Get an instant email notification when someone signs up (or gets an error).

Setting up email notifications

Perhaps a user gets a specific error on your website and you want to start fixing it as soon or possible. Maybe you want to call everyone who signs up on your website the moment they hit the “sign up” button and make an instant impression on them. Let’s use this last scenario to learn how to set up instant email notifications using Triggers. After all, who doesn’t like good news in their inbox?

1. Create a Workspace

Sign in to UseItBetter, select a project and create a new workspace called “Someone’s just signed up!”. 

2. Create a Segment

Create a new segment based on URL

Once the workspace is opened click [+] icon to create a new segment with the visits in which users signed up. In the key/value field Type in “URL=” followed by the URL of the page on which users land upon signing up. In the case of our demo landing page, users land on “thanks.html” so my rule will look like this:

URL=demo.useitbetter.com/landing-pages/thanks.html

Now click [Apply] to confirm creation of the segment.

3. (Optional) Check Segment’s History

Now that we have the newly created segment let’s see how many people signed up so far. To do so, click the [Select] button on the segment’s branch and then open the “Segments” tab. You will see the table with the total number of visits in which users went to thank-you-page.html. You might want to see the sign ups over time - just hit weekly or daily to see the chart. This step is important as it helps you verify if the segment is correctly defined before you assign a trigger to it.

We can see that we had X users signed up so far. Let’s set up notifications to find out when the next person signs up. 

4. Add a Trigger to the Segment

Select the notification response

Open the “Triggers” to see all the available responses. Switch to the "Notifications" tab and select “Send an email notification”. from the list.

5. Configure the Notification Response

Configure email subject, its content and add recepients

Configure the email title and a message that will be sent with every notification. You can use it, for example, to provide notification recipients with some instructions on what to do when they receive the email.

You also have the option to include content of JavaScript global variables that are available on the thank-you page. Our demo thank-you page has an object called “signUpData” with information entered by a user in the signup form. This way the notifications will include users' contact details. If you are using GTM dataLayer you can include it as well to provide more context.

Finally, you need to add the recipients of those notifications. You can only send notifications to email addresses of people who have a registered account in UseItBetter - you can’t send emails to office@mycompany.com without creating an account with that address first. 

Tip: You can add an unregistered email in the notification configuration and register it later. To do so, after you save the workspace, open the navigation bar and select “Users”.

Enable Notifications on Production

Configure email subject, its content and add recepients

Once you’re done, toggle the Live Mode and save the workspace. A moment later your notifications will be up and running. 

Now you may want to sign up and visit your thank-you page to test if the notifications work. The notification will look like this:

Email notification example

Other notifications

To set up notifications for other events you would simply need to change the “URL=...” rule to something else, for example “Error=Product * is out of stock”.

If you have larger traffic and you don’t want to get tens or hundreds of emails per day you could use a different approach and use Scheduled Reports instead of notifications. Scheduled Reports can send you emails with selected reports according to the schedule - every Monday morning or every hour. Some reports can be configured as alerts to send emails only in case of changes in traffic. You may use alerts to get notifications about spikes in errors, drops in funnel and so on.