Media training 101 for small businesses

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Great news: you just scored a big press interview to promote your business. The story will expose your brand to the perfect new audience and drive meaningful traffic to your website. So…don't blow it. Yes, just as quickly as the excitement for the opportunity arrived, the realization that you now have to do an interview sets in. I get it—press interviews can absolutely be intimidating. The resulting coverage represents a significant opportunity to acquire new customers, drive sales, or raise awareness, and you want to be sure to represent your brand well and really compel the audience to check out your company. On top of that, you have to contend with adrenaline and nerves in the moment. You may be thinking, "So many other business owners are so polished and articulate in their interviews. How am I going to pull that off?" Deep breath. A successful interview is usually the result of good media training: preparation and practice in advance of an interview. I've tr...
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4 ways to automate Intercom and take your customer conversations to the next level

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In the past, your customer relationships ended at the point of sale. Support was an afterthought, and retention often fell low on the list of priorities.

But Intercom is part of a fleet of apps and services giving businesses new ways to interact with their customers. Intercom lets you use chatbots to have personalized conversations with current and prospective customers. This provides better conversions for businesses and a better experience for customers. In fact, Intercom found that people who've chatted with businesses first are 82 percent more likely to convert.

Intercom lets you interact with more users, collect more data, and see more conversions. That's a huge benefit for your business, but if you're doing all the data entry manually, it will be challenging to leverage all of Intercom's power.

Use Zapier to connect Intercom with your other apps and automatically take care of all the routine work.

Add Intercom users to other apps to cultivate customer relationships

Chatting with customers through Intercom makes them feel seen and valued with personalized conversations. When you give your users that glowing feeling, don't let it disappear as they move down the sales funnel. Use these Zaps to connect Intercom to your CRM and support apps, so the good experience continues from one app to the next.

According to McKinsey & Company, only 15 percent of CMOs believe their company is headed in the right direction when it comes to personalization. If you can bring what you learn from Intercom interactions into your customer relationship management (CRM) you'll be able to customize chat and the other interactions that follow.

You can add Intercom users to your CRM so you can build customer profiles and targeted campaigns. Zapier lets you connect Intercom with popular platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Pipedrive.

You can also add Intercom users to your support or service apps, which is especially helpful for customer retention.

Add leads to Intercom to close deals faster

According to Chorus.ai research, companies have to nurture leads the most in the late stages of a sales cycle because that's where they spend the most time. And 80 percent of sales need five follow-ups to close. Instead of letting this process drag on, leverage Intercom to automate it and get leads ready to convert faster.

As Intercom is, it can only deliver results as fast as you feed it leads. Use these Zaps to capture leads from lead cultivation tools and automatically pipe them into Intercom.

You can also create landing pages to capture leads and then automatically send form submissions to Intercom.

Track Intercom activity

In Intercom, a lead becomes a user when they sign up for your product or log in to an existing user account. But no one has time to constantly check to see how many people have become users.

Rather than chasing this info manually, automatically track new Intercom users across different apps.

Here are several Zaps that automatically track Intercom users in a spreadsheet or project management app, so you can stay organized.

If there are actions your team needs to take when events happen in Intercom, you can also use Zapier to make sure the message gets out.

Make data-informed decisions

With effective personalization, companies earned as much as 15 percent more revenue and achieved 30 percent better marketing-spend efficiency, according to McKinsey & Company.

Likewise, Intercom is also at its most powerful when conversations are personalized. When you have a healthy sales pipeline, it's virtually impossible to manually input data for every single lead. Use these Zaps to add user data into Intercom or send surveys from Intercom to get even more data.

To create richer, more robust customer profiles, update user info with data from other apps.

When you want to collect detailed feedback, check in with customers directly and automatically send them surveys. You'll learn more about how they feel about your business and how you can best serve their needs.

Then, when users you chat with over Intercom complete surveys, use Zapier to automatically connect those responses with their profile in Intercom so you can refer back and compare changes over time.

Intercom automations make your chatbot experience better

When you give customers a great start through a conversation, make sure their experience runs from their first interaction with you to their last. Use these automated workflows to extend Intercom's powerful features and information into the other apps you use so you can get more done with less effort—all while making your customers feel special with personalized conversations.

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