The price of your Intercom subscription is based (in part) on the number of active people reached by your workspace. This article includes a few tips to help you avoid unintentional increases in your Intercom invoice.
1) Be deliberate with your Audience
Tidy up the contacts in your workspace
Over time, you may find that messages to some email addresses don’t deliver anymore. For example if your contacts at a particular company have changed jobs or the company is no longer operating. You should clean your user list of old, disengaged users once every 6 months. Neverbounce built an app to help clean your email list in Intercom. Other services you can use include Kickbox and Webbula.
Note: Removing inactive users from your workspace won’t directly impact your subscription price. It will prevent sending messages to invalid contacts, which will lower the number of active people counted as reached by your workspace.
Refine your audience to reach the right contacts
Unless you’re specifically trying to reach inactive users, it’s a great idea to target all messages at active, engaged users. Intercom’s default filters can help you to target these users accurately.
We recommend using the following filters for your active users segment:
Last seen less than 30 days ago
OrSigned up less than 30 days ago
OrLast opened email less than 30 days ago
This will return all contacts who signed up, visited your site, or interacted with your emails in the last month.
2) Pause any outbound messages you no longer need
Over time, on-going messages will increase the count of active people reached by your workspace. Once a campaign or series has served its purpose (like announcing a new feature) it's important to pause or delete it so it doesn't keep contributing to your usage.
3) Tighten up your roles and permissions for Outbound
Limit those with Outbound permissions
Make sure only teammates that need to send bulk messages have permission to do so. Go to Settings > Teammates > Edit to change the permissions for any teammate that should not have permissions to send Outbound messages:
Nominate an internal approver
We recommend having a simple internal approval process in place for any large outbound messages, this will help your teammates be more deliberate when setting large messages live. For example, if your audience size is greater than 50% of your user base the teammate should seek internal approval before setting that message live.
4) Get in touch
If you’ve followed this advice, and are still looking to adjust your usage, you may benefit from upgrading your Intercom subscription. Please reach out to us in the Messenger and we’ll be happy to help.