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How to use News items successfully when you have many different products

  • 2 February 2023
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I am really struggling to use the News feature, so I am wondering if someone could share some tips for using it. We have many different products, and users can subscribe to just one of them, or all of them, or anything in between. When we want to publish product-specific News, I never manage to target people so that they get all of the News that are relevant to them. This is because News is deviating from the tried and trusted way of setting audience rules for other outbound content. If a person is in one Newsfeed, they can't be in another!

So for example a client needs to see news for product X and product Y. If I publish news for product Y (targeting all users of the product) and then publish news for product X (targeting all users of that product), the client will only see the news that are at the top of the newsfeed list. Are there any workarounds? This is really headache-inducing for me. I want to use News because this feature fills a gap to have a non-intrusive long-form in-product message, but I just can't make it work because of the way the audience targeting is set up by Intercom. Help?!

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Best answer by Milan 6 February 2023, 14:33

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Userlevel 3
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Adding @user382​ in case he has any tips or feedback on that 👍

Userlevel 4
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Hello @user86​ (I like the name, same as my daughter)

 

I totally get it, the issue you have. Unlike Articles, where you can define who can see the article based on attribute (ie. custom attribute, type list, named ProductsUsed where it will list all the products that user is having), News need to be assigned to the Newsfeed (one or many) BUT only news which belong to one newsfeed (the one whose rules User is matching and with highest priority) will be shown.

 

Would it be too much to create a Newsfeed for each combination of products that your users are using? I assume yes, because even if there are only 3 products that would be 7 Newsfeeds. And then when you create a News for Product A you need to choose 4 Newsfeeds where it belongs to. And also to pay attention on how rules for Newsfeeds are defined so that only one is true.

 

This is a huge problem if you have more than 3 products as numbers of Newsfeeds is increasing and creating the News and assigning it to a proper Newsfeed is prone to mistakes.

 

4 products = 15 Newsfeeds... 😞

5 products = 31 Newsfeeds!

Userlevel 1
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Hi @user382​,

Thanks for your reply! It is nice that you have chosen this name for your daughter - I agree that it is a very nice one 😅

Yes, you are right, I have been trying to push News to multiple Feeds, but it gets very hard to manage. We have 9 different products, and in some cases I want to push News in a specific language, or to users in a specific country, so that would require even more Feeds!

This feature just might not be for us, unless Intercom decided to change the audience settings to match other outbound content (which works really well for us).

 

/cc @diana t12​ - Could you maybe forward this as feedback to the product team? Thank you!

Userlevel 4
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@user86​ oh the languages, that makes it even harder.

 

The only thing that I can think of then, is to let them see all the news (in their language - languages are newsfeeds perhaps) and have labels to mark to which product it is related to. So they immediately see it above the header text. So they can scroll away. Anyway - who knows - maybe seeing something about a different products you offer can produce some up-sell/cross-sell? Give it a try at least for some time. 🙂

 

I agree with you that more control of the audience would be great to have, so I'll mention @Product Wishlist​ to push this idea to the relevant team within Intercom 😉

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I still don't understand what the benefit of setting up audiences like this is supposed to be. As far as I know, the regular way is working for people - I don't usually see complaints about it. It is certainly working for us! We've decided to not use News unless this gets improved - it's just not worth the headache and time. It's a shame because we thought it would be a useful feature and now have to find other ways to ship similar information to users. @diana t12​ 

Userlevel 3
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Thanks for your feedback @user86​ We'll keep an eye out for additional customer feedback on that and let the relevant teams know 👍

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