With Intercom, it’s easy to share the right content with the right people at the right time, in the right place. Below, we’ll show you how to create engaging and relevant messages to educate and inspire your customers to take the action you want.
Get clear on what you’re trying to achieve
Before you start writing your message, you need to be clear on why you’re sending it. We recommend setting a goal in Intercom to track the action you want your customers to take after reading your message.
Pro tip: If you’d like your customers to hit an important goal like upgrading to a paid account or becoming pro users of your app, you should create a series. Series let you send a series of email, chat, post, and mobile push messages to help customers hit a common goal.
Choose the right message channel
Next, decide where it's most useful for customers to get your message.
Chat or post messages are great for encouraging customers to take action while they’re using your app.
Email is the perfect channel for re-engaging inactive customers and bringing them back into your app.
Mobile push messages are ideal for deep linking customers to specific locations in your mobile app.
Share content when and where it matters
Whenever possible, share content in context. For example, if you want to share the new article you wrote all about how to use your calendar feature, share it in your app, when your user is on your calendar page.
To set this up, just choose chat or post as your channel and deliver it to ‘web first.' Then, under ‘where to send this’ enter the URL you’d like to target.
Now that you know where you’d like to reach your customers, it’s time to create your messages. To truly engage your customers, share content that will:
Educate your users about your product
Share relevant, useful advice inside your app while your customers are using your product. Include tips inside the message itself or link to a best practice video or doc, for example.
Keep your users up to date with new product releases
Announce new feature and product updates that will help your customers do their jobs better. Not only is this a great way to engage active users of your product, it also helps you stop inactive customers from slipping away.
Improve your users' experience with your product
Your messages should guide your customers through your product and highlight your most important features gradually. For example, right after your customers create their first project, they’ll want to know what’s next. Link them to the next important step to help them get the most value from your product.
How to say it
What you say is only one piece of the puzzle. If you don’t speak to your customers in the right way, you’ll never inspire them to take action. Here’s some powerful tips for making your customers feel valued, excited and motivated:
Keep your tone friendly and mirror your customers’ language. Speak like a human, not a machine.
Highlight the benefits your customers will gain by taking action.
Focus on how you’d like your customers to feel after getting your message. Is it empowered, excited or curious, for example?
Have fun. The more excited you feel while writing, the more excited your customers will be to learn and progress.
Congratulate your customers when they hit important milestones or even when they achieve smaller tasks. This will make them feel smart, capable and appreciated.
Keep it personal. Intercom makes it easy to personalize each message so that it's customized to everyone who gets it. For example, you can include custom attributes in your message, so that the content is specific to each user.
Pro tip: For more tips on this, check out our staying personal at scale guide.
Measure the effectiveness of your messages
We strongly recommend keeping a close eye on how your messages are doing and iterating based on the results. Messages that receive poor engagement should be altered or paused entirely. We put together this guide on how to measure the effectiveness of your messages.
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