---
title: "Effective messages have real goals - The Intercom Blog"
description: "Defining a clear goal before sending a customer message is essential for effectiveness and guides message structure. Real goals should focus on eliciting user behavior change such as more frequent product usage, updating billing details, or trying a new feature, not on intermediate metrics like open or click-through rates. Intercom’s Message Goals feature lets you see message impact and measure success against your objective. Onboarding messages should ask users their own goals, new feature messages should explain user benefits to increase adoption or usage frequency, and announcements must ensure recipients understand implications and any required action. Newsletters can stay top of mind, reward paying customer loyalty, or re-engage lapsed users, while surveys should gather quality data to drive business decisions rather than maximizing quantity."
---

# Effective messages have real goals - The Intercom Blog

[Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom) · Oct 8, 2026

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

Defining a clear goal before sending a customer message is essential for effectiveness and guides message structure. Real goals should focus on eliciting user behavior change such as more frequent product usage, updating billing details, or trying a new feature, not on intermediate metrics like open or click-through rates. Intercom’s Message Goals feature lets you see message impact and measure success against your objective. Onboarding messages should ask users their own goals, new feature messages should explain user benefits to increase adoption or usage frequency, and announcements must ensure recipients understand implications and any required action. Newsletters can stay top of mind, reward paying customer loyalty, or re-engage lapsed users, while surveys should gather quality data to drive business decisions rather than maximizing quantity.

## Context

The post explains that many customer messages fail because they lack a clear goal beyond intermediate metrics. It provides a framework for defining goals across different message types to drive desired user actions.

## Takeaways

- Real message goals focus on changing user behavior, such as more frequent product usage or updating billing details, not on intermediate metrics like open or click-through rates.
- Different message types require different goals: onboarding should ask users what they aim to achieve and tailor accordingly, while announcements must ensure recipients understand implications and required actions.
- For surveys, the goal should be gathering quality data to inform business decisions, not maximizing response quantity through gimmicks like prize incentives.

## FAQ

### What constitutes a real goal for a customer message?

A real goal focuses on the change you want to elicit in users, such as more frequent usage or updated billing details, not on intermediate metrics like open or click-through rates.

### What should the goal of an onboarding message be?

The goal is to get users to experience value from your product, often during a free trial, by asking what they want to achieve and tailoring messaging accordingly.

### How should you approach survey messaging to get useful data?

Focus on gathering quality data that can inform business changes, not maximizing response quantity. Avoid gimmicks like prize incentives that attract uninsightful responses.

**Tags:** [Customer Experience](https://yomu.fyi/topic/customer-experience), [Onboarding](https://yomu.fyi/topic/onboarding), [SaaS](https://yomu.fyi/topic/saas)

- Source: [Intercom](https://www.intercom.com/blog/effective-messages-goals)
- Source URL: https://www.intercom.com/blog/effective-messages-goals
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-10-08T21:00:27.764Z

[Read original post](https://www.intercom.com/blog/effective-messages-goals)