement.

Progress bar

Since this is a one-step flow, we don't really need the progress bar. But, if you like the framing it gives the top of the slideout then leave it in!

Slideout Location

Select where this Slideout should sit on the page.

Targeting the correct users

Your targeting will depend on who the appropriate audience is for the content of the flow you just created. For this flow example, we want to target anyone who has been an Appcues customer for more than 3 weeks. Before the 3-week mark we're showing our customers content that teaches them how to use the product, so we don't want to meddle in that workflow.

Click "Target & Publish" in the Builder to get started, or the Settings page of the Flow if you're in Studio.

Page Targeting: where the announcement will show

We're avoiding pages where a user would be building or editing their content, but in general an announcement like this could show on any page. Think about whether there is any place you'd absolutely not want it to show and simply exclude those URLs.

Frequency: how often it will show

We're just going to show it to each user once, if they're interested they will sign up and vice versa. We could create a reminder closer to the webinar as a second chance to sign up, but that would be a different flow completely.

Audience Targeting: to whom it will show

Lastly, we're going to show this flow to anyone on an account that is at least 3 weeks old.

Publish and test

Congratulations! You've just finished creating your general announcement flow! Feel free to test first (see: Testing Flows) and publish when you're ready.