

Automated Emails & Respecting Your Customers - destraynor
http://blog.intercom.io/automated-emails-customer-respect/

======
sudonim
Today was day 2 of being full-time for me and my cofounder. We make it easy to
build automated emails and measure whether users do the thing you want them
to. You can imagine my heart skipped a beat this morning when a prospective
customer emailed saying Intercom rolled out (part of) what we do.

I figured it was coming, but I didn't know when. Day 2 was sooner than I had
expected. I don't know who else this has happened to (I'd love to hear about
it) but it definitely makes you pause to think. Intercom is doing a phenomenal
job both on their blog and their product. Ultimately, on Day 2 with this
feature release, I learned what is best summed up in this blog post by David
Cancel <http://davidcancel.com/true-startup-competition/>:

"a startup only has one real competitor, indifference"

This one event could flip our plan on it's head. Instead, I'm taking it as
great validation. We were right about what we're building.

~~~
destraynor
Thanks for your kind words Colin. Your attitude is spot on. Let's keep in
touch.

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patio11
I'm very happy to see this productized. You're probably going to make money
hats (certainly for your customers, ideally for you, too).

n.b. A lot of savvy software companies hire, er, high-priced consultants to
build this sort of thing out of duct tape and bailing wire, and/or handroll it
in-house. If I can hypothetically give a suggestion, a) customer education on
how to use it is a large part of the value add (see MailChimp's copious
writing on how to use regular ol' email in pursuit of business objectives) and
b) this spins straw into gold, charge appropriately.

~~~
bigiain
Also, work out how to market it to those of us buying _way_ too much bailing
wire and duct-tape.

Show me a good way to plug this into my clients existing infrastructure
(MailChimp/CampaignMonitor/Magento/Wordpress/Concrete5/PaypalStore/etc), and
I'll just sell it to them for you, instead of heading to the stationary
cupboard (again) for another roll of tape.

I want a useful, well documented (with examples) API. I want well written and
comprehensive end-user documentation I can point my clients at and let them
run with you. (I'd also _like_ some believable assurances about reliability,
uptime, the businesses sustainability, all that kind of stuff - but if you win
me on the first two, I've got a _lot_ of clients I need to call…)

~~~
destraynor
Hey Iain,

We really want all these things too :)

Here's your Docs <http://docs.intercom.io/> Here's your API:
<http://docs.intercom.io/api>

We are working incredibly hard on making this business succeed, your goals
(reliability, uptime, sustainability etc) are 100% in line with ours.

If you've any other questions, let me know. des at intercom dot io

Regards, Des (COO at Intercom)

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gwillen
The only thing I have to firmly disagree with here is putting your name in the
From: header. If the company name does not appear, either instead of your name
or in front of it, I will probably throw your message in the trash without
ever figuring out what it is. (If the _very first thing_ in the Subject:
header is your company name, you may be able to get away with this.)

~~~
destraynor
Interesting point. We do that in a few places, e.g. if a customer starts a
conversation and a user replies. Small change though (says the guy who doesn't
have to make it :-) )

We'll take a look.

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chrisacky
Rentention!

One of the fundamental pillars of AARRR! (Acquisition Attention Retention
Revenue Referral)

I've been searching for a service like this for quite some time. I have been
wanting to create something homebrew for quite some time because there is
clearly no offering currently available that does this.

I'm still yet to test, but it looks like you guys might have nailed it.

\- Any signs on pricing for when you do launch?

\- And why is a JS library required for this? (Is it purely for the popup
messaging?)

~~~
destraynor
Hey Chris,

Thanks for your comment. Regarding pricing, this is all we've said publically
: <http://docs.intercom.io/#PricePlans> \- if it's a big obstacle and concern
for you, mail me and I can give you some loose bracket to inform your decision

Along with messaging, the JS library tracks web application activity sending
us useful data such as "last seen" which in turn let's us email "users not
seen in the past 30 days".

You can use our API if you prefer <http://docs.intercom.io/api> but the client
works really well for lots of this stuff.

~~~
chrisacky
Thanks des.

We are relying heavily on caching, and I noticed that you require the users
email and created at to be available in the page with each snippet? Could you
explain this a little more?

Is this _just_ for the initial signup for the user, or is this for every
request that the user makes. I mainly ask because it would seem odd to pass
the "created_at: 1234567890" in every request.

~~~
destraynor
Hey Chris,

You can do this via the API instead -> <http://docs.intercom.io/api>

We're constantly improving the way this works, but in short the reason behind
the current behaviour is simply that we wanted the initial sign-up experience
to be both easy and powerful. Soon it won't be necessary to pass it after the
initial call (and for what it's worth it's only useful so that we can
distinguish your existing users from your new signups)

Hope that makes sense, Des

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JEVLON
Has anyone thought about "donotreply@xyz," and how it disengages customers?
Would it be beneficial to have "pleasedoreply@xyz," and forward the replies to
the social media expert or customer service? Combined with the system
described by intercom, it may greatly increase customer/user engagement.

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ams6110
Be different. Don't send unsolicited marketing email to your customers. Just
don't.

