What Is In-Product Messaging and Why Should I Be Using It?
In-Product Messaging gives companies the chance to deliver marketing or support messages to their customers when it matters most.
In-product messaging (IPM) lets companies deliver timely, personalized communications directly within apps and websites. In this blog post, we explore what in-product messaging is, why it matters for modern consumer product marketing, and how to build an effective IPM strategy that balances user experience, business goals and long-term ROI.
In brief:
- In-product messaging (IPM) allows brands to communicate directly with users inside apps and websites for greater impact.
- Traditional marketing channels are less effective once users are engaged with your product. IPM fills this gap by delivering timely, personalized content.
- IPM enhances user experience by offering real-time guidance, support, and relevant prompts based on user activity.
- Modern consumers expect instant, personalized responses within apps, making IPM an essential part of a successful consumer product messaging strategy.
Adding in-product messaging (IPM), or consumer product messaging, to your marketing plan reaches consumers in a memorable way.
Traditional marketing channels — such as print, radio, or TV ads, or email and social media marketing — are effective for brand and product awareness. But these channels aren’t much help once a customer is already in your product or app.
Today’s customers expect personalized messaging and instant responses to in-app messages. This is where in-product messaging comes into play.
What Is In-Product Messaging?
In-product messaging delivers messages directly to end users while they’re actively using specific products — such as apps, websites, portals or software — on different mediums, like smartphones, tablets or personal computers.
These messages can include marketing prompts, guide users through onboarding, and offer support to improve customer experience.
For example:
- You’re watching a movie or listening to music using an online streaming service. You see a message recommending additional content based on your specific interests or a banner announcing a new release.
- You’re filling out your taxes online, and an in-product message prompt helps you through a complicated section, or a pop-up box offers a chatbot for additional support.
In both instances, IPM enhances the user experience in real time by:
- Guiding users through complex processes
- Encouraging specific upsell actions, such as subscribing to a service or upgrading a subscription
- Immediately tending to their needs
- Driving engagement and adoption
- Collecting customer feedback
- Increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty
Real-time engagement allows the customer to get answers to their specific questions right away without leaving your website. This builds trust and transparency between you and your customers with personalized, nondisruptive messaging when the customer is most likely to be highly engaged.
Why You Should Care About In-Product Messaging
In recent years, consumer product messaging rapidly became one of the most effective tools for companies looking to deliver highly targeted messages to their customers. According to Intercom, in-product messages are 1.5 times more likely to be opened as emails and 6.7 times more likely to receive a response. A Reckless Agency study found that in-app messaging had a 75 percent open rate.
As Centric Consulting’s Columbus Salesforce Lead Betsy Stokes explains, “In-product messaging connects with potential customers right where they already are — in the tools and apps they use every day. People are busier than ever and constantly flooded with information, so this approach helps your message stand out by reaching them when it’s most relevant and useful. Plus, because it’s easy to track and fine-tune, in-product messaging has become a go-to part of today’s marketing tech stack.”
Organizations are always looking for ways to positively impact their engagement metrics and enrich the user experience for customers. You don’t have to be an app or software company to benefit from IPM. For example, any company with a website or customer portal can significantly improve its engagement and overall customer satisfaction by using IPM.
Don’t get me wrong, email marketing is still an essential part of any marketing strategy. However, it can be difficult to get your emails to stand out in a crowded channel.
In fact, many consumers are suffering from information overload due to traditional marketing. A Euromonitor 2025 study reveals that 38 percent of smartphone owners have turned off notifications, highlighting a growing sense of digital fatigue. In-product messaging can be a more mindful way to connect with customers.
With so much competition for attention, it makes sense why companies are turning to IPM solutions as another channel to help support other marketing and customer support initiatives. Think about it: When a customer logs into your product, service, or website, the only messaging they will see will be yours and yours alone.
Putting IPM Into Practice in Consumer Product Messaging
Let’s imagine you’re an application company that offers monthly and annual subscriptions. The primary goals of your marketing initiative are to convert users to longer subscriptions and improve customer retention.
Predictive models and data-driven insights can further strengthen your efforts. For example, Centric Consulting helped a digital marketing agency use predictive analytics to improve customer retention.
Emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (AI) are also reshaping how marketers personalize and deliver in-product messages to enhance customer engagement.
Using IPM allows you to target those customers while they’re active on your application. Meaning, you could potentially entice them to migrate from a monthly subscription to an annual subscription to meet your goal.
Or maybe you want a better way to remind customers that their plan is about to expire. You can personalize in-app pop-up messages that offer renewal and upgrade options when the customer’s account is close to expiring. This hopefully reduces the number of customers lost to expired plans.
A custom IPM solution can easily support either scenario and potentially drive higher conversion or retention rates than email campaigns.
IPM is the perfect complementary tool to improve your marketing and customer support strategy. If you’re having issues getting the right message in front of customers at the right time, then IPM might be the solution.
7 Steps to Build an Effective In-Product Marketing Messaging Framework
When you’re ready to explore how IPM can work for your business, you need to develop a framework to build your in-product messaging strategy.
- Determine your business goals. What are you hoping to do and why are you doing it? Do you want to increase retention, upsell subscription levels or products, or improve customer satisfaction?
- Think about the applications already available to your customers and how they are used.
- Map the customer journey and potential touchpoints.
- Determine the metrics you want to track and how you’ll track them.
- Segment and personalize your messaging to ensure it’s timely, concise and value-driven.
- Determine what types of tools and platforms you will use to deliver your in-product messaging. Out-of-the-box applications can be quicker to implement and more budget-friendly than custom applications but could also be limited in their scalability.
- Test, measure and optimize. Use A/B testing to experiment with elements like message content, design or placement. Track click-through rates, conversions, and other metrics to determine which messages drive the most engagement or where customers are most likely to drop off, and adjust your in-product messages accordingly.
To learn more about how automation supports consistent, data-driven messaging, see Centric’s overview of marketing automation.
Is In-Product Messaging Right for Me?
IPM is a powerful tool that requires significant buy-in across the company. It can take a considerable amount of time before you see a positive return on investment (ROI), especially if you’re looking for a custom solution.
It typically makes sense for companies with multiple products or a large customer base to invest in IPM. That way, you can spread the cost across multiple teams, products, business units and strategies.
It may not make as much sense for a small startup app or software company. However, that doesn’t mean smaller companies won’t benefit from integrating IPM into their marketing or customer support strategies.
Implementing, designing, maintaining, optimizing, and managing everything involved with IPM can be a significant cost and time investment, so it’s essential to evaluate whether it makes sense for your business to invest in IPM. Ask: What’s driving our desire to use IPM? Is this a functionality that would be nice to have or is it business critical?
If you do decide an IPM solution makes sense for your company, carefully vet possible solutions, whether they’re custom or out-of-the-box.
The Toughest In-Product Messaging Challenges
It’s easy to understand how in-product messages can increase customer satisfaction and engagement. But it can be difficult to attribute ROI — and therefore problematic to justify the investment. Beyond that, implementation itself can present challenges that need to be addressed before your consumer product messaging framework can reach its full potential.
Common challenges include:
- Integration and Setup: Implementing IPM tools across multiple systems and applications can be complex, often requiring coordination between information technology (IT), marketing, and product teams.
- Data Cleanup: Successful IPM relies on high-quality, up-to-date customer data to effectively personalize messages.
- AI Accuracy: Chatbots are a great tool for enhancing customer support, but they can also deliver inaccurate information or misunderstand customer inquiries if not properly programmed.
- Message Fatigue: Too many pop-ups or notifications can frustrate and annoy users, reducing the effectiveness of future communications.
By addressing these challenges early in the development stages, you can better position your IPM strategy for success.
Create More Effective Product Messaging With IPM
Targeting users with the right message at the right time is now essential for companies looking to deliver a more robust user experience.
IPM gives companies the opportunity to deliver messages to their customers when it matters most, regardless of whether that message is marketing or support-related.
Delivering relevant and helpful in-product messages while consumers use your product, service, or web portal or visit your website can help drive your company closer to achieving your overall marketing and customer support goals.
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