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How to send a follow-up survey to your Intercom Email or Intercom Messenger survey
How to send a follow-up survey to your Intercom Email or Intercom Messenger survey

Increase your response rate by sending a follow-up to users who didn't answer your survey

Agnieszka avatar
Written by Agnieszka
Updated over 7 months ago

By combining the power of Survicate surveys with Intercom's Series feature and Survicate surveys, you can boost your response rate and reach your customers where they feel the most comfortable answering your survey.

In this article, you'll learn how to:

  • Automatically follow up with the users who didn't respond to your first survey with an embedded email survey,

  • Uncover your active users' insights and automatically capture the user's first & last name and email address information - so you can act upon scores with follow-up emails to prevent churn or boost referrals,

  • Pass your survey responses to Intercom as user/company attributes, tags, and events.

Things you will need:

  • An account at Survicate (Sign up) with the Intercom integration included

  • An Intercom account with the Series feature

Step 1. Create the first survey

1. In your Survicate Panel, click on Create new survey.

2. Select Intercom Messenger surveys or Email or Shareable link surveys from the list of options, and choose whether you'd like to use a ready template, create a survey with AI, or start from scratch.

Then, build your survey by adding your questions and applying survey logic.

Step 2. Pass survey responses to Intercom as tags and/or attributes

To distinguish the respondents who have answered the survey, we need to pass information regarding the user participating in the survey to Intercom. You can sync information from Survicate as a tag or as an attribute.

Read on to see how you can achieve this.

1. Identify respondents of your survey:

  • if it's an Intercom Messenger survey sent via Chat or Post, their email addresses will be captured automatically;

  • if it's an Email/Shareable link survey sent via Intercom Email, you should select this setting before sending out the survey:

2. Head to the Connect tab of the survey you've just created, find Intercom from the list of integrations, and click the Connect button to set up the authorization (if not authorized before).

3. Under the Settings tab, you'll see the option to send responses to user or company profiles as tags and/or attributes. Pick your desired action here, and set up the tag or attribute that should be assigned to the respondents.

We've assigned the tag kb-survey-replied to each respondent who answered our first question. You can add more tags or send tags and attributes simultaneously.

Step 3. Create your first message in the Intercom Series

Start by creating a new Series in Intercom and defining the group of users who will enter this series (your target audience).

In this example, we decided to send this survey to the visitors of our Help Center.

  • If the first message in your Series will be an Intercom Messenger survey, add a chat message to the Series. Then, insert your survey into your Intercom message by clicking on the➕ that appears on the left-hand side of the message. Choose App > Survicate Customer Surveys from the list and select the survey you want to add to your message.

    Once you are ready, save your chat message.

    💡 See How to run surveys in Intercom messenger article for more detailed instructions.

  • If the first message in your Series will be an Email or Shareable link survey, add an email to the Series. Then, Get your code from the survey's Share tab, copy the HTML code.

    Click Switch to HTML editor in the bottom-left menu of the Intercom Email you're creating.

    Replace the code with the one you've copied from your Survicate survey, enter the subject of your email and save changes.

    💡 See Send surveys via Intercom Emails for more detailed instructions.

Step 4. Set up your email message's audience

To send a follow-up email survey only to the users who didn’t answer the first message (the one you configured in Step 3), we will need to define this group in the Series. This is where the integration we've done in Step 2 will come in handy!

1. Firstly, we need to set up a delay between the messages so that customers won't get the same survey simultaneously.

In our example, we decided to wait 7 days (add a step WAIT) before sending the email survey follow-up.

2. Next, we need to exclude the customers who have answered the first survey. As we are tagging every respondent who answered the first question of our survey with kb-survey-replied, all we need to do is exclude the customers who have this tag assigned to their Intercom profile (add RULES and edit the Audience in the RULES) from the audience of our follow-up email.

🚀 After applying the above steps, our Series can look like this:

See the next steps to learn how to add a follow-up email with a survey as the next step of the Series.

Step 5. Create an Email or Shareable link survey

Now that we have our first Intercom Messenger or Email or Shareable link survey and the follow-up survey's audience ready, let's create the survey we'll embed inside our follow-up email.

1. Select Email or shareable link survey from the list of options, and pick whether you'd like to use a ready template or start from scratch. For ease of analysis, it's better to have the same questions in this survey as in the Intercom Messenger survey you created in Step 1.

📌 You can enable Intercom integration for this Email survey as well. Although it's unnecessary for this particular guide, we highly recommend it as you can update your respondent's Intercom profiles with survey data. Follow the steps in the Intercom integration article to set up the integration.

Step 6. Add your email survey to the Intercom Series

With your Email or Shareable link survey ready, we can add the next step to the Intercom Series.

1. You can embed the Survicate survey's first question inside the Intercom email's body and let the respondents start the survey directly from the email. This is a proven way to boost your response rate! Your respondent will then be redirected to a landing page to take the rest of the survey.

Head to the Share tab of your survey in Survicate and grab the HTML code by clicking on Get your code.

2. Then, head on to the Intercom Series you are working on and add an email message. To embed your survey inside the email, click the Switch to HTML editor button on the bottom left of the email builder.

Replace the code with the one you've copied from your Survicate survey's Share tab, and enter the subject of your email.

After applying all the steps, our Series looks like this:

That's it! Now set your series live and dive into your customer feedback 🚀
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Best practices: Set up a Series to follow up with unhappy customers

You can push the NPS® score as tags to Intercom to the users or company profiles. That will allow you to send customized emails to Promoters, Passives, and Detractors later and help you identify who hasn't answered your survey.

1. To set up these tags, head to the Connect tab of your survey and find Intercom.

Head on to the Settings, and select the Send tags option.

2. Select the question based on which you'd like to assign the tags and write the tags you'd like to apply.

3. Now, you can send follow-up emails to users who are Detractors.

Go to your Intercom Series, and create a filter for users who received the survey and have the NPS2020_Detractor tag assigned to their Intercom profiles.

Now create a message in your Series that you'd like to send to the Detractors.

📞 If you have any questions about setting up the Intercom integration or creating the surveys - feel free to contact our team via chat or email: support@survicate.com.

Net Promoter, NPS, and the NPS - related emoticons are registered U.S. trademarks, and Net Promoter Score and Net Promoter System are service marks, of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.

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