Keep your visitors engaged with an on-site newsfeed that you can use to promote your new products, blog posts, updates, launches, and announcements! It can be overwhelming for your audience to stay on top of everything that’s new on your site so a newsfeed is the perfect way to bridge that gap and keep your audience up-to-date with what’s new and noteworthy in your neck of the woods.
Want to learn more? In this Beamer review, we’ll be focusing on one of the best on-site newsfeed tools in the market so you can keep your visitors updated in a way that can be more effective than email newsletters.
What Beamer Does
Beamer is a tool that gives website owners the ability to add a newsfeed to their site without having to hard-code it into their site’s backend. Many website owners use these newsfeeds to maintain a direct point of contact with their audience so their audience is always aware of news, launches, offers, and updates to the site. It’s advantageous because it’s convenient, easy to access, and super quick for website visitors to check while browsing around the site.
What’s so great about Beamer is how easy it is to install on a website. To create this sort of function without the Beamer app, you’d have to hire a developer to hard-code it into your site which would likely cost a lot of money and take up a fair amount of time getting it right. Not to mention, you’d regularly have to update it to keep it running smoothly. With Beamer, however, it’s just a simple app that you can install onto your site—no complicated coding required—so you definitely don’t have to hire a developer. Plus, all of the content on your newsfeed stays off your site which makes it faster to load and means that it doesn’t bog down your site.
Another reason why Beamer is a great tool is that it makes adding new posts to your newsfeed a breeze, so you can update it as frequently as you like. You also have the option to add text, images, videos, GIFs, links, and calls-to-action within each post so you can create the exact kind of updates you want, however you want.
The sky’s the limit with Beamer posts—you’re in control of customizing every detail—and it’s a great fit for online businesses, blogs, newsfeed for ecommerce stores, or virtually any kind of website so if you have an online space you want to add a newsfeed to, Beamer is likely going to be the perfect fit for you!
Who Beamer is For
Beamer is an ideal tool for website owners to use when they want to keep their visitors updated and engaged with what’s new and noteworthy on their platform. It’s a great way to develop brand loyalty and to keep visitors coming back to your site frequently to check what’s new—quickly and easily!
Since other methods of communication with your audience have become an oversaturated playing field rife with competitors—such as email marketing—it can be tough to get your audience’s undivided attention in the way that you used to. Beamer helps to give you that power back with their on-site newsfeed that you have 100% control over so you’re not constantly trying to compete for attention. This helps to keep communication with your audience open and accessible which helps foster a better customer relationship environment overall.
So, if building and maintaining strong relationships with your customers is important, then you might want to try out Beamer!
Why Use Beamer
Most importantly, Beamer is an effective and accessible communication tool that provides similar outcomes to email marketing and popup marketing, however, the approach is entirely different.
The differences between Beamer and email and popup marketing are:
- Beamer is on-site only, so you don’t have to compete against other marketing messages in your audience’s inboxes.
- Beamer is accessible on all of your webpages so—unlike most popups, which are generally set to perform on a single webpage—your website visitors can view your content no matter where they are on your site.
- It’s less invasive so your audience is less likely to be annoyed by your posts.
- You have the option to send your Beamer posts as push notifications, which, generally, are more likely to receive much more engagement than email campaigns or popups do.
- You can reach more of your audience through Beamer since every visitor on your site gets alerted of a new Beamer notification, rather than just the subscribers who are signed up to your email list.
- Old campaigns stay relevant for much longer because visitors can scroll down the newsfeed to see your previous posts so the lifespan of your posts can last much longer than email marketing or even social media marketing.
- Visitors are more likely to interact with Beamer notifications because they can simply click on a notification directly rather than clicking through an email to then have to click another call-to-action to eventually end up at the desired destination.
- It’s simple to install on your site and update—Beamer posts are much simpler to create than email newsletters and you can update them more frequently than you would popups.
So while yes, you can achieve similar results on your website by using email marketing or popup marketing strategies, you can see from the list above that Beamer can help you achieve your desired results more quickly and simply.
Overall, Beamer is an important tool for all website and ecommerce store owners to use because:
- Beamer helps to increase visitor engagement
- Beamer can improve click-through rates
- Beamer can inspire more sales
- Beamer can reduce bounce rates
- Beamer helps make announcements for new features
- Beamer can help to reduce abandoned shopping cart rates
- Beamer helps make content more accessible
- Beamer helps you get your marketing messages in front of more of your audience
One of the aspects of using Beamer that’s important to identify is the knock-on effect that adding such a simple, yet effective tool can have. Of course, the above list details the advantages of using Beamer that most website owners can understand—who doesn’t want visitors to be more engaged with their site or see click-through-rates improve or sales increase or bounce rates reduce?—but there’s actually much more to Beamer than just these advantages at the surface level.
By quickly being able to keep visitors interested in your website with a Beamer notification, you help to increase the amount of time that visitors are on your site which in turn, signals to search engines like Google that your website is interesting which makes them more likely to list your website higher in relevant search results.
So, just by adding a simple tool like Beamer to your website, you can create a domino effect that has the potential to improve your site’s SEO, your search engine ranking positions, and your potential to earn more organic traffic which in the long run, is how you can successfully grow your business.
Since you can also update your Beamer newsfeed more easily and frequently, it also gives visitors a reason to return to your website to see what’s new which also can have a positive impact on your SEO and your site traffic overall. It can also help keep your website at visitors’ top-of-mind which keeps your website relevant and memorable.
Beamer’s Features & Services
Beamer has been consciously created for website owners and although it may just seem like a simple tool, it actually offers some specific features which make it unique plus features that we haven’t seen other tools in this space be able to execute as successfully.
Check out this list of Beamer’s powerful features.
CUSTOMIZE YOUR NEWSFEED
To start with, Beamer’s customizable newsfeed is the star of the show. Posts on Beamer are easy to create and edit, you can add text, images, videos, GIFs, links, and calls-to-action or any combination of those options to each post and you can also modify the style and colorway of the Beamer newsfeed on your site so that it blends in seamlessly with your own branding.
These customization tools are important because it makes Beamer seem like a native aspect of your site, not just an app you installed that sticks out like a sore thumb, so it gives an even more seamless and authentic experience for your visitors. Plus, they offer customizable CSS so you can add even more custom elements to your Beamer newsfeed.
GET DIRECT FEEDBACK & REACTIONS FROM VISITORS
One of Beamer’s most fun features is that you have the option to turn on commenting and reaction privileges for your visitors so they can further engage with your newsfeed posts. This means that they’ll be able to comment their feedback to you directly or click on one of the emoji reactions to give you a quick indication of what they think of the post.
This feedback will help you understand what your audience wants more or less of, and it also helps to keep visitors active, engaged, and present on your site. Plus, you can now even send user feedback to a Slack channel or your Zendesk helpdesk!
CREATE & SCHEDULE POSTS IN ADVANCE
We love that you can create posts in advance for your Beamer newsfeed and either save them as a draft to publish later or schedule them to go out automatically, whenever you want. This helps you stay on top of your promotion strategies and also can help you post content more consistently.
INSTALL BEAMER ON VIRTUALLY ANY WEBSITE OR STORE
Installing Beamer is easy and you can install or embed it onto your ecommerce store, website, blog or app using their embed code, embeddable widget, WordPress plugin, Squarespace integration, Zapier connection or API. Check out their detailed installation guide here—which also includes their developer and API docs—to get Beamer installed on your site.
ACTIVATE PUSH NOTIFICATIONS
This is one of our favorite features that Beamer offers and one that we struggle to find executed successfully via other similar services.
Opting-in to push notifications is a great way to notify your audience of your updates when they aren’t already on your site and it reminds users to check back with your site regularly, which can keep a constant flow of traffic directed to your site.
Users have to opt-in to your push notifications so they only get sent to your list of subscribers, however, these are often your most dedicated visitors or customers which means that they’re high-value, “warm” leads which are often very interested in your brand and want to stay up to date with what’s new.
By opting-in to your push notifications, your subscribers will be notified of any posts that you choose to send out a push notification for—even when they’re not on your site. The push notification will be sent through their browser (note: Beamer’s push notifications only work on Chrome and FireFox browsers, not Safari) and users can click directly on the notification to go straight through to your site or whatever link you were promoting in the post. They generally have a much higher open rate than other marketing strategies like email marketing campaigns, so they’re a very valuable feature to make use of.
Best of all, push notifications are super easy to create in Beamer. It’s a simple toggle you can turn on or off for each individual post, so you don’t have to send out push notifications for every post if you don’t want to. As soon as you publish a post with the push notification toggle turned to “on,” a push notification will be automatically created from the post you’re publishing—including the title, image, and text preview so you don’t have to do any extra work to prepare the notification. Users who have opted-in to your push notification will then receive them through their browsers and be able to click through to your site.
Learn more about Beamer’s push notifications feature and the best practices on how to send push notifications to your users in their blog article.
ADVANCED SEGMENTATION
Beamer also offers advanced segmentation features so you can create segments directly from your Beamer dashboard. To get started, all you have to do is send user data to Beamer and then you can use filters like user-role, plan, or product module used in conjunction with “and/or” logic to create even more highly-targeted segments. This feature is ideal for website owners who want to let their user-data do the heavy lifting to help them engage and convert more of their traffic.
SINGLE USER NOTIFICATIONS
Create single user notifications to send to individual users through your Beamer app or website! This is an impressive way to increase user engagement and create a more personal and customized feel for your audience. This is another feature we don’t often see executed successfully—or at all—by other similar services on the market so if you’re looking for a way to really stand out from the crowd and provide that personal touch, you’ll want to check out this feature.
MULTIPLE LANGUAGE OPTIONS
Communicate with your audience in the language that suits them best with Beamer’s option to translate and publish your newsfeed posts into other languages. This could go a long way in helping drive up customer satisfaction and engagement, plus it works well for businesses who serve a global customer base and need to be able to update their audience in their own languages.
USER SEGMENTATION
Not all of your visitors and customers are the same—so don’t treat them that way. With Beamer’s user segmentation feature, you can target specific groups of users and send them updates and announcements that are better suited to them based off of their behavior, location, and demographics. This gives you the power to approach your audience in a way that’s going to appeal most to them which gives your posts the best chance at success.
With this feature, for example, you could show new visitors specific content from your newsfeed such as an introduction post or video to your brand or a walk-through of your site. This way, new users start off with the content from your newsfeed that’s most applicable to them which will be more likely to keep them engaged and interested with your sie from the get-go.
Beamer’s Pros & Cons
PROS
- Effective & Engaging: More effective & engaging than email or popups.
- Customizable Design: Change the colors of Beamer’s pop-out widget to your own brand colors.
- Easy Installation: Easily install Beamer onto your store, website or blog.
- For Any Brand: Use Beamer for ecommerce stores, blogs, SaaS & websites.
- Easier Notification Creation: Notifications are easier to create than email marketing campaigns. No need to manage lists, drafts, and campaigns.
- Content Options: Add text, images, videos, GIFs, links, and calls-to-action in every post.
- Expansive Audience Reach: Reach visitors no matter which page they enter onto your website on.
- Push Notifications: Subtle and discreet push notification option that blends in well with your site, and push notifications that can be delivered even when users aren’t active or logged in to your site.
- Advanced Analytics: Segment updates to target visitors more accurately, get the view and click analytics, plus audience feedback and reactions analytics.
CONS
- No Push Notifications on Safari: Push notifications only work on Chrome and FireFox browsers, not Safari.
- Upgrade Necessary to Get All Features: Not all of Beamer’s features are available at each pricing plan level so you may have to upgrade pricing plans to get access to all the features that you want. Check out Beamer’s Pricing Plans to learn more about what is included in each plan.
Beamer’s Pricing
Beamer offers a 14-day free trial for all pricing plans so you can use their service and install it onto your site for free before you decide whether it’s the right tool for your brand or not. For a more long-term option, check out Beamer’s Pricing Plans to see which features are included in each one.
Here’s a quick glimpse at what you can expect from Beamer in terms of pricing:
- Free Plan: $0/month
- Startup Plan: $49/month
- Pro Plan: $99/month
- Enterprise Plan: $249/month
Conclusion
This Beamer review has hopefully shed light on why Beamer is an important addition to any ecommerce store or website and how their features can help you increase visitor engagement and drive more traffic to your site. Ready to get started? Head over to Beamer and sign up to their 14-day free trial and install their app on your site.
