Marketing automation with intercom — using series!
Intercom provides us with a pretty nifty way of regulating how messages are pushed out to customers or even potential customers (classified as leads internally) to either make them use the product or transition to a paid version!
However, using the out-of-the-box templates doesn’t cut it for the most part, since not all businesses have the same requirements!
In this article, I’ll be going over a fictional case study, and we’ll try to see how we can use the intercom series in a personalized fashion to suit the business’s needs!
Although keep in mind, I won’t be going over the marketing strategies to achieve this, but focusing on the implementation details for a pre-existing marketing strategy devised by your team!
Introducing the fictional firm
The fictional firm has a landing page, along with an MQL (Marketing qualified lead) generation method along with a full-fledged store (in a separate domain) where orders can be placed.
Challenge 1 — Converting MQL to a customer
This is probably the bigger challenge of the two since a prospective lead has left their email and now you gotta pursue them into buying your product!
The first thing we need to be doing here is to generate a segment of users that will fall under the MQL category, this categorization is important since it’ll determine whether a user enters the series or not.
The way intercom works, is that it qualifies leads on its own, and users with an email don’t necessarily fall under the defacto leads segment (at least as of writing this article), as a result, we’d have to go to
Settings -> Qualification settings
And add a custom attribute called “isMQL” to determine whether the user entered our eco-system via the MQL pipeline.
Once the attribute has been added over in your qualification settings, you need to provide the variable with a value when the user enters their email in the MQL box!
window.Intercom(‘update’,{email: user's_email, isMQL:true});And that’s it — now the user will end up having a name the same as their email and have this attribute to be true!
We head over to the series tab now and chalk up a pipeline
Step 1 — Add the Audience to the target rule
Step 2 — Add if isMQL is true in the rules
Step 3 — Attach your rule to the rest of your pipeline
And that’s it, now you feed in MQL specific customers to your custom pipeline.
Challenge 2 — Making customers who are already using your products to upgrade their plan
This probably is less challenging in terms of code as compared to the MQL pipeline, the rules here are simple, you need to be checking if the user has confirmed their email address and signed up with your system (add another attribute for checking this) and then if they have, they leave your MQL pipeline and enter into the user upgrade pipeline!
Some other tricks to play around with —
The MQL rule we defined was for all intents and purposes, quite simple, one can choose to enhance that filter by adding rules like
- First seen in the last 1 (or 2 days) (If you don’t add this, then you might end up pushing out emails to customers who have been in your system for months but have since abandoned it)
- Total visits above or below a particular count (Helps target customers who are in-frequent visitors specifically)
- Adding custom attributes based on your personal business scenario and checking against it!
And that’s pretty much it! Using custom attributes is the way to go if you wish to give your customers the most personalized experience possible!
