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13 posts about Marketing. Every summary links to the original.
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An agentic ad stack wires governed customer signals to campaign execution through a shared tool interface and server-side guardrails. The diagram shows each layer, the direction of a tool call, and where control stays human.
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Intercom hired John Collins, a former print journalist with 20 years at The Irish Times, as managing editor to lead its content efforts. The company’s blog, Inside Intercom, has been a key driver of its success by sharing insights on web design, search, and business evolution, not just product features, and increasingly reflects the views of its customers. Intercom avoids typical content marketing tactics like link baiting or artificial publishing schedules, instead focusing on evergreen content that builds a lasting knowledge base and gets referred to weeks and months after publication. This approach allows direct engagement with customers without intermediaries like PR agencies or trade magazines, which have declined, and the company is not setting up a corporate newsroom. The company views this as an experiment putting a journalist among engineers and designers to create content that attracts and engages prospective customers on its own terms.
Email open rate, which relies on a tracking pixel being loaded, is an unreliable metric because modern clients let users read without opening. Reader fatigue is inevitable as a list grows, and the only cure is staying relevant. Subject lines and sender fields have the strongest effect on opens; simple, personal lines like “Dinner?” performed well for a political campaign. Click-through rates are more accurate, and the first two links get most of the clicks, so the call to action must be prominent. Links should be visually obvious and placed predictably, as weak styling halves their click-through rate. The core advice is to write about what the reader wants to know, not about the product, and to test the email on a stranger before sending.
The Intercom marketing team, a group of lifelong learners, compiled a reading guide of five books that have influenced their careers and thinking. Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable categorizes 12 technological forces like AI and streaming, offering an optimistic view of future change. Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow argues that brand growth depends on reaching new customers through broad reach, not on increasing loyalty from superfans, using Harley-Davidson as an example. James Twitchell’s 20 Ads That Shook the World explores historic campaigns such as De Beers’ creation of diamond engagement rings, providing context for modern advertising. William Zinsser’s On Writing Well and Jake Knapp’s Make Time round out the list with advice on clear writing and focusing on a single daily highlight for better productivity.
Intercom introduced new features to unify conversational support, marketing, and engagement, including Banners, Series, and enhanced bots. Banners are an unobtrusive message type for announcements and promotions, with brand styling, personalization, and scheduling. Series is a visual campaign builder that orchestrates behavior-based messaging across channels with audience segmentation for activation, retention, or re-engagement. Custom Bots now include A/B testing with goal setting and retriggering rules for returning visitors, while email targeting can be based on website behavior with new reporting trendlines. Inbox management gains automatic conversation closure, tagging permissions, CSV export with field selection, and predictive answers in Resolution Bot, while API v2.2 adds conversation title viewing, assignment, redaction, and segment listing.
Intercom released seven data and customization-driven features to help sales and marketing teams optimize their funnel and personalize customer experiences at scale. The updated Clearbit Reveal app uses Clearbit data for personalized auto messages, routing conversations by company size, and viewing company data in the Inbox. New Revenue Reports, powered by the Salesforce app, show opportunities, pipeline, revenue influenced, and which landing pages and messages generate the most opportunities and conversations. Sales Team Performance Reports provide leaderboards for largest deals closed, response times, and meetings booked. Control groups on the Messages Premium plan enable A/B testing by withholding messages from half the audience to validate performance, while other features include duplicating Custom Bots for experimentation, customizing Operator’s bot identity with a name, logo, and color scheme while keeping it clear it’s a bot, and advanced Messenger security options like blocking GIFs and attachments in emails, available on new Premium plans.
Intercom has released a new book, Intercom on Marketing, aimed at helping startups overcome marketing challenges. The book addresses the difficulty founders face in knowing where to start with marketing, especially without a background in it. It emphasizes that strong brand and go-to-market strategy can differentiate startups in a commoditized software landscape. The book collects lessons from Intercom’s own marketing team, which grew from one to over forty people. It covers 14 chapters including getting first customers, choosing tactics, aligning product and marketing, and launching products, and is available for free in PDF, Kindle, or epub formats with original illustrations.
Content marketing advice often focuses on promotion rather than the substance of the content itself, leaving businesses without a clear strategy. Drawing on his experience leading Intercom’s content team and two decades as a journalist, John Collins argues for evergreen content that addresses timeless themes like filing a good bug report rather than news events. Evergreen content decays slowly and provides a compound return, with analysis showing it grows traffic three times faster than news-focused blogs over a year. He applies a journalist’s 5W and 1H framework—who, what, where, when, why, how—to plan content strategy, emphasizing that specialists should write, topics should help customers solve problems, and content must be relevant to the business. Collins concludes with four key takeaways: stay committed for the long term, make content relevant, impose a high editorial bar, and embrace unexpected benefits like easier hiring.
Drawing from nearly four years of running the Intercom blog, John Collins shares eight lessons on scaling content marketing. It provides a slow but compound return: Tomasz Tunguz’s data shows articles tied to principles remain relevant for years, offering lasting value beyond page views. Opinionated, high-quality articles like ‘Why Cards Are The Future Of The Web’ and ‘Growth Hacking Is Bullshit’ outperform generic content, and writing must be practiced as a muscle with company-wide contribution. Not every article needs to sell, but all content is marketing aimed at growing audience loyalty. Scaling requires an editor backed by a clear content strategy that defines topics, depth, and quality bar; not every company should become a publisher.
Customers increasingly expect personalized marketing, with 66% reporting companies do not understand them despite data showing 80% are more likely to purchase from personalized experiences. However, 85% of marketers believe personalization should be a higher priority. To address this, the post outlines four methods: using first-party data collected directly from customers to enrich messaging; integrating the tech stack for cohesive journeys; reaching people through the right channel at the right moment based on behavior; and building targeted campaigns across multiple channels using a visual campaign builder. Such approaches allow marketers to trigger relevant messages based on custom attributes, actions, and segments without requiring code. The result is more engaging, timely, and measurable marketing that improves customer relationships and business outcomes.
SaaS companies ship continuously, creating endless marketing opportunities, but announcing everything leads to audience fatigue. Intercom experienced over 12X growth in new signups since investing in marketing in 2014, with product announcements as a primary contributor. They shipped over 100 features in a year and needed a framework to prioritize announcements. Their framework uses two axes: value (existing versus new customers) and innovation (catch-up versus new solution), yielding four priority levels: P1 for big announcements attracting new customers, P2 for features valuable to existing customers, P3 for gap-filling features, and P2 also covers features that unblock sales. Each priority maps to specific tactics: changes page entries accessible inside the app, targeted in-app messages based on usage, email for inactive users, video for demonstration, landing pages, and press coverage only for major announcements.
Live chat is a messaging channel that enables real-time conversations between businesses and customers on websites or apps, aligning with the philosophy of sending the right message to the right person at the right time. It serves marketing, sales, and customer support by engaging prospects, driving conversions, and resolving issues instantly. Companies report significant improvements: Living Spaces handles over 8,000 weekly conversations with an average first-response time under a minute, tado° saw a 92% decrease in first-response time, and Qonto reduced median first-response time to two minutes while saving over 1,000 team hours per quarter. Website visitors who chat first are 82% more likely to convert, and bot conversations convert 36% better than those without. Proactive messaging and integrations with tools like Clearbit help businesses anticipate needs and reduce inbound queries, making live chat a standard for personalized, efficient customer experiences that customers increasingly expect.
Customer journeys have become non-linear while identity signals decay, and marketing value is shifting from reach frequency to a prediction economy that rewards anticipating needs. AI agents can recommend or take the next-best action for each customer within human-defined guardrails, with each action measured incrementally against what would have happened without it. Identity resolution must be continuous, connecting known and pseudonymous signals across channels, to provide reliable context for agent decisions. The context required includes customer behavior, business objectives, decision history, and control guardrails, with a single transaction carrying up to 50 metadata parameters. A practical starting point is focusing on one meaningful decision, such as reactivating lapsed customers, and expanding as trust and results build.
Marketing and data engineering teams often interpret the same data terms differently, leading to campaign rework and misaligned expectations. The guide covers 24 commonly misunderstood terms organized around five practical questions about campaign execution, including where data comes from, who a customer record represents, and what makes an audience ready. For example, ‘customer’ might mean a person to marketing but an entity at a specific grain like account or household to engineering, while ‘real time’ can mean soon enough not to feel broken to marketing but sub-second streaming with always-on architecture to engineering. The post provides paired definitions for each term as conversation starters to surface assumptions and agree on meanings before work begins. It also recommends documenting business definitions in Unity Catalog, connecting agreed meanings to datasets or workflows, and using them for AI agents to produce consistent results.
The best engineering reads, once a week.
