What are events?
Event is the technical term for any actions your users perform on your website and inside your product. Not to be confused with calendar events.
Hare are some example events:
- User Signed Up
- Trial Started
- Task Created
- Project Updated
- Team Member Invited
- Product Viewed
- Application Installed
To keep your data clean, we suggest you stick to this naming convention for your events: Object Action.
User events are critical for the execution of behavior-based emails in Encharge, as emails will be sent (or not sent) based on what events a specific user has performed. For example, when a user performs the User Signed Up event, you will send a welcome email.
Are page visits and email actions events?
In short, no. Page visits and email activity actions (like email opens) could also be considered user events. However, in Encharge, these two types of actions are automatically tracked and come out of the box with our platform. They also work in a different way than other events, and you don’t have to set them up. For that reason, when we talk about events, we only refer to custom events that happen in your app, excluding page visits and email actions.
Event properties
Each event can have a set of properties. These are additional details about the event.
For example, the event “Task Created” might have the properties Task type, Time of creation, and Task priority.
The “Signed Up” event will contain properties about the user that has signed up, like email address, name, company, etc.
Each event sends properties with their values that you can later use to personalize emails and flows in Encharge. You can use event properties as dynamic merge tags in emails. For example, a "Trial started" event might have the "Trial end" property, which contains the end date of the trial of the user. If you want to include this date in an email, you can insert a merge tag that looks something like this: {{event["trial.created"].lastCreated.properties.trialEnd}} Don't worry, you don't have to write these merge tags manually. Encharge offers an automated merge tag generator. To insert an event merge tag, open an email to edit, click on "Merge tags", then select the object "Events" and set up the event merge tag:
When this merge tag is inserted, it will dynamically populate the trial end date of the user, so each user gets a personalized email with their trial end date.
Identify events
An identify event is a special type of event that identifies users in your app. This is usually the “User Signed Up” and "User Signed In" events. This type of event tells Encharge which user is performing the action (executing the event). Without it, Encharge will receive events, but they will be attached to anonymous people.
Apart from identifying users, the identify event also updates user fields directly in Encharge. For example, when the identify event is received, the name property will update the Full name field in Encharge.
It’s important to work with your developers to ensure that the identify event is set up correctly. This is explained more in our API documentation on sending data to Encharge.
Next article: How to send user events to Encharge?