How a Leading SaaS Increased User Engagement with Beamer

Teamleader is a SaaS platform that unifies CRM, project planning and invoicing in a simple and intelligent tool - helping companies focus on growing their core business instead of operational details. One key to Teamleader’s strong growth is continually adding new features and improvements to their platform - but they haven’t always had a great way to communicate these updates to their users. That’s where Beamer comes in.

Beamer is a changelog and notification center plugin that lets companies send announcements to users and site visitors for important news, latest products, special offers and more. Teamleader found that Beamer was just the tool they had been looking for to improve their engagement with users.

What were they using before?

Teamleader had previously been using a combination of email newsletters, blogs and in app messaging to keep users updated. But that wasn’t enough. They were in search of more ways to increase user engagement, especially for smaller changes that aren’t easily noticed by users. Benny Waelput, Teamleader’s product marketing manager, also wanted a tool that could handle multiple languages and that would allow different members of his team to collaborate on the same announcement.

Main use cases.

When Benny started testing Beamer he immediately saw its potential to help his team with two main problems: how to announce 1) new features and 2) bug fixes in a non-intrusive and engaging way.

Beamer allowed his team to create posts announcing new features with visual elements like images and explainer videos. This proved much more efficient than email at educating users on how to start using those new features. Users were able to get announcements in context while they are logged in to the app and immediately start testing product updates. Because of this Benny said "Beamer has quickly become a key element in our go-to-market strategy for new features releases." It’s especially important for SaaS companies to show users they are continuously updating their product - if they don’t users will start worrying that the product isn’t maintaining its cutting edge and will start looking for alternatives.

"Beamer has quickly become a key element in our go-to-market strategy for new features releases."

Bug fixes were also a perfect use case for Beamer. No tech company is perfect - even Google’s most popular products have bugs that need fixing. Of course Teamleader is no different and they pride themselves on fixing any user reported issues as quickly as possible. The problem was how to communicate to users that bugs were fixed. Sending an email for each minor bug fix seemed a bit too intrusive and creating blog post wasn’t going to get the engagement they needed. Beamer allows Benny’s team to show users their issues have been resolved without overstuffing their inbox and lets them send messages about bug fixes only to logged on users who were actually affected by that issue.

Another high impact use case for Teamleader was the ability to send targeted messages using segmentation. Teamleader has several different modules including online CRM, project management and invoicing. Segmentation allows Benny to show each user only the most relevant updates for them. So any updates to the CRM are shown only to users who actually use the CRM feature on Teamleader’s platform. By making sure messages are as relevant as possible for the individual user engagement is much higher.

One thing that surprised Benny was how effective Beamer was at helping upsell users to more premium plans. Whenever Teamleader adds a new feature or improvement to an existing plan or creates a new plan they use segmentation to send Beamer announcements to users who could potentially benefit from the new features. These announcements can be targeted based on users' current plans to make sure they are relevant and to show those users specifically how the new features on the upgraded plan would help them. Benny told us that “Beamer has helped increase our upsell numbers 20% since implementation”.

“Beamer has helped increase our upsell numbers 20% since implementation”.

The ability to send announcements in multiple languages is key for Teamleader. Benny told us, “our platform is available in seven different languages and we need to keep all our users in the know.” Benny was able to invite multiple teammates to their account to help easily get each announcement fully translated into all their languages.

Results from Beamer.

Teamleader uses Beamer analytics to measure the results and get user feedback. For each post Benny’s team can see total views and clicks and any specific feedback left by users. They can also see the results across all Beamer posts and filter by date, location, browser, operating system to get insights on where their announcements are having the most impact. Benny told us that “Beamer announcements get over 10% click through rate, significantly higher than our other communication channels”.

“Beamer announcements get over 10% click through rate, significantly higher than our other communication channels”.

Favorite things about Beamer.

We asked Benny if he could talk about why he decided to trust Beamer as an important part of Teamleader’s communication strategy and he mentioned a few additional points.

Benny told us that, “Beamer is extremely easy to implement. It took us less than two weeks from initial trial signup to getting Beamer installed and sending our first announcements.” He also mentioned that Beamer’s interface is extremely easy to use, even for non-technical users, which was a huge plus to help them get started.

He also mentioned customer support as one of his favorite things about Beamer. Teamleader was one of Beamer’s first clients and as such gave us tons of great feedback in the early days to help us improve. Benny was impressed with how quickly we were able to respond to feedback and incorporate in our product. Benny told us, “At first Beamer was really responsive to feedback we had for improvements. Now they are coming up with new great features we wouldn’t have even thought of.”

Teamleader also highly values that Beamer’s changelog is a central repository for all changes and improvements. Their users now know exactly where to look when they want to find out all the latest important updates and news to make sure they are getting the most out of the platform.

Final impressions.

Benny is convinced that “Beamer is the perfect tool for SaaS companies to engage users and reduce churn.” As a SaaS company you must be continuously improving to stay competitive and if you don’t effectively communicate these improvements to your users all your hard work will go unnoticed and users will start churning.

“Beamer is the perfect tool for SaaS companies to engage users and reduce churn.”

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