How Beamer helped GetResponse double their product activation

GetResponse is an all-in-one marketing tool, covering different marketing needs from building a website to automating email campaigns and running complex automations. The platform covers the whole marketing journey from building a landing page, to nurturing leads, selling online and engaging them.As one of the key Product Marketing Managers at GetResponse, Tom Barragry is responsible for the product launch, new feature adoption, product activation and ways to improve them. GetResponse has been using Beamer for about a year now to announce product updates and send notifications to users and Tom shared their experience, use cases and results.

This is how Beamer helped GetResponse double their product activation

What they used before

As one of the main products run by GetResponse is an email marketing tool, indeed they were using emails to showcase their newest updates. This is something they still do, as it’s a widespread practice among SaaS companies.However, they quickly realized that their customers also needed a way to keep up to date with the ongoing developments inside their tool. Why would customers have to go to their inbox to find out what’s new with GetResponse, when they can have the updates in real time through Beamer?

Main use cases: Notification Center and Changelog

GetResponse is a transactional platform, where users upload content, contacts and publish landing pages. However, they didn’t have a way to easily communicate customers important operational notifications.That was the first solution Beamer brought to GetResponse. Thanks to the notifications sent through Beamer via API, their users started getting in real time communications about billing, customer success or support tickets and events that confirmed their actions in the platform were successful. Now, every customer could check right away that their landing pages were published, their emails were being sent or an import was completed.

However, GetResponse’s Product Marketing team immediately saw the benefits of having their changelog in-app and push product updates in context within their product.

“Beamer has always been the frontline to get our customers opinion and immediate reaction to a product update”

They started announcing every product update, from the smallest changes to the big new features launches. At the same time, they did several experiments for over a year: from sending notifications to everyone, to using heavy segmentation to target just the right group of users. Curious about the results?...

Key results

As previously mentioned, GetResponse Product Marketing team understood the value of testing and experimenting to get to the optimum results. Although they support lots of languages, they identified 7 key markets where they implemented Beamer and these were the best practices and results they got.

Product activation

According to Tom, the main metric they were trying to improve was product activation, or having their users connecting and using their platform more often. To measure that, they have a “publish goal”, where they check how many users connected in the following 48 hours after a Beamer announcement is made.

On average they see a 2x increase in product activation every time they announce a product update via Beamer.

“Every time we push an update we pretty much see a minimum of 2 times of product adoption than we were seeing before”

Beamer data as a source of retargeting

Another interesting best practice pointed out by Tom was the use of Beamer data as a feedback to retarget a certain group of users.Once a release was sent, they could check the level of engagement and segments where that specific feature had higher traction. Let’s say an announcement was very well received by free trial users: so, that was an opportunity to run a campaign or retarget that specific group of users to increase engagement and product usage even more!This data and segments coming from Beamer, would eventually be used by the Demand Generation or Performance Marketing teams to actually improve their campaigns, make them more personalized and show better results in the bottom line.

Increased engagement in mature customers

Even though the initial announcement of new features has an instant effect, Tom highlighted the importance of having one central place for users to check out all the product improvements.First of all, customers easily understand where to look for product updates and announcements. But most importantly, at a certain maturity level they go back to Beamer and engage with comments and reactions (at an average rate of 10 to 15% within paid customers). This is another source of valuable feedback!

There’s probably more value in showing your customers how your product has evolved over time, as it’s a way to reinforce their buying decision and make them notice they have chosen the right tool.

“It’s almost like continuing activating our customers”

Equal adoption and acceptance across markets

As mentioned before, GetResponse selected 7 key markets where Beamer was implemented.As opposed to using browser data as a way to localize posts, they do it through a data attribute, which also allows them to measure each individual market metrics.The key result after comparing each market performance is that Beamer has an equal acceptance across all of them.

NPS Implementation with Enterprise clients

GetResponse also uses Beamer NPS to measure the loyalty level of their Enterprise customers and gather quarterly feedback.After sending NPS surveys for 4 quarters now, Tom highlights 2 key findings and best practices:

• NPS surveys “dehumanizes” the process of giving negative feedback, so customers tend to be more honest than if their account managers come into a quarterly meeting. This additional transparency, helps account managers early detect areas of improvement and eventually avoid churn.  
• They use a Zapier integration to immediately resend each NPS reply to the responsible account manager into a Slack channel. Thus, account managers have instant access to their clients’ feedback and can reply right away. Customers feel their voice is heard and actions are being taken.

“One of the most powerful features is being able to send the data from Beamer to Slack immediately to our account managers when something is wrong”

Boosted Announcements for specific purposes

Beamer’s boosted Announcements allows you to send in-app notifications in the form of pop-ups, top bar, snippets and tooltips to grab your users' attention even more and increase engagement.However, obtaining additional attention was not the only use GetResponse found. They started to use each widget for a specific purpose, which was also immediately understood by customers. For example, they would use snippets to send surveys to support the product development or UX teams or top bar for big updates. In addition, pop-ups showed a strong performance in terms of engagement: anything that pops-up make people click!

“Boosted Announcements changed the game when it was rolled out . Now I couldn’t imagine the announcements without the pop-ups”

Why Beamer: Custom Support as the main success driver

When asked about the favorite things about Beamer, Tom doesn’t hesitate to reply: “Customer Support”.He stresses not only the quality level of service of Beamer’s Support team, but also the deep understanding of the product and the way they listen to their specific use cases and can find the right solution.

“When we invest in a SaaS tool we’re looking for a quality product, but also we’re looking for a listening ear as well. Somebody who can listen and help us hack it.”

Tom feels he has been actually working alongside our Support Team “stars”, Anna and Laura! Even if he thought “We don’t have a tool for that”, he could come back to them and they would find the way to push Beamer to its limits to come up with an answer!

He also points out that Beamer is very easy-to-use and most importantly, is adding the right features to support Product Marketers needs. What started as a changelog, now also supports NPS and roadmaps. It’s great to have everything in the same tool instead of spending lots of money developing in-house solutions!

“In terms of the product it’s simple, yet powerful and also going in the right direction”

Even though Tom logs into Beamer on a daily basis, he doesn’t feel he has to constantly monitor each post's performance. He and his team had already experienced the results:  “At the beginning, when we rolled out Beamer we had to test it but now we trust on it”. Beamer is helping more and more Product Marketers increase user engagement, drive product activation, gather feedback and plan the next steps for a successful product strategy. If you’re looking for a tool to cover all feedback loop needs, sign up for Beamer today.