You can track actions your customers take as events, both while logged into your product on web or mobile and while visiting your website.
Events record each time a customer takes an action, the details of that action (metadata) as well as the first, last and total number of times a customer has taken that action. Once you start tracking events in Intercom, you can filter your customers and send them messages based on their actions, including:
When they’ve taken an action a certain number of times.
The first time they take an action.
When it has been “X days” since the last time they took an action.
You can track actions that your logged-in users, and logged-out visitors are taking. For example, you could track:
The most recent time a user performed an action. For example, the last time they exported a PDF, or visited your help center.
The first time a user opted for a paid plan, or used a discount code.
Each time a user invites someone else to your service.
When (and what) someone ordered on your site.
Note: The events described here are just examples, and may require assistance from an engineer or developer to implement. It's simple and there are many methods for doing it successfully.
These are just some of the ways you can use events to better segment your customers based on their actions and send them behavior-based messages.
Note: It's only possible to view events from the last 90 days within Intercom or via the API. However, you can still filter and message users based on events older than 90 days. This will not affect the first/last occurred dates if they are over 90 days ago.
Events vs custom attributes
A custom attribute is data you track about your customers, e.g., how many projects they’ve created in your product. It's a single value about a single piece of information.
An event is information on what your customers do, and when they do it, e.g. each time they make a purchase, or when they most recently invited a teammate.
Check out this article for more details on when to use custom attributes vs events.
Filtering and Messaging based on Events
By filtering your customers based on events, you can create a segment, or build an audience like:
Customers who have done something more than twice.
Customers that did something for the first time this week.
The heaviest users of specific features in your app.
Or, with event based messages, you could target:
Visitors who have added a product to their cart, but not checked out.
Visitors, each time they download your content.
Visitors, whenever they run into an error on your website.
Users who have visited a feature but never used it, encouraging them to try it out.
You can combine these rules with Intercom's standard attributes like "Last Seen', or your own custom attributes if you want to send the message to a more specific group of active customers.
More ways to use events
You can capture many kinds of activity in Intercom using events.
Upgrade subscription
In this example, a user has changed their subscription from the Standard plan to the Pro plan. You can view that as a plain event, or add context to the event by tracking some metadata with it, such as:
New plan
Old plan
Billing period
Note: You can track up to 20 key-value pairs as metadata.
You could use an event like this to send a message that thanks a user for upgrading, and links to a Product Tour of the new features they can access:
Product feature usage
By tracking events when your customers use new features, you can conduct product research and contact them to ask "what worked well?" or "what could be improved?".
Purchase
In this example, we’ve tracked an event when a customer has made a purchase. This allows you to ask for a review and include event metadata in the message. As well as noting that the purchase happened, you'll send along some extra details like the price, and name of the item:
What's next?
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