Welcome notifications

You can create welcome notifications that are sent automatically to the new subscribers.

The notifications can be delivered immediately or in the next days and you can create multiple notifications (welcome series) for each subscriber.

Create or manage the welcome notifications

Go to your project and click Welcome to see the welcome notifications that you have defined.

Click New notification to add a new notification: you can set the notification title, message, link and image.

The delay field defines when the notification is delivered: set it to 0 seconds to deliver the welcome message immediately or set a delay (up to 5 days).

You can repeat the steps to add multiple notifications at different times or even multiple notifications at the same time.

The welcome notifications defined in this way are sent automatically when a new subscriber is created using the functions of the JavaScript SDK: pushpad('subscribe') or pushpad('widget').

If the subscription data is simply updated or a subscription is imported with the REST API, then the welcome notifications are not sent.

A practical example

Let's say that you want to send some daily notifications to every new subscriber, in a sequence of 5 different notifications with a 24 hours gap between each notification.

You can easily achieve that using the welcome notifications feature.

Go to your project, click Welcome, New notification and add the first notification:

• Delay: "1 day"
• Title: "First notification"
• Message: "An example notification that will be received after 1 day."

Then save and create another notification:

• Delay: "2 days"
• Title: "Second notification"
• Message: "An example notification that will be received after 2 days."

Then repeat the process for each notification, up to 5 days.

The title and message are displayed to the user in the notification, so you need to replace the examples above with a real message.

Finally a new user that subscribes to your notifications will receive that sequence of notifications automatically (one after 1 day, one the second day, etc.).

If you also want to display a message to the user immediately, after they click "Subscribe", you can add a notification like this:

• Delay: "0 seconds"
• Title: "Thanks for subscribing"
• Message: "You have just enabled the notifications for this website."

See the notifications sent

Go to your project and click Notifications: the welcome notifications genarated automatically are listed there together with all the other notifications.

If you click Details and you go to the Audience section you will see that the notification is sent to a specific Subscription ID (sid in the Notifications API).

Update or delete the welcome notifications

Go to your project and click Welcome, then click Show near a welcome notification to change or delete it.

Note that changes will be applied only to the future subscribers: this means that the existing subscribers may still receive the old notifications for some days.

Alternatives

There are also alternative methods for creating the welcome notifications automatically from your application.

Usually the steps are:

1. Add a user ID or tag to the subscription
2. From your application backend, send some notifications to that specific user ID or tag: you can create a series of scheduled notifications when something happens or run a cron job.

You can find some examples on our blog: Welcome notifications with Pushpad and Create welcome series with web push notifications.