1. Two well written, highly relevant mails every week might leave your customers wanting more. It’s all about who you’re speaking to, what you’re saying, and when you’re saying it.
2. At Intercom, we believe personalized messaging is and will remain the most effective type of messaging, and that’s core to our mission of making web business personal.
3. The most effective messages we see in Intercom either educate or persuade customers.
1. When you know what you are trying to achieve, the people you are trying to change the behavior in become obvious
2. Experience has taught us generic content is rarely as impactful as a personal note from someone.
3. Wherever possible address people by their name – we’ve all been annoyed when we received a message from a business we’ve been dealing with for a long time and it opens “Dear Sir/Madam”. At Intercom we start most of our messages “Hi <first name>” which falls back to “Hi there”, if
for some reason we don’t have their name.
4. Here at Intercom, when we’re selecting what style of message to send to our customers, we most often use our in-app chat style message or a simple plain text email, because they feel handwritten and direct.
5. Not everything should feel 1:1 and personal. For example if you want to announce a new feature and put your best foot forward, then it’s best to do it with beautiful screenshots, engaging copy, and a remarkable design.
6. No one likes false friendliness from folks they’ve never met. Right buddy ;-)? Our success team joke that a good tone is akin to leaving a voicemail for an aunt you’ve never met. Warm and friendly, but respectful about what you don’t yet know.
7, For example if you receive a lot of email you’ll be offered new types of inboxes. If you receive very little email you’ll be told how you can do voice or IM chat instead
8. A powerful feature for creating personalized messages is to include custom attributes in each message
9. This was set up as an auto-message so any customers who failed the SPF check in the future would also receive it.
10. Once we knew what users were asking, we were able to update our message (and the related docs) to include answers to these questions.
11. Depending on the nature of your app, they are there to enjoy themselves, complete a job, or save time – not to hear about what you’ve been doing or what you want them to do tomake your life easier.
12. DON’T SHOUT at your customers. And it’s not just all caps; extreme fonts, red text, and overuse of bold, all feel too in-your-face. As a simple rule write to your customers in the same way you would talk to them face to face.
14. Avoid all business-y robotic-type language. You just want to sound friendly, natural, and personal.
15. Or put even simpler business communications should be actionoriented, clear about what action it wants to take place, and quickly explains what that is.
16. If you want users to complete a certain task that is desirable to them but at the same time is daunting, education is the way you make it seem simple and easy. If a task is easy-to-do but of low value to customers, then persuasion is how you get it done.
17. Every user decision is a cost-benefit trade-off. How much time and effort do they have to invest? What will they get in return?
18. Honest “growth-hacks” simply alter this trade-off so that the cost is decreased, or the perceived benefit is enhanced.
19. For any given task in your product you have to understand how much a user actually wants to do it, and how hard they find it when they attempt it. Until you understand the cost-benefit analysis you can’t target effective messages against them.
20. It’s said the job of advertising is to get a consumer to try a product just once.
21. This is a good way to think about new feature announcements – your goal is to get the recipient to try the new feature or app just once. After that, it’s the role of the product or feature you are releasing to generate regular usage.
22. What is the key thing that is going to convince them to give it a try – is it going to improve their social life, save them time at work, make them more money?
23. Unless you’re selling to developers, no one cares that you’ve re-written your app from scratch in the latest programming language. No one cares what you did, or often even how you did it. Your customers care about what they can do with the product.
24. You also need to think about the barriers that might prevent people from trying the feature. Is it available on their price plan? Is it available in their country? Does it require an integration with another product or service they may not be using?
25. The goal of your survey is not to get lots of responses, even if you think a big number might impress your boss, your investors or some other third party. What you are after is quality, actionable data that will help you improve your product or service.
26. We all get asked to fill out lots of surveys, so you need to persuade customers it’s in their interests to complete this particular one. At the very least you need to make it clear the results of the survey are going to be acted on – no one wants to feel like they are wasting their time.
27. You can also provide a carrot in the form of a prize or reward. But just remember a reward related to your service e.g. upgrading a package for a short period or providing a discount voucher, will be far more effective at getting loyal users to respond than the latest shiny gadget such as an Apple Watch.
28. If quality data from a loyal user is not worth a month of premium service, should you even be asking customers to give up their valuable time to respond?
29. What’s in it for me?
30. You’ll do more damage than you’ll fix. Provide as much information as possible about what happened, why it happened and what action, if any, the recipient needs to take. The damage has already been done – don’t make things worse with an apology that annoys or insults your customers.
31. It’s even more important here to have a compelling subject line – after all you are trying to get people to open their wallets and the first step to doing that is to get them to open your message. Don’t make it about you or your amazing product. Sell the benefits to the customer – if they take advantage of this offer how will it improve their lives?
32. Why does it matter when and where someone receives your message? It’s all about context.
33. The context in which your customers receive your message has a major influence on its effectiveness.
34. But for most people the rapid rise of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Line and other messaging apps has all but killed SMS.
35. At Intercom we’ve begun sending a thank you note to customers when they hit certain significant milestones.
36. At Intercom our approach with push notifications is conservative. Again, the more personal you are the better: if Facebook sends me a generic push notification to tell me to add more friends, it’s spam. But if they tell me that Brian has replied to my message, I’m interested.
37. If you are trying to elicit some change in behavior within your app, what could be a better time to ask customers than when they are in the app and can take immediate action.
38. We’ve all received
messages from services congratulating us on hitting a milestone such as being a user for six months. But just because I’ve been a user for six months doesn’t say anything meaningful about my usage of the product, such as whether I’m a regular user, power user, or even use a particular feature.
39. At Intercom we’ve seen that messaging customers after they hit key milestones in our product is far more effective than relying on calendar time as a proxy for engagement
40. Major anniversaries and milestones e.g. one year as a customer, can be a great time to remind people of the value your product has given them.
50. If you’ve never created a message schedule, the good news is that there’s loads of low-hanging fruit and quick wins. To start with, there’s a basic set of messages every business will immediately benefit from sending to their users.
51. They should feel like they’re receiving one unified and coherent flow of information, not sporadic unbalanced bursts of communication. Thinking of it like this will help you avoid conflicting messages and create a schedule that’s much more effective.
52. Targeted, behavior driven in-app messages are the best approach here.
53. The onboarding period is sacred. Only send messages that are designed to turn your new users into loyal and active customers of your product. This is not the time to be pushing your new feature, asking for feedback, or promoting your super-interesting new blog post.
54. This means we can focus on getting customers engaged with Intercom in all the right ways, without them feeling like they’re being spammed with content irrelevant to their needs.
55. You’ll never get a second chance at welcoming your customers to your
product so make the first message count. When new users sign up, introduce yourself, let them know you’re there to help, and set a positive tone for the relationship. Why not include a smiley, happy photo of yourself? It really does help increase engagement if your users are reminded there are real people behind the software.
56. Should you welcome new users in-app or with an email? Probably both. Right after they sign up is one of the occasions when a user is expecting to receive an email from you – so make it count.
57. There will be times when a user signs up, but fails to take the first steplike completing registration, or adding their teammates. If two days after signup they haven’t carried out that next step, it should automatically trigger a message. Make it an email, or possibly a push notification, rather than an in-product message as you are trying to get them back into your app. The message needs to clearly outline what the next step is that they need to take, and the value to them of taking that step.
58. Once onboarding is almost complete and users have settled in a little bit, it’s a good time to ask how things went. Your message should be short, to the point, and personal.
59. Of course, milestone messages can be behaviorally based too e.g. you could send a message congratulating them on achieving power user status after they create 1,000 tasks in your time tracking app.
60. When you’re looking for feedback on a feature, you need to message your users inside your app, in context. You’ll get more replies, and they will be much better quality.
61. Some will churn because your competitor is cheaper, some because they no longer have a need for your product; that can’t be helped. But some will churn because either they never understood your product, or they felt that you never cared about them. These last two issues can be solved by regular customer contact.
62. Just as constant growth turns exponential, and is great for business, constant growth in churn rates turns exponentially bad.
63. Activity churn is the leading indicator of account churn
64. (At Intercom, we’ll message our users after 30 days of inactivity). The message should thank them for being a customer, and give them a compelling reason to return to your app, such as the launch of your new features.
65. We firmly believe real customer engagement comes from communications with the people who are using your product
66. They need careful planning – from establishing your tone and voice to drawing up a message schedule.
67.
Anatomy of good Message:
Subject Line
Convey a sense of urgency and uniqueness
Avoid looking like a spam
Sell the benefits
Spell them out clearly
Call to action
Obvious link style
Predictable location for links and CTA
Design for Screen Reading
The postscript
Footers
Different Types of Message:
Product Announcement
Survey
Feedback
- If you want to improve your onboarding, only talk to people who recently signed up.
- If you want to improve a feature, only talk to those who use it.
- If you want to understand why people aren’t using a feature, only talk to those who don’t use it.
- If you want to find areas of concern, only talk to active customers who use all your features.
Invitation
Apologies
Promotions
Promotion:
Discounts
Coupons
Points
Right Way:
Phone/Voice Call
Text Message
Post "snail mail"
Push Notification
In-app message
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