You can proactively reach out to visitors on your website based on who they are and what they do. Here’s how to create ongoing messages that help you chat to, capture and qualify high quality leads.
Note:
You’ll need Intercom Messages to send messages to your visitors.
Anyone on your website who’s not logged in can receive these messages, including your leads or users.
Create a new message to capture leads
First, go to Outbound from the main menu and click + New message in the top right corner.
Choose "New chat" or "New post" as your channel or use one of the pre-made templates.
For this example we’ll start from scratch with a new chat, but the following steps also apply if you customize a template.
Before composing your message, you’ll see these options to define how it’s received by site visitors. Selections you make here will update the preview on the right, so you can see how your message will look:
You’ll need to choose who the message should come from, and which inbox you’d like replies assigned to. — If you’d like to share new leads equally among a team (like your sales team), choose that team with ‘round robin' enabled.
The ideal settings for a message to visitors are:
Chat message type - You can collect a visitor’s email address with a “Chat” message, or start a conversation by allowing text replies. You could send a small post message, but chat's are most effective for engaging visitors on your site.
Sent as Snippet - Make the first few words engaging and indicate what your message is about.
Create an engaging message
To make your message engaging, you can easily add video clips, images, buttons, apps and more. Just hover over the text editor and click the '+' icon on the left:
Note:
Uploaded video clips must be in MP4 format and no more than 40mb in size. They'll display in a 4:3 aspect ratio.
Buttons and Social buttons can only be inserted in Post messages, not Chats.
Automatically qualify leads who reply
Configure our bot, Operator, to automatically qualify your leads. Below the message, select “Add follow up actions”.
Then, select “Trigger Operator’s qualification task bot”. You can configure the qualification data Operator collects on the Operator tab under “Qualify leads”.
Set up audience rules and triggers
Under Rules you can set up triggers to send your message and specify your audience.
For example, you might know that visitors who arrive on your pricing page after clicking a link from a ProductHunt promotion are more likely to convert to customers. To specifically message these folks, your filters would look like this:
Tips:
Combine 'and' with 'or' filters for more powerful audience targeting.
You can also choose to send your message after a person has spent a certain amount of time on the page, like 10 seconds in this example. ☝️
Pro tip: If you’ve installed our Clearbit Reveal integration, you’ll also see additional company data to choose from, like the number of employees in a visitor’s company, the total amount of funding they’ve raised, and more. You can see the full list of Clearbit Reveal data available in Intercom here.
Frequency and scheduling
To avoid missing important leads, set your message to send during your office hours, when your team is available to respond:
Important: Delivery times for visitor auto messages are calculated based on your workspace’s timezone.
That’s it. You’re ready to set your message live 🎉
Why did a user receive a message meant for visitors?
It is possible for a user to receive a dynamic message designated for visitors under specific circumstances, like when they're logged out.
Here's how something like that can happen:
The customer visits your landing page as an anonymous visitor
This customer receives a visitor cookie
A visitor message is triggered
Then, the customer logs in
Intercom identifies the visitor and the user as the same person (based on the tracking cookie) and we merge the visitor data into the user profile
The message that was sent to the visitor is visible on the user's profile
The user logs out and clears their cookies
Steps 1-7 could happen repeatedly in situations where the customer uses a shared computer and purposely clears all their cookies and browsing history to protect their data, or if they frequently browse incognito.
Although they are the same person in this instance, we are unable to tell that, as the user is not logged in and they no longer have the same tracking cookie they had the first time they've received the visitor message while logged out.
Something to help avoid messaging users while they're trying to log in would be setting a delay on the message so a visitor receives it only after being on the page for a set amount of time.
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