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IntercomTutorial
How Live Chat Can Warm Up Your Cold Outbound Leads
Summary
The post describes a technique that combines cold email outreach with live chat to avoid spammy follow-ups, based on research that leads are 82% more likely to convert after a chat. When a prospect clicks a link in a cold email, they receive a proactive Visitor Auto Message personalized with a unique UTM code, such as the author’s initials ‘?nml’. This turns outbound emails into inbound conversations, with near 100% open rates and over 25% reply rates, and allows scheduling demos in under five minutes. The post includes an example email citing Tradeshift’s success with live chat, reducing lead qualification days from 21 to 3 and increasing sales by 32%. It provides a step-by-step guide on setting this up in Intercom by creating UTM codes and triggering Visitor Auto Messages based on URL matches.
Context
Cold email outreach often results in low engagement and spammy follow-ups. Intercom’s sales team found that leads are 82% more likely to convert after a chat, so they combined cold emails with live chat to turn outbound into inbound conversations.
Approach / What changed
Use unique UTM codes in cold email links to trigger personalized Visitor Auto Messages in Intercom when prospects visit the landing page. The messages greet the prospect by name and invite them to chat, turning a cold email click into a live conversation.
Takeaways
Leads are 82% more likely to convert if they have chatted with you first.
Using unique UTM codes in cold email links allows triggering personalized live chat messages when prospects click.
This technique can reduce demo scheduling time from hours to under five minutes.
FAQ
How do you set up a Visitor Auto Message triggered by a cold email click?
Create a UTM code for the landing page URL, then create a Visitor Auto Message triggered by 'current page URL' containing that UTM code.
What reply rates can you expect from this approach?
The author reports near 100% open rates and over 25% reply rates for these chat messages.
How do you personalize the chat message for each prospect?
Use a unique UTM code per prospect, such as the author's initials, and set the Visitor Auto Message to trigger on that code.
Source and freshness
- Source
- intercom.com
- Published
- Added to Yomu
Summaries are generated from the original by a language model. Check the original before relying on it.
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