When Intercom raised $50 million last month, the company said they were now “fully funded” and will not need to raise any more money to reach profitability. They also plan to continue to invest 85% of revenues on product development, driving growth without a big spend on sales and marketing. Intercom’s platform brings together all customer communications (in-app, email, live chat, mobile, social) under one platform, so companies can control all customer engagement from one place.
Getting the right message to the right customer at the right time remains the big marketing challenge that many tech vendors are trying to solve with marketing automation technology. MarTech Advisor spoke to Intercom today about Smart Campaigns which promises to simplify email campaigns in the same way they have disrupted in-app and live web chat with their messaging platform. The new feature is bundled with the Engage marketing automation product which sends targeted contextual messages to customers for on-boarding and engaging with customers.
The focus of marketing has shifted because people are used to try-before-you-buy offers, especially with SaaS and Mobile apps, said Matt Hodges, Senior Director of Marketing at Intercom. Marketing today is about helping prospects and customers see the value of your product during a trial phase or re-engaging with those who slip away. Marketers need to personalize and refine their customer messaging so they can nurture each prospect towards particular actions or “goals” you want your customer to reach.
The problem Matt says, is that “no one customer journey is going to be right for an individual customer”. Because our behaviors are unique, we take different actions at different points of time, and marketing automation tools that approach customer journeys as linear journeys are “fundamentally flawed”. Other products force you to predict the paths a customer will take so marketers end up with messy complex workflows or decision trees.
Smart Campaigns tries to eliminate this problem and take the guesswork out of personalizing the customer journey. The new feature simply asks users to create rules for getting each customer towards desired goals and then add their marketing messages. Smart Campaigns then takes over as customers automatically enter and exit campaigns based on these rules. Intercom’s product will work out the right message to send to each user at the right time based on the rules and priorities that you set.
At any point you can change entry and exit criteria and adjust the priority of the message but essentially its automated from this point on. When the goal is hit the customer profile is removed from the campaign. While they expect the Smart Campaigns to be heavily used in on-boarding campaigns, Matt sees many other use cases for Smart Campaigns - nurture leads for signups, cross-sell to existing customers and reengage with people to reduce customer churn.
Intercom believes its far more effective to message a customer inside of a product while they are using it rather than sending email. Also, customers are increasingly interested in talking with businesses through a familiar messenger type interface, another channel which works best inside of a product or service. The advantage of using Intercom’s platform is that it’s powered by live customer data from your web or mobile app. That allows it to automatically build rich customer profiles with added contextual data said Matt, which can be customized for each business.
Matt says the company remains committed to invest in the platform because that’s what makes Intercom special and to “make sure we are building the right set of features”. He named large marketing automation vendors such as Marketo, Oracle’s Eloqua and Salesforce’s Exact Target as the main competition, with several other startup products that all try to “solve the same problem but don’t do anything different.” The Intercom vision of the future of marketing automation is one where customer profiles, analytics and messaging are merged on a single platform.
In the last few months they have added over a 100 customer who are beta testing Smart Campaigns. As a SaaS product, they see it as a largely self-serve business where people who come to the site dominate the customer base, although they do have a sales team for large customers. So is Smart Campaigns the killer marketing automation product that can turn Intercom into the next billion dollar martech unicorn?
The fast growing company now has 10,000 paying customers, including rising startups like NewRelic, Expensify and Typeform. Matt said they have a good mix of web apps and mobile apps on their customer list of which about 8-10 percent are mobile only. As of now Intercom has no concrete plans to sell to the enterprise, and the focus now is on raising the bar in terms of the quality and variety of inbound content that attracts people to their product.
