In-app messages in Canvas

In-app messages can be added as part of your Canvas journey to show rich messaging when your customer engages with your app. This article describes features and nuances specific to Canvas in-app messages.

Before continuing, you should have already created your Canvas and set up delay and audience options.

Now you can add an in-app message to your Canvas. Add a Message step and choose In-App Message for your Messaging Channel. After any delays pass and the audience options are checked, the in-app message will be set live and users will see it if they open the app. In-app messages in Canvas may only be triggered by the start session trigger event—they can’t be triggered by custom events in a Canvas component.

For Canvases that have action-triggered entry, users can enter the Canvas mid-session. However, as noted above, in-app messages won’t trigger until the next session start, so these users would miss the initial in-app message since they weren’t eligible to enter the Canvas prior to the session start.

You can customize when your message will expire and which advancement behavior it will have.

In-app message expiration

In the in-app message composer, you can choose when the in-app message will expire. During this time, the in-app message will sit and wait to be viewed until it has reached the expiry date. After the in-app message is sent, it can be viewed one time.

Option	Description	Example
Message expires after specified period	The first option allows you to expire the in-app message relative to when the step becomes available to the user.	For example, an in-app message with a two-day expiration would become available after the step’s delay elapses and audience options are checked. It would then be available for 2 days (48 hours) and during those two days, users may see the in-app message if they open the app.
Message expires by specified date	The second option allows you to choose a specific date and time when the in-app message will be no longer available.	For example, if you have a sale that ended at a specific date and time, you might select this option so that users no longer see the associated in-app message when the sale ends.

Use cases

When should you use this feature? Braze highly recommends that you consider using this feature in your promotional and onboarding Canvases.

• promotional
• user onboarding

Advancement Behavior options

Canvas Flow

In Canvas Flow, Message components automatically advance all users who enter the step. There is no requirement to specify message advancement behavior, making configuring the overall step simpler. If you want to implement the Advance when message sent option, add a separate Audience Path to filter users that didn’t receive the previous step.

Original Canvas editor

Canvases created in the original editor need to specify an advancement behavior—the criteria for advancement through your Canvas component. Steps with only in-app messages have different advancement options than steps with multiple message types (push, email, etc.). For in-app messages in a Canvas Flow workflow, this option is set to always immediately advance the audience.

Action-based delivery is not available for Canvas steps with in-app messages. Canvas steps with in-app messages must be scheduled. Instead, Canvas in-app messages will appear the first time that your user opens the app (triggered by the start session) after the scheduled message in the Canvas component has been sent to them.

If you have multiple in-app messages within one Canvas, a user must start multiple sessions to receive each of those individual messages.

Steps with multiple channels

Steps with an in-app message and another channel have the following advancement options:

Option	Description
Advance When Message Sent	Users must be sent an email, webhook, or push notification, or view the in-app message to advance to subsequent steps in the Canvas. If the in-app message expires and the user hasn’t been sent the email, webhook, or push, or hasn’t viewed the in-app message, they will exit the Canvas and will not advance to subsequent steps.
Immediately Advance Audience	Everyone in the step’s audience advances to the next steps after the delay elapses, whether they have seen the noted message or not. Users must match the step’s segment and filter criteria to advance to next steps.

Prioritizing in-app messages

A customer may trigger two in-app messages within your Canvas at the same time. When this occurs, Braze will adhere to the following priority order to determine which in-app message is displayed. Drag different Canvas steps to reorder their priority. By default, steps earlier in a Canvas variant will display before later steps.

Navigate to the Send Settings of the Canvas section to prioritize in-app messages from a Canvas against in-app messages from other Canvases and campaigns.

By default, Canvas component priority is set to medium, with the most recently created steps having the highest relative priority. Canvas and campaign-level priorities also default to medium, with the highest relative priority defaulting to the most recently created items.

Drafts of an active Canvas

When editing a draft of an active Canvas, changes to the in-app message priority within Send Settings are not saved with a draft. These changes are applied directly to the active Canvas when the priority sorter modal is closed. However, in a Message step, the priority sorter will be updated when a user launches the draft since step settings apply at a step level.

Custom event properties in a Canvas

Due to action-based delivery being unavailable for Canvas steps with in-app messages, you similarly cannot use custom event properties for these steps. If you’d like to template event properties in Canvas, we recommend storing your event properties as custom attributes in your first Canvas step, and then personalizing your in-app message with the custom attributes in the second step.