How to Connect Clerk to Audienceful

Connecting Clerk is the first step to every signup-triggered automation in Audienceful — welcome sequences, activation nudges and onboarding drips. The connection is a webhook endpoint and a signing secret pasted between two dashboards; there's no code to deploy.

Step 1: Start the connection in Audienceful

1. Go to the Integrations tab and choose Clerk, then click Install.
2. Audienceful creates a pending connection and shows you a webhook endpoint URL plus a field for the signing secret. Leave this page open.

The endpoint URL is unique to your workspace, which is what keeps each delivery scoped to the right audience. Copy the URL exactly as shown.

Step 2: Add the endpoint in Clerk

In your Clerk dashboard:

1. Open Configure → Webhooks and click Add endpoint.
2. Paste the endpoint URL from Audienceful into the URL field.
3. Subscribe to user.created, user.updated and user.deleted.
4. Copy the endpoint's signing secret — it starts with whsec_.

Step 3: Save the signing secret

Paste the secret back into Audienceful and click Connect. Saving it is what makes the integration live: it's how each incoming delivery is verified as genuinely from Clerk before anything is written to your audience.

What happens after connecting

Audienceful turns Clerk's user events into contacts and automation triggers:

• New signups become contacts within seconds, with their email, first name and last name.
• Clerk profile data is stored as custom fields — Clerk User ID, Clerk Signed Up and Clerk Last Sign In — so you can match contacts back to users in your own database and segment on when they joined.
• Profile updates keep contacts in sync. A user who changes their email in your app doesn't become a dead address on your list.
• Signups, updates and deletions become automation triggers you can build flows on.

A Clerk user with no email address — phone-only auth, for example — can't become an email contact, and is skipped rather than half-created.

Data handling settings

Two settings on the integration page decide how synced users are treated. Both are worth setting before your first real signup arrives.

Marketing consent for new synced users. Signing up for your product isn't on its own a marketing opt-in, so new contacts default to Unknown. Product and onboarding email still sends to them; what Unknown preserves is an honest record that nobody ticked a box. Choose Granted only if your terms of service genuinely cover email marketing.

When a user is deleted in Clerk. The default is to unsubscribe the contact — emails stop, but their history and analytics survive. You can also delete the contact outright, or do nothing. Pick whichever matches what you tell users in your privacy policy.

There's also a Sync new and updated Clerk users toggle. Leaving it on is almost always right; turning it off pauses contact writes while still recording events, which is useful during a migration and rarely otherwise.

Rotating the signing secret

If you regenerate the secret in Clerk, paste the new one into the Rotate signing secret field on the integration page and save. The stored secret is never displayed back to you — you'll only ever see a masked hint like whsec_••••ab12.

Disconnecting

Remove the integration from its page in Audienceful to stop webhook processing. Also delete the endpoint in your Clerk dashboard, or Clerk will keep attempting deliveries to a URL that no longer accepts them.

Next steps

• Build a Clerk welcome email flow
• Learn how automations work
• Write a high-engagement welcome sequence