Announcements

An announcement is a post that appears in your widget's News tab, perfect for product launches, scheduled maintenance, holiday hours, and new features.

An announcement is a short post that shows up in the News tab inside your customer-facing widget. Use them for things you want every visitor to see passively — a new feature launched yesterday, a planned maintenance window this weekend, holiday hours next month — without sending an email or interrupting an active chat.

Announcements only appear on widgets that have the News tab enabled. If a widget hides the News tab, your announcement still publishes; visitors on that widget just won't see it.

The announcements list

Open Announcements in the sidebar. Each row shows the title, status (draft, scheduled, published, expired), audience, and publish window. Use the filters at the top to focus on what's live right now or what's about to expire.

Anatomy of an announcement

Every announcement has the same fields:

Field	What it does
Title	The headline shown in the News tab list.
Body	Rich text — headings, lists, links, inline images.
Publish date	When it goes live.
Expiry date	Optional — when it disappears from the News tab.
Audience	All customers, or only customers matching specific tags.

Keep titles short and skimmable; the body is where the detail belongs.

Creating an announcement

Open the editor

Go to Announcements → New announcement.

Write the content

Enter a title and the body. Use the rich-text toolbar for headings, lists, and links. You can drop an image inline — useful for screenshots of a new feature or a banner for a seasonal post.

Pick an audience

Choose All customers to publish to every visitor, or Specific tags and pick one or more tags. Tag-targeted announcements only render for visitors whose contact record has at least one of those tags.

Set the publish window

Pick a publish date — now, or any time in the future. Optionally set an expiry date so the announcement disappears automatically when it's no longer relevant.

Save or publish

Three choices:

Save draft keeps it private while you iterate
Schedule queues it for the publish date
Publish now makes it visible immediately

Always set an expiry date on time-sensitive posts (maintenance windows, holiday hours, limited offers). An outdated announcement at the top of the News tab is worse than no announcement at all.

Editing and unpublishing

You can edit a published announcement at any time — changes are visible to customers immediately. To take a post down before its expiry date, open it and click Unpublish. The post moves back to draft and you can republish it later if needed.

Audience targeting tips

Tag-based targeting pairs well with the rest of Outreach. A few patterns that work:

Tag contacts with plan:pro or plan:free when they sign up, then publish plan-specific updates only to the right audience.

Tag opt-in beta users with beta. Use announcements to share known issues, new test builds, and feedback prompts only with them.

Tag contacts by region (region:eu, region:us) and publish regional maintenance windows only to the affected audience.

Where customers see them

Inside the widget, customers click the News tab to see the list of active announcements, newest first. Clicking one opens the full body inline. There's nothing customers need to do to subscribe — if a post matches their audience and is in its publish window, it shows up.