Building and maintaining a relationship with your customers helps a long way in any business to earn their trust.
Emails are still one of the best ways to build this relationship and trust. However, that generally happens at the lower end of the funnel.
For someone on the top end of the funnel, who are mostly website visitors, it is quite hard to start a conversation with and communicate the things you want to unless they initiate the conversation via live chat or a contact form.
Let's be honest, a minute percentage of visitors do that and initiate a conversation while studies and stats show more than 80% of the visitors turn away and never come back.
What if there is a way to grab the attention of the visitors straight away and communicate with them the most important updates, things you are working on, new projects or whatever that might interest them.
That's exactly what Beamer aims to achieve. Will it help do that? Well, let us find out.
Sign up and initial set-up
The sign-up process is fairly straight forward. Once you set-up the account, you need to enter the details of the website you want to use Beamer on.
The website types listed include,
- Agency/Consulting
- Blog
- SaaS
- e-Commerce
- e-Learning
- Other
Building your post
Once the sign up is done, it is time to write your first update post you want to display on your website.
The post editor is clean and super easy to use. You can set up an expiration date on the post right before starting to write it.
It is possible to link out to a separate URL and give a short heading for the page that is linked to it.
Additionally, the post can be pinned to the top of the feed, enable reactions and comments, enable social media sharing, send a push notification about the post, etc.
Additionally, the pro plan allows for advanced segmentation, post scheduling, CSS customizations, custom domain, etc.
Once you have completed editing the post, you can save as a draft and preview to have an idea of how it will look on your website.
Posts can be categorized under,
- New
- Improvement
- Fix
- Coming soon
- Announcement
Additionally, you can also have custom categories based on your product or service that fits the use case.
Installing on your website
The installation process is as simple as installing the code on the page you want to display the updates on your website.
In the case of WordPress, it is even simpler as there is an official WordPress plugin. The plugin is available in the WordPress plugin repository.
Once installed and activated, head over to Beamer settings and just paste the product ID which you can get from the top left of your Beamer dashboard.
You cal also choose the segment that this update is to be displayed for, position and size of the post. Once activated, you should be able to see the widget on your website.
If you have a live chat widget on your website, it is important to place the Beamer widget on the other end or to position it such that the two widgets don't collide.
There are a lot more customization and segmentation options available from icons, colors, push notifications, pages or posts to show or not to show, etc.
In short, you can style and display the updates and announcements in whatever way you wish for as Beamer allows for complete customization.
The filtering options are quite extensive as well to control when and where to show the updates and announcements.
Pricing
There are a free plan and three paid plans ranging from $49 per month to $249 per month based on the required monthly unique views and some features.
The free plan covers up to 1,000 monthly unique users, but comes with the Beamer branding and misses out on most of the customization and segmenting features.
The pro plan that costs $99 a month provides the best value for money as it comes with features like user feedback, user segmentation, push notifications, custom domain, up to 10,000 monthly unique users, advanced analytics, post scheduling, filter by URL, custom CSS, etc.
The enterprise plan is needed if you require the inserting of custom JavaScripts, advanced level segmentation, single-user notifications, etc.
Integrations
Beamer integrates natively only with Intercom and for the rest of the tools, it is via Zapier.
There are many goos predefined zaps that you can easily set up to share new Beamer posts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
It is also possible to add new Beamer posts to the queue in Buffer to automate the posting across all social media channels.
You can also connect to thousands of other apps in Zapier easily. There are four types of triggers and one action available.
Zaps can be triggered in the case of,
- New feedback
- New post
- New reaction
- New NPS response
The action corresponding to all the four triggers is a new post.
Although Zapier integration covers many use cases, it would be nice to have more native integrations available to skip the use of zaps.
Support
Live chat support is available in the dashboard of the application even for the users of the free plan. The response rates were super quick and I was able to get clear and precise answers for my queries.
Additionally, there is an excellent help center with a lot of support documentation covering all the features. Documentation is extensive for developers and API implementation as well which is quite impressive.
Alternatives
Announcefly is a similar product that is custom-built for SaaS products to display their product roadmaps and changelogs.
One key advantage over Beamer is the native integration with CRM's like Salesforce, Freshsales, and Pipedrive.
Try Announcefly free for 14 days
Headway is designed for a simple display of changelogs for your SaaS app.
It is much cheaper at only $29 a month and works well if all you need is a simple way to show your product's changelog to your customers. Integrates with Twitter and Slack.
Conclusion
So, will Beamer help me in my business?
Well, if you want your user and website visitors updated all the time and get them more engaged, there isn't a better application than Beamer.
It is super simple to set up and install on any website and share your updates effectively.
The only downside would be the need to use Zapier automated publishing across social media and other third-party apps, but I am sure they will release more native integrations.
Aside from that minor complaint, it is a fantastic tool to try out.