Notifications basics

Your websites and apps never sleep. It’s always working, collecting leads, processing requests, and capturing important visitor activity. But your team isn’t always watching the system.

That’s where notifications come in.

They help your colleagues respond faster to customer needs, stay in the loop, and avoid missing key actions without constantly checking the platform.

This how-to guide teaches you what notifications are and how to easily build one from scratch.

What are notifications?

Notifications in Xperience by Kentico are automated internal emails sent to your team, not to your customers. They can be triggered by specific actions visitors take on your website, such as when a visitor submits a form.

For example, you can alert the marketing team when someone fills out a contact form or notify an admin when a request is submitted through your newsletter subscription form.

You can also receive a notifications when someone from your team moves a piece of content through workflow.

These messages keep your team aligned and ready to act.

Why internal notifications matter

When a visitor requests a quote and no one follows up, it’s not just a missed opportunity. A lack of response, clarity, or care can impact your brand’s credibility and the trust you’ve built with your audience. In a busy marketing environment, it’s easy for form submissions or system events to slip through the cracks, especially when your team is juggling multiple tasks across campaigns and channels.

Notifications help you avoid that.

Here’s how setting up your notifications correctly makes your daily work easier:

• Help your team respond faster to visitor activity.
• Reduce the need to monitor submissions manually.
• Ensure essential actions, like form submissions or system events, aren’t missed.

What you can customize

Notifications aren’t one-size-fits-all. You can tailor them to match your team’s workflow and communication style. You can add proper brand styling and assets. You can make the notification stand out so the recipient processes it as the first thing.

At the same time, don’t overdo it. The goal of any notification is to ensure that the right people get the correct information at the right time without unnecessary noise.

As a marketer or content editor, you can:

• Edit the subject line and message content.
• Use dynamic placeholders (called macros) to insert form data and other context, like this one – {{FormLink}}.
• Choose who receives the notification.
• Choose the sending domain.
• Preview messages before they’re sent.

You don’t need to write any code to create your notification. Simply gather the pieces that matter to your project, and let notifications do the rest of the work.

What you need to set up

Before you create your first notification, check a few system basics to make sure everything will work as expected:

• Your admin domain should be correctly set in the system configuration.
• Your sender domain must be approved as a sending domain for system emails, especially in SaaS or private cloud environments.
• You need access to the Notifications app in the admin interface.

Ask your site admin or developer for help if you’re unsure about these settings.

Explore common use cases

Not sure where to start? Here are some everyday examples where notifications come in handy:

• Get notified when someone submits a specific form (e.g., Contact us, Request a quote, or Newsletter signup).
• Receive a notification when someone creates or updates content you are responsible for. Depending on your content management workflows, you might need to review this content or approve its publishing.
• Collaborate with developers to trigger notifications from other system activities, such as e-commerce-related, content-related, or other custom events built by your developers.