Why & How to Best Use In-App Notifications for SaaS Products | With Expert Spencer Coon

Users getting up to 3 times more user engagement, decrease in churn, higher lead conversions. Can you share specific examples or, you know, frameworks of why and how to best use those in-app notifications for maybe some of our SaaS product marketers to start seeing similar results without being too annoying or spammy when you're building those? Because I know too many of those people get like, why do you keep sending me these notifications every week? Right? Definitely. Yeah.

I think avoiding being too annoying or spammy is key. And I think Beamer, really any in-app changelog is going to help a lot with that. So before Beamer, most SaaS companies were publishing product updates in, I would say either like a company blog that no one reads, doesn't really get any traffic. So it's kind of not having much of an impact, or sending it out in an email newsletter, which has its own set of issues. So like, you know, being out of context, it's not in your app, you got super low open rates due to like spam and promotions folders, and it is like kind of intrusive and spammy. So it really limits like how often you can reach out to users. So what Beamer does with this like plug-and-play changelog is allow SaaS product teams to notify users directly in-app, in-context, about all kinds of product updates. So not just Just your biggest feature releases, so it helps users discover new features. So they get more value out of the product, as well as helping like convince them that like you really are working hard to provide them the best possible solutions. They don't need to go look for someone else because like you're already working as hard as possible to make this the best the best solution for them. You can also collect user feedback with Beamer. It's a really important part of the feedback loop, so your product team can find out what users think about your latest releases and even have them suggest new ones. So since the notifications are in-app and in-context, they're like, you know, much less annoying and spammy because the user is already there. They can click on if they want or not. You can also use segmentation to keep your notifications as targeted and relevant as possible. I think that's really important to do that. We also recommend that companies use Beamer's changelog as a dedicated channel for product updates without really any like marketing offers or promos or anything like that. So that helps reduce even further that, you know, any spam. spammy feelings. And it keeps the feed clean and the user's really highly engaged on those notifications. And we do have other modals that our customers can use for marketing-related comms. So things like pop-ups, snippets, banners, things like that.

Cool. So we mentioned having pages, emails, and there's other channels like maybe SMS. And then now we have these tools like the changelog widget. When it comes to that feedback loop, do you guys measure what that difference in engagement, meaning let's call it user feedback when they're sending email Versus, uh, you know, the in-app widgets. Did you guys measure that difference?

Yeah, totally. So, you know, as mentioned before, it's much higher than email since Beamer is in context, in your app. It can actually be installed to look like a native part of your app, so notifications get extremely high engagement. So you can install it with like, you know, a bell icon or a menu item with text like what's new or updates or something like that. So you don't have to deal with like spam folder promotions. It'll get to everyone that's logging in. And, you know, like I mentioned before, like a huge benefit is you can send out many more product updates than if you're using email, where like at most you'd send an email update like once every month, but that even feels like a lot. I think most companies are probably sending out every few months or maybe even like a couple times a year.

Mm-hmm.

So with Beamer, you can announce even the smaller like improvements and fixes and things like that. So you're not just focusing on your biggest releases. And users will know that you're constantly working for them. And in terms of quantifying it, that's pretty tough. I mean, that definitely will run the gamut of different ranges based on the companies. But yeah, I mean, we've had many customers report more than 3x engagement on their updates, email, or whatever other channels they're using, like a blog versus the in-app widget.

And how often would you suggest that we'd be releasing these notes and changelogs? If, you know, you said email maybe once every quarter, if we're doing it through GetBeamer, is there a time you recommend people release these?

Totally, definitely much more often than once a quarter for sure, but it will depend on, you know, the speed of your development cycle, like how mature is your product, how often are you actually churning out new features, because you don't want to announce something that's not really important or relevant or going to have an impact for the user. So it will depend on your development cycle, but I would say, um, if we look across all of our customers, we now have, like I mentioned, like, you know, over 900 paid customers and many, many more on our free plan. So like we have a good sense of like how often people are really doing this. So I'd say 1 to 2 updates a month is common. So that might not sound like a lot, but I, I think it's still a pretty good amount, um, in terms of hitting up users, like with your latest, uh, like, you know, features that really— and improvements that really do make an impact for them. But a lot of our customers will do it more often than that, a couple times a week. We have some customers like Drift who will do a weekly sort of update or summary. So they're not gonna push out the release as soon as the new feature's deployed. They'll actually wait and kind of summarize, okay, this week, this is what we've done. And they do it on a consistent basis, which I think is cool too, because that creates sort of this expectation and your users become excited and they know, okay, Fridays, I'm going into Drift and I can see what's new.

Hmm. And would you say, is there, is this something you say every SaaS business would need? I know you mentioned like the product cycle, or does it work with certain markets and audiences and how your product roadmap looks like?

Totally, yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I would say every SaaS business for sure should be using an in-app changelog of some kind. I mean, it could be Beamer, it could be something you build in-house, but it really is like a vital part of the feedback loop. So the new features that are built and that you announce and you tell your users about, that's gonna lead to even more user feedback, which leads to new and better features, and that loop kind of virtuous cycle continues. So it's a great way to like sort of, you know, start your users, get your users to expect a better product, and when they demand a better product of you, that spurs you on to build a better product. And so yeah, that virtuous cycle I think is really important, and I think, you know, SaaS companies today more than ever need to quit quickly adapt to market demands. And, you know, there's just like so many options in SaaS that if you don't differentiate yourself and really convince your customers you're the best possible solution and you're really like solving their needs, it's gonna be difficult to retain those customers.

Sure, yeah, so I think part of that retention also comes to, you know, keeping them engaged. Do you have any favorite strategies that you can suggest to our audience when it comes to improving that user engagement for SaaS or, you know, improving NPS scores? I think those are maybe related.

Yeah, totally. I think those are definitely related. Yeah, so there's many, many things I could touch on here, but just a few of our favorites. So ask for user feedback and act on it. So proactively go out and ask for the user feedback, however you want to do that, and then also make sure the user feels heard. So even if you aren't going to— the user asked for feature X, and even if you aren't going to build feature X, 'Cause you shouldn't do everything your users ask for, right? You gotta keep yourself on track and be following your own roadmap. But yeah, just make the user feel heard. So even if you aren't gonna do it, at least tell them, hey, I heard that, thanks so much for the feedback, keep it in mind. Let them know that you are hearing their feedback, even if you aren't gonna build exactly what they want. Another important thing is gamification and onboarding checklists. So direct your users, identify the key steps that you know will get them hooked on your product, and then direct them to complete those either via gamification or checklists or something like that. Segmentation, like I mentioned earlier, so keep your communication targeted and relevant, so segmenting by user role, by plan, by geography, whatever you can do to keep those notifications a little bit more relevant, I think is key. Visual elements, I think, are really, really key for user engagement, so things like explainer videos, GIFs, including that within your changelog And really, whatever sort of communication you're doing with your user, I think is really important. And then in terms of NPS, so we actually offer an NPS survey, so we have a really good sense of what causes companies to get higher or lower NPS scores.

Mm-hmm.

And definitely one of the highest, I guess, reasons, one of the most common reasons why users will leave a high NPS score is ease of use. So I cannot stress enough to other SaaS founders, that's what you wanna be focusing on, making your product easy to use. Not having overly complicated software is definitely like globally one of the most common reasons for high NPS score. And then, you know, responsive and helpful customer support, that's also a super common answer. And I think that helps with user engagement as well.

I love that ease of use, right? We, as engineers, we try to overcomplicate everything. People just want it. I know, one click. If you could do it in one click, please do it in one click.

Do less, but do it in one click.

Exactly. Cool, man. So, you know, you guys done a super great job when it comes to growth, $1.5 million ARR, 900 paying customers. And you got some big brands, you mentioned Intercom, Hotjar, Freshworks. Can you share any, some growth strategies that have worked well for attracting some of those big players for our audience, maybe SaaS marketers who are listening and they wanna test out to get some of those big guys paying attention to them?

Totally, for sure. So in our case, a lot of the growth really has been product-led. So, and this is something, I mean, we were looking for. So we had always, before Beamer, we were always looking for, you know, how can we find a way to get our users to promote our product without having to do it consciously. And so like, we definitely had that with Beamer. It's great. Like, you know, when Intercom uses Beamer, I mean, they're installing this changelog widget within their app and showing it to all their users, um, who all, you know, a high percentage of their users are SaaS companies and also are potential Beamer customers. So it's just, yeah, for us, it's a, it's a great growth engine, is like identifying those kind of like strategic customers like Intercom, Hotjar, Freshworks that we know have a high percentage of SaaS users. And we don't treat those customers exactly the same. We do whatever we can to get those customers on board, especially earlier when we were just starting out. Now, maybe not so, so much, but yeah, when you're starting out, I think it's a great strategy to identify those strategic customers that are either gonna give you that good success case, you can build a case study and share it with other leads, or if you're more product-led, get your app in front of their customers or their community in some way. I think that's a really important strategy for growth. Providing great customer service. So we actually have a lot of our dev team, part of our dev team answering our live support chat.

Nice.

It can be a little distracting at times, but I just think it's so worth it. I mean, we have so many of our customers that are just saying, your support is amazing, it's so good, it eliminated all the friction I had. I mean, we try to make it easy and self-service anyway, but issues always inevitably will come up. And so I think that's been actually a really good investment that we've done, is just putting so much focus on providing good support and good, again, good UX, good ease of use, good documentation. And I think that too, not only does it help people convert, but also I think that gets us tons of referrals. I think because of how easy it is to work with us, I think that's what gets this sort of community of product teams and product marketers that are using us talking about Beamer and sharing it with their colleagues and people in their network and stuff like that. And then yeah, just talking about communities too, we try to work with communities that we know engage the audience that we're going after. So guys like the Product Marketing Alliance, a bunch of product marketers and product teams that are interacting there, and so it's a great group for us. And so we do things like giving them the tool for free, with a watermark to use on their site. I've done podcasts with them. We engage with their Slack group. But yeah, I think working with communities where your audience is living is obviously a good strategy as well.