Your customers will have questions like, ‘How do I use this feature?’ You'll need to pre-empt and answer important questions at the right time, in the right place.

It's one thing to react to your customer’s problems quickly, it's another to pre-empt the question before they have it, and provide the answer. Here’s how you can do that using Intercom: 

You can significantly reduce the time you spend dealing with support queries by being proactive in support; studying your support queries, and identifying the most common questions customers have at key points (this is easy with tagging).  

Once you see these patterns, you can send messages at the right time, to the right people, in the right place, and watch as your support queries start to go down. 

Of course, the questions that your customers have will depend on your product and the jobs that they need to do. But these are the kinds of questions you should be pre-empting: 

Let’s say you discovered that most users who upgrade to your highest plan are asking the same question about your premium messaging feature, over and over again; "How do I access the premium level message composer?".  You could set up an in-app message that would send as soon as a user triggers the event 'Upgraded to Pro plan'.

What to say: Thank them for upgrading, and explain what they need to know about the new features they have access to. For example, you could tell them how to access the premium composer, and share a link to a relevant doc or share a video in case they have any more questions. 

Sometimes your customers will approach a barrier to using your product. For example, if they’ve just uploaded their 99th image, out of a possible 100, they’ll be thinking, ‘What’s next?’ In this case you’ll need to help them upgrade their account. You should send a message the 99th time your customer uploads an image. Your filter here would be something like ‘Images uploaded is 99’. 

What to say: Congratulate them for uploading their 99th image and let them know the next step they need to take. It’s really important to talk about the value they’ll get from upgrading. For example, you can say something like, “You’ll get 5,000 photos on your pro plan and you’ll be able to share as many photos as you like with your network.” Pro tip: To provide even more value, it’s a good idea to reward these users for engaging so frequently with your product. For example, you can offer them a discount for their upgrade.  

Your customers don’t just want a step by step guide to using your product. They want to know how they can use it in the best possible ways. You can send a message that includes a best practice article to help users inside your product when they land on a relevant page (just as they are about to use an important feature). Intercom makes it easy to target a specific URL so that your users get your message at the right time. 

What to say: Really focus your message on the job the article helps your users do in your product. For example, you can send an auto message to customers who land on your project creation page with a link to your best practice article. Focus your message on how it will help them organize their workflow and how it will save them time. 

Now that you’ve mastered your messages, it’s time to learn how to use email to engage your customers.