Userlist

Step-by-step guide to send your event data from RudderStack to Userlist

Userlist is a popular behavior-based messaging platform that lets you engage with your SaaS users effectively through targeted, behavior-based campaigns. It’s great for onboarding your users as well as nurturing them throughout their journey.

RudderStack supports sending your events to Userlist from the cloud mode S2S (Server to Server) by calling the relevant RudderStack APIs.

This destination is supported by the Userlist team. Feel free to contact Userlist via [e-mail] the open-source transformer code for this destination in our GitHub repo.

Getting Started

Before configuring your source and destination on the RudderStack app, please check whether the platform you are working on is supported. You can refer the following table to do so:

Connection Mode	Web	Mobile	Server
Device mode	-	-	-
Cloud mode	Supported	Supported	Supported

To know more about the difference between Cloud mode and Device mode in RudderStack, read the RudderStack connection modes guide.

Once you have confirmed that the platform supports sending events to Userlist, perform the steps below:

• From your RudderStack dashboard, add the source and Userlist as a destination.

• Name your destination, and click on Next. You should be able to see the following screen:

Connection settings for Userlist destination

• Enter the Userlist Pus Key which you can find from your Userlist Push API settings.

• Once the destination is enabled, events from the RudderStack SDK will start to flow to Userlist.

Userlist does not support tracking of anonymous users. So, make sure you call identify before calling track.

Identify

The identify call sends the event data to Userlist along with the properties that you pass as the RudderStack traits. For more information on the identify call, please refer our RudderStack API specification documentation.

If the userId is already known, Userlist will update the user record. Otherwise, it’ll create a new one.

Userlist will only process messages with a userId. Messages with only an anonymousId will be ignored.

The following code snippet is an example of an identify call in RudderStack:

rudderanalytics.identify("test-user-id", {
  name: "Tintin",
  city: "Brussels",
  country: "Belgium",
  email: "[e-mail]",
})

Group

The group call is made to associate the user with a company in Userlist. For more information on the group call, please refer our RudderStack API specification documentation.

An example of a group call is as shown:

rudderanalytics.group("test-group-id", {
  name: "Example, Inc.",
  industry: "Testing",
  employees: 42,
})

Userlist supports adding properties to the relationship between user and group. As this isn't officially supported by RudderStack's message format, you can specify the relationship properties by providing additional data for Userlist specifically.

The following example will associate the currently identified user with the given group (company) and set their role for that particular group (company) to owner.

rudderanalytics.group("test-group-id", {
  name: "Example, Inc.",
  industry: "Testing",
  employees: 42,
  integrations: {
    Userlist: {
      extensions: {
        relationship: {
          properties: {
            role: "owner",
          },
        },
      },
    },
  },
})

Track

The track call will pass the event properties to Userlist. You may call rudderanalytics.track() with or without event properties. For more information on how track call works, please refer to our RudderStack API specification documentation.

The following code snippet shows how a sample track call is made in RudderStack:

rudderanalytics.track("Project created", {
  project_name: "Demo Project",
})

Note that every track call will be sent to Userlist as a new event. You may send additional properties to describe the event in more detail.

Both the event name and additional properties will be stored with the event and normalized to snake case (project_created and project_name) automatically within Userlist.

To track an event in the context of a group (company), you need to specify the groupId in the context, as shown:

rudderanalytics.track("Project created", {
  project_name: "Demo Project",
  context: {
    groupId: "test-group-id",
  },
})

Contact Us

If you come across any issues while configuring Userlist with RudderStack, please feel free to contact us. You can also start a conversation in our Slack community; we will be happy to talk to you!