Intercom Helps Businesses Track Whether Their Messages Are Actually Working

If you’re sending emails or other messages to your customers, there’s a standard way to measure your success — you look at whether they opened those messages, and whether the openers actually clicked.

But that’s setting the bar kind of low isn’t it? I assume you’re usually trying to drive some sort of behavior, whether it’s making a purchase, trying out a new feature, reactivating an account, or whatever. That’s what customer communication company Intercom aims to measure with a new feature called Message Goals.

“I still think there’s absolutely value in seeing the open rate and click rate, but with these goals you can actually see the true impact,” said Matt Hodges, the company’s senior director of marketing.

He added that this can be particularly useful when paired with Intercom’s A/B testing capabilities, because it allows you to find the message that’s actually driving the outcome you’re looking for.

Take Intercom customer and early Message Goals user Magoosh, which offers online test prep. When Magoosh tries to re-enage with its users, it’s easy to focus on getting those kids to open an email and maybe click on a link, but the real challenge is actually getting them to actually start studying again.

Intercom gave me a quick demo of how quick and easy it is to set up Message Goals. You just create your message or messages, identify the users you want to communicate with, then use a drop-down menu to identify the exact piece of data that you’re trying to track (you might have to drop in some code if Intercom isn’t already tracking that part of your product), plus the action or actions that count as success.

Intercom is including Message Goals in its Engage package of tools for marketers.