Inbox quick start guide

This communications channel allows you to display messages to customers in their personal inbox within your website or mobile app. You can configure whether you want the messages to remain in their inboxes or to expire at a preconfigured time. Inbox messages allow you to engage users with rich content.

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Inbox messages are targeted to user profiles, not to devices. Messages will be available to any device associated with that user profile via setting the user ID.

Enable the inbox channel

To be able to use the Inbox channel, it must first be enabled by a Project or Company Admin user from Settings > Apps & sites > click on the matching app or website by toggling the Inbox slider. Once you do, a new button called Settings will appear; navigate to it by clicking on it. Review our guide on inbox settings here for more details.

Prerequisites for the inbox on your website and apps

Website inbox

In order to use the inbox in your website you first need to integrate the Xtremepush SDK in your website by following the website integration guide. When you have added the SDK and enabled the website inbox, a default icon will appear overlaid on your site.

In settings this can be set to be top left/right but you can also manipulate the position and look via CSS. Details on how to fully customise this can be found here. If you want to build a fully custom inbox that is more natively integrated into your web app, this is also possible. You can build your own inbox and populate it with content from the inbox feed via API.

App inbox

If you want to use the inbox in your app you first need to integrate the Xtremepush SDK by following the guides on how to do this for Android apps and iOS apps. To add the inbox to your app you will need to enable the Android / iOS inbox and add a button to your app that can be pressed to open the inbox. It is straightforward to implement this button with an SDK method to enable the inbox and a method to open the inbox.

There are native methods for adding the inbox to your app for Android and iOS. Skip to the appropriate section for the type of app you are working with to get details on the OS-specific variations when adding the inbox. See how to do so for Android or iOS. You can customise the look of your app inbox from settings.

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Running tests is encouraged before starting to send inbox campaigns. You'll find details on how to test below.

Test the inbox channel

Once you have enabled the inbox channel and configured it in your website or mobile app, you will be able to see inbox as an available channel from the campaign builder page. Inbox messages can be added as a complementary channel to a campaign that also includes a notification or another comms channel. One common use case is to add a copy of a notification to the inbox to persist it on the site. Another is to use the inbox as a fallback channel for users who have not opted-in to other notifications.

You can now test sending an inbox campaign by navigating to Campaigns > Create Campaign > Single-stage > Time-based > Create campaign > select Inbox from the Setup tab.

You can review more details about how to set up an inbox campaign in this guide and you should also check our inbox creative guidelines for best results.

If you have Target Applications enabled, you can navigate to the Segment tab to specify the recipients of the campaign by targeting a specific app. Otherwise, the content will appear in both your mobile apps and your website. Also if you have multiple users and you want to target a particular one, you can do so by selecting Create custom segment > Identifier > users ID equals and indicating a single user ID. This will only work if you have previously set your user ID.

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Count recipients before launching the campaign

Whenever launching a campaign it is a best practice to use the Calculate recipients feature to count recipients and make sure that your targeted audience for this campaign is what you are expecting.

Manage your inbox feed

Once you have sent some inbox messages, managing the inbox is a little different to other comms channels, since once sent, messages have the ability to stay in your users' inbox. However, you can manage whether you want the messages to persist indefinitely or to expire on a given day or after some time from the Schedule tab of your campaign. Once that you have sent the campaign, you can use the inbox feed to expire inbox messages.