Outbound overview

Onboard, educate, and notify your customers with in-context, automated messages that cut support volume and keep customers happy.

Written By Markus from Featurebase

Last updated 1 day ago

Overview

Outbound helps your team reach the right customers at the right moment - inside your product, in the Messenger, by email, or through product updates. Use it to onboard new users, announce product changes, explain known issues, collect feedback, and guide people to the next step across Chats, Banners, Email, Surveys, and Updates.

Everything is managed from the same dashboard, so your team can create, target, schedule, review, and measure customer communication from one place.

Common use cases:

  • Welcome and activate new users - Send onboarding guidance when someone signs up or reaches a key page

  • Announce product changes - Share releases through Updates, in-app Banners, Chat messages, or Email messages

  • Guide customers in context - Show messages based on page URL, time spent on a page, or CSS selectors

  • Collect feedback - Send targeted Surveys to understand customer needs and product satisfaction

  • Follow up with customer segments - Reach people based on who they are, what they do, and which rules they match

Omnichannel customer messaging

Use Outbound to reach customers where they are - inside your product, in the Messenger, by email, or through Updates. Pick the channel that fits the moment so announcements, onboarding, and feedback requests are easier to notice and act on.

Chat

Chats let you start a targeted conversation in the Messenger while customers are already active in your product. Use Chat when a message should feel personal, contextual, and easy to reply to.

Banner

Banners let you place important announcements directly within your product, on the pages where they matter. Use Banners for updates, notices, or guidance that should stay visible.

Email

Emails let you reach users outside your product when the message should not depend on an active session. Use Email for launches, follow-ups, and lifecycle messages that need to land in their inbox.

Survey

Surveys let you ask targeted questions and collect structured responses from the right audience. Use Surveys when you need feedback without sending customers to a separate form.

Updates

Updates let you publish product announcements to your Updates page, in-app widgets, and email subscribers. Use Updates for release notes that should live in a dedicated, shareable place.

Message composer and templates

To get started with creating Outbound messages:

  1. Go to Dashboard → Outbound

  2. Click New Message

  3. Choose Start from scratch, or pick a template from Popular or one of the message type tabs

  4. Select Chat, Banner, Email, Survey, or Update

The editor guides you through content, rules, audience, scheduling, and analytics. Before setting a message live, review who will receive it, when it can send, and how it will appear to customers. For the full setup flow, see Creating an outbound message.

Precise targeting

Target Outbound messages by audience type, customer attributes, and page-level triggers such as current page URL, time on page, or CSS selector. For example, all Enterprise customers who visit the /pricing page for more than 15s.

Flexible scheduling

Scheduling controls when an outbound message can send. You can start immediately or on a specific date, stop manually or automatically, and choose whether a message sends once, on a recurring schedule, or when someone matches again, depending on the message type. You can also restrict messages to specific send times, such as office hours or custom windows.

Multi-language messages

All Outbound messages can be translated into multiple locales to reach your users in their native language. Featurebase automatically shows users the correct translation based on their browser’s language settings.

Centralized Outbound dashboard

The Outbound comes with a powerful dashboard that centralizes all your messages, allowing your team to view all content in one list. You can filter & sort the messages, customize the columns, and even track relevant analytics for each message (e.g. clicks, views, sends, and more).

In addition, you can create saved views in your sidebar to turn important filters into reusable working lists. Each view keeps its filters, sort order, and visible columns so your team can jump back to the same segment without rebuilding the list.

Message analytics

Outbound analytics tracks engagement events for each message type. Depending on the message, you can review counts such as sent, viewed, opened, email clicks, replied, dismissed, and responded.

Use analytics to understand whether a message is reaching the right people and whether customers are engaging with it. Survey messages also include response reporting for the answers customers submit.

Manage Outbound settings

Use these articles and settings pages when you need to configure shared Outbound behavior:

FAQs