Card delivery
To send a card from an Action Flow, add a send a card step to your Action Flow.
Card delivery settings
When Action Flows reach a send a card step and use the template to send a card to your target customer, it will apply any delivery settings that were configured for the card in the step settings, to control precisely when the card will be visible, for how long, and where in your app it should appear.
Card delivery settings are found by selecting the send a card step on the Action Flow canvas, not inside the card template editor. From the Action Flow canvas, click the relevant step to review and configure the delivery details.
Unlike legacy action cards, cards sent by Action Flows should not have their delivery settings overridden by metadata values you supply in Trigger events. This is because Action Flows can contain multiple send a card steps, and supplying this data once in the trigger will attempt to apply it to all send a card steps, and is highly likely to cause unintended behaviors. To support a smooth migration for existing customers we have not blocked your systems from sending delivery metadata in trigger events, and we will attempt to apply it if supplied (which will continue to work as expected for single card action flows), but we will be deprecating this soon to prevent unintended system behavior
Streams
By default all cards are shown in the 'All cards' stream. To also display your card in other streams, select the stream(s) from the delivery settings.
Schedule delivery
Use Schedule Delivery to hold a card back and deliver a card at an exact date and time in the future, rather than as soon as the Action Flow reaches the send a card step. When you set a delivery time you must also choose the time zone it applies to.
Until its delivery time the card is embargoed, so it does not appear in the customer's feed. If the delivery time is in the past, the delivery time is ignored and the card is sent immediately.
If a relative expiry is set alongside scheduled delivery, the countdown starts from the scheduled delivery time, not from when the Action Flow ran. A card that would expire before its delivery time is never sent.
Prior to November 2024 times were specified in UTC with an accompanying offset. Cards and Action Flows can be migrated to time zones by simply selecting the desired time zone and re-publishing. Daylight savings, if applicable, will be accounted for automatically.
Expiry
Expiry automatically removes a card that the customer has not yet actioned, so that time-sensitive cards don't linger in the feed. Once a card expires it is removed from the customer's feed. You can choose one of two ways to set expiry:
- Absolute time: the card expires at an exact date and time. As with scheduling, you also choose the time zone.
- Relative to delivery: the card remains available for a set number of days, hours and/or minutes after it is delivered (a countdown timer).
If both a relative and an absolute time are supplied, Atomic respects the absolute time.
Expiring cards using the API
If using the API, use ISO 8601 duration formatting to specify relative expiry durations.
Prioritization
Prioritization lets you surface the most relevant and urgent cards at the top of a customer's feed, so the cards that matter most are seen first.
Set a card's priority on the send a card step, in the Priority section. Choose a value from the Card Priority dropdown, from 1 (highest) to 10 (lowest). If you don't set one, cards use the default priority of 5 (default).
Cards with a higher priority (a lower number) appear higher in the feed. For example, a card sent at priority 2 is ordered above a card sent at priority 4, and a card at priority 10 always sorts to the bottom.
When two cards share the same priority, the more recent card is shown first. "Recent" here means the last time a card became active for the customer, either when it was first delivered or when it came out of snooze. Because every card defaults to priority 5, feeds are effectively ordered by recency until you start setting priorities.
Some example ways to use prioritization:
- Send a time-sensitive card, such as a payment reminder or security alert, at priority 1 so it sits above routine cards.
- Reserve priority 10 for an evergreen "default" card that any other card should outrank.
- Send everything else at the default priority 5 and let recency order the feed naturally.
In the Atomic SDKs, you can also filter a container to show only certain priorities. See showing many screens from one container.
Platforms
By default, cards will be displayed on all platforms: Web, Android & iOS. With this setting it is possible to configure cards to be displayed on only a subset of these platforms. If no platforms are selected, or all platforms are selected then the card will be displayed on all platforms.