How do you orchestrate your messaging?

Hey @craig (SiteMinder)​ 👋 Like @murat k (Shopney Inc.)​ , the more info you share the more specific we can be with advice but I had a quick chat with one of Customer Engagement colleagues and we've put together some tips:

1. Your targeting will only be as good as the data you have, so think of ways to get users to input their role/title, or whatever info you need, during the onboarding process. We've used the 'ask a question' app in the messenger to effectively gather this sort of data in the past, but you could also build it into your sign-up flow and use it to create a customer-data-attribute for targeting.
2. Use ‘last contacted at’ for every campaign, message and bot. This filter is your best friend when attempting to prevent over-messaging. We also suggest that for campaigns, use ‘at least 3 days apart’ unless the campaign requires more immediate messaging, i.e. onboarding.
3. To ensure users get the 'next best message' - create data points for key product actions, and define the sequence of actions. Trigger your messages based on the actions a user has or hasn’t taken. By defining the sequence, you’ll be able to target users based on the next action they should take to be successful.
4. One-off vs ongoing - this depends on the whether the audience is static or rolling, and whether the message is evergreen or a once-off communication. For example, we use ongoing messages to onboard our users. These messages are evergreen, and the audience is rolling. If we had an outage that affected a certain group of users, we would send a once-off message to that static audience. For product announcements, we use ongoing messages within a campaign, as it allows us to reach more users as they qualify for the campaign, and to send a sequence of message to help educate users about different parts of the new product or feature over the course of weeks. (Top tip: users exit a campaign once they receive all the messages so we always add in a dummy message with rules that prevent it from sending (eg. email = fakeemail@fakeyfake), just in case we need to add further messaging to a campaign further down the line).
5. Intercom vs other systems. We solely use Intercom for customer communications, but we do sometimes experience this issue on the prospect side where we use a number of systems. Our first piece of advice would be to develop internal governance. Define the role of each system, the types of leads or users they communicate to and at what stage. This will help your teams to understand what is used when, and why. It will also help you to see where the overlap occurs. The second tip, if possible, is to build data connections between your systems. It’s crucial that each system has similar info about a user, so that you don’t develop varying profiles for the same person, which can lead to an incoherent experience. Combining tip 1 & 2 should help you build an ecosystem where the tools communicate with, and complement, each other.
6. When I began building out our customer onboarding campaigns a few years ago I actually drew them out on a scrap of paper 😂 It's probably easier to use a product like Lucidchart or Figma though.

It's worth mentioning that our team are working on some really exciting updates that will change a few of the above answers...but I'm not allowed say any more than that 🤫