Intercom — bang for the buck for SaaS Products!
Selling your product is probably way high up on the list of things you ought to do in order to have a sustainable product!
However, the deeper you dig into marketing the more things prop up — from generating mailing lists to identifying users as leads, customers, etc and then targeting campaigns to make free users to paid! Sure, you can hire a marketing expert to manage this and then use a bunch of disparate services to somehow intermingle this mess together, but that low-key defeats the point of paying for a third-party SaaS product — that’s the ease of use & bottom-line time savings for your engineering team to focus on what matters- i.e. writing business logic specific to your firm!
Here comes intercom (this isn’t a paid endorsement, I truly vouch for the product having used it for more than a year), it sort of hits all of the checkboxes — let’s go step by step to try and uncover where intercom can come in handy for your team!
User lands on your Landing page
At this point in time, intercom would immediately capture their IP and some geo-location values to have an anonymous user identifier assigned to this user, they prop up almost immediately on your front page
Now your marketing team can try and chat with them OR even better, use one of intercoms custom bots to start a conversation with this user to try and entice them to at least give their e-mail (if they are showing interest towards your product however are not yet ready to bite the bullet and actually use it)
Recognizing on-boarding failures
This is one of those features where most teams end up writing either custom scripts or some sort of crontasks to recognize failures during onboarding
In a system where your user needs to download an app, sign up, confirm their email, they could potentially abandon at any point of time and you pretty much stay clueless as to why/when did they abandon or in some cases, whether or not did they abandon in the first place.
This can very very easily be solved by ending up writing single-line JS codes to just relay back data over to Intercom which essentially might be setting simple flags for your intercom user showing which step(s) of the onboarding process are they done with.
Now, we can make use of the “Custom Segments” in intercom to then create a dashboard of all the users that abandoned the app at a specific point of time, to then have a consolidated view/find out potential discrepancies in the onboarding process early on!
Having an FAQ page!
This is one feature that surprisingly even Intercom hasn't justifiably pushed forward as much as they possibly could!
Intercom allows you to chalk up articles — now if you sort out articles correctly under the sub-categories like we have done here in two example articles -
The show up perfectly aligned in a FAQ-esq page!
Heck, you could even change the domain to point to your custom domain, like help.voice-ping.com!
Recognizing Users who use your app the most & the least!
Intercom gives this feature where you can hide the launcher, so now you can use the same “App” (in intercom terms) on your landing page and your actual page (the launcher being hidden in the latter) — now intercom associates how much each user who signed up for your app uses it
You can use this hack + series to send out different messages to users based off how much they use your app!
Series provide a nifty way to recognise users who did download your app, used it for a bit but now for some reason have pretty much left it… you can automate a workflow to ping them to try and fetch them back onto your app!
Notifying users of new features!
Most early-stage startups pretty much end up pushing out new features to cater to requests coming from… you guessed it — early users. However, what a few users want might just be the same thing another startup using your product might use but are unaware of! Notifying users of your current features is a low-key difficult task if you just use SNS channels for it, since not all your users might follow your SNS channels too, however, you have their email address, you can always push them emails for the same! This too is pretty straightforward on intercom, you can pretty much chalk up an article, set your target audience, and boom — you are done!
This might still be just the tip of the iceberg! There’s a whole bunch of nifty stuff which might be lurking out there which I might have missed in this article! Feel free to include it in the comments!
