Spencer Coon
February 15, 2018
Users expect personal and fast communication with your team no matter what size your team is. There are a lot of options for tools available to help you give your users the immediate information they need and keep them interested in your product. Many companies have chosen to use Drift to communicate with users. With Drift, your team sets up a “Driftbot” to direct message customers and leads on your site. Drift is more for teams that are looking to set up sales calls with leads. You cannot really announce new features or news to visitors to your site to boost engagement. If you’re looking to and have the capacity to direct message users, Drift is an option. That sort of sales-y approach can get annoying for users. It’s missing a lot of features to really engage all users on your site.Beamer is a very simple newsfeed you can install on your website or app that is more central and engaging than just a chat system. You can create updates in your Beamer feed that are visual and engaging by adding screenshots, videos, and GIFs. You can also segment updates so users get a customized feed based on their language, demographics, and behavior on your site to boost engagement.
Beamer discreetly blends into your website’s interface and doesn’t feel like an external chat tool. You can add a “What’s New” tab to your navigation menu with a little red notification indicator. It’s both engaging and visually appealing without taking over your site or needing to be designed around. It matches your interface exactly and doesn’t look branded by Beamer. When the Beamer window opens, it does so discreetly on the side of your site’s content. Users can scroll through your updates easily without leaving the page they were on. Not only does this just overall look nicer than a chat which users have largely learned to ignore, but it also helps decrease the bounce rate on your site by engaging users in useful content and updates.
As mentioned before, users now ignore certain notifications. Push notifications, email updates, and even chatbots are now just something else to forget about or not open at all. You’re lucky to get a 15-20% open rate on an update email to your users about updates. It’s can be difficult keep people continually engaged with your product if this is how you’re communicating new updates to them. Updates in Beamer get ten times more engagement. It’s difficult to get users excited and using new features or exploring changes with a basic chat message. When was the last time you read through a text notification? Beamer updates are much visual than just text notifications. You can add screenshots, videos, and GIFs to engage users and visually explain your updates.
Tools like Drift make your team look bigger and more responsive, but it still requires you’re team is able to respond. You open the door to chat messages 24/7. If you’re not able to respond to them, users can get frustrated and think your service is not great. You will need to dedicate people on your team for this. With Beamer, there is no live chat element so you can set updates live and leave them alone. Beamer allows users to leave comments and reactions like on Facebook that your team can respond on your their own time when they can. Users still feel there is a two-way communication but it doesn’t take up your entire day!
There are certain things that are better to announce and leave in a findable place. Beamer acts as a rolling, permanent changelog of all your new features, updates, and announcements that users can look back on anytime. Instead of receiving a push notification or an email about a new feature, users will be able to see new and past updates in one central place where they can actually check them out. This is perfect for new users as well so they can see your most recent updates and see how hard your team is working to improve your product. Users are more loyal to products that respond to feedback and continually get better.
Installing Beamer is incredibly simple. There are no coding skills or tech team required to implement Beamer on your site or app. There are a few ways you can install Beamer. You can copy and paste a script into your wordpress site directly if you have a little tech ability. If not, there is a Beamer Wordpress plugin that makes installation even easier with a simple download.
Lastly, Beamer is a much cheaper alternative to Drift. For full functionality of Drift, you’re paying $500 a month. Beamer Pro is just $49 a month for creating all types of updates, segmenting, and access to powerful analytics Beamer collects on your users behavior on your site. It’s a complete user engagement package for much less.
If you’re interested in reaching users in the most effective way, boosting user engagement, and collecting insightful data, try Beamer on your site or in your app with a a simple install.
Spencer Coon
Co-founder
Spencer is an entrepreneur, analyst, climber, skier and adventurer based in Boulder, CO.
This article is about Customer Engagement + customer feedback + Product Management + User Engagement + User Feedback
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