Using Firebase Cloud Functions to trigger in-app messages
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Firebase Cloud Functions are an amazing tool for product builders. They provide you with easy-to-use, scalable, and instantly deployable bite-sized services. If you're already invested in Firebase, then you'll definitely appreciate how easy it is to set up event-triggered functions within your Firebase app.
In this post, we're going to set up a personalized in-app welcome message and send it to every new customer automatically.
Here's what we need before we get started:
- Enable Firebase Cloud Functions
- Switch your account plan to Blaze
- Create a free Gist account
Setting up our message
Let's start by creating a new Welcome message in Gist. To make the message feel more personal we're going to add the customer's first name.
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When the "Finalize your account" button is pressed we want to take our customers to the payments page. Our app supports deep links so we're using the karma://payments
deep-link for this.
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Save the message.
Creating a new Firebase Cloud Function
Create a new sendWelcomeMessage
function which listens to new Firestore entries on users/{userId}
Replace organization-id
with your organization id and service-key
with a newly created service key for Firebase.
Deploy your changes and let's take it for a spin.
On account creation, we're saving the customer's name & last name in a Firestore Collection. Our app is using the userId
(also the document id) as a Gist userToken
.
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When a new customer signs up, a new record is created, this triggers our function and a message is sent to the user in real-time.
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In minutes we managed to create and automate a welcome message that can be viewed on Web, iOS & Android.
You can try this out on your mobile app or website for free, head over to gist.build and create your free account.