Could you elaborate a bit more on what is not offered by current tools?
I have been in charge of reviewing and integrating various email marketing solutions for some of the companies I've worked for, I've found them usually quite complete in terms of features (some more than others, obviously).
@arien "Could you elaborate a bit more on what is not offered by current tools?"
Basically what intercom is doing. Plus.... You don't want to hammer your customers with emails. You also want to make sure that users don't get notifications which are totally irrelevant to them. Tracking all of this information is going to be hard work for your own application.
There is a drop off of rentention of users at each barrier in your application.
You might have a really simple flow like:
1. Sign Up
2. Create Project
3. Add something to Project
4. Add Collaborator/Files/Foobars to Project
5. Publish
So at each "barrier" or hurdle, you are going to have users drop off. It's pretty important to minimize this dropoff as much as you can. If you've spent $X acquiring the users, retaining them and reducing drop offs it important.
You can usually do some pretty good analytics from your own application, but then you also have to start tracking stuff like when was the last time you emailed the user.
I recently set emails from KickSend to go immediately to my spam because although they were doing a good job of reminding me that I had dropped off at point 3, they were spamming me too much during each point. I really didn't need an email every day from them.
But all the same, being able to create "tags" for my applicaiton and email users where they are at each point will be pretty awesome.
I think that's how I understand intercom can help anyway. I might be wrong!
You can filter your userbase any way you want. You can use our tagging feature to create segments (e.g. You can define VIP as plan = "premium" and LTV > 2000 ) and then you can create auto-messages which target segments of users, as you wish, to say whatever you way.
Users can reply, and we keep track of that too. We use this data to establish a relationship score (i.e. which users you've talked to). Relationship score is great for finding users who nobody has talked to (score = 0) and there is usually good return in talking to these guys.
Thank you for the explanation. I believe that is already available in some email marketing services, although they are part of bigger systems, probably too bloated and pricey for a start-up environment or a specific project. Something more straightforward is certainly welcome.
I have been in charge of reviewing and integrating various email marketing solutions for some of the companies I've worked for, I've found them usually quite complete in terms of features (some more than others, obviously).