Recipe: Onboarding completion workflow

Send a congratulatory email the moment a user finishes your onboarding checklist, plus a next-step nudge if they don’t.

A common SaaS lifecycle pattern: celebrate when a user completes onboarding, and re-engage the users who stall. This recipe sets up both with two workflows.

The core idea: fire an event from your app when the user completes onboarding and update an onboardingCompletedAt contact property in the same request. The celebration workflow triggers from the event, and the stalled-user workflow filters out contacts with a completion timestamp.

What you need

• A timestamp contact property like onboardingCompletedAt
• A named event for “onboarding completed”
• The Loops API or an integration writing into Loops

Set up the trigger

Use the Event received workflow trigger with an event name like onboardingCompleted.

Update the contact’s onboardingCompletedAt property at the same time so your stalled-user workflow can exclude users who already finished.

If you prefer using contact property changes as the trigger, see the Contact updated approach used in the lifecycle emails guide.

1. Send the event from your app

   Call the Send event endpoint when the user finishes the last onboarding step. The API accepts contact properties as top-level fields in the same request:

   API request

   {
     "email": "[e-mail]",
     "onboardingCompletedAt": "2026-04-27T17:00:00Z",
     "eventName": "onboardingCompleted",
     "eventProperties": {
       "daysToComplete": 2
     }
   }
   

   await loops.sendEvent({
     email: "[e-mail]",
     eventName: "onboardingCompleted",
     contactProperties: {
       onboardingCompletedAt: new Date().toISOString(),
     },
     eventProperties: { daysToComplete: 2 },
   });
   
2. Create the workflow

   In the Workflow builder, pick Event received and select onboardingCompleted.

3. Send the celebration email

   Add a Send email node. Congratulate them, surface the next high-value feature, and offer a next action.

Catching users who stall

The other half of this recipe is a separate workflow that fires when a contact is added but does not complete onboarding within a timer window.

1. Trigger on Contact added

   Pick Contact added as the trigger.

2. Add a timer

   Wait 3 days.

3. Filter on onboarding state

   Use an audience filter to only send if onboardingCompletedAt is empty.

4. Send the nudge

   Keep it short. Link to the specific step they missed if you track that.

Measuring success

• Open rate on the celebration email: should be >50% because it is expected
• Click-through on the stall nudge: track with the email.clicked webhook
• Completion lift: compare daysToComplete distributions before and after this workflow ships

Read more

Lifecycle emails overview

Workflows

Events

Filters and segments