Beamer

What is Beamer

Beamer is a customer communication platform designed for product and marketing teams. Its main purpose is to help companies announce new features, product updates, and important news directly within their website or application. This is done through an embeddable widget that feels like a native part of the product. The core functionality includes a changelog, user feedback collection, Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, and user onboarding tools. Beamer helps businesses increase user engagement, drive the adoption of new features, and gather valuable customer insights to inform their product roadmap. The company was founded by Mariano Rodriguez and Spencer Coon and operates as a remote-first organization, serving thousands of companies globally.

Beamer Features

Beamer offers a suite of tools to improve communication with users:

• Changelog: Create and publish announcements for product updates, new features, or bug fixes. These posts can include images, videos, and GIFs. You can reach users with in-app notifications and banners to make sure they see the latest news.
• NPS Surveys: Measure customer satisfaction and loyalty with Net Promoter Score surveys. These surveys appear directly inside your app, making it easy for users to respond and for you to collect continuous feedback.
• Feedback and Feature Requests: Provides a central place for users to submit ideas, feature requests, and general feedback. Teams can then prioritize this feedback to make user-driven decisions for their product development.
• User Segmentation: Target your announcements to specific groups of users. You can segment based on user location, role, subscription plan, or in-app behavior. This ensures messages are relevant to the audience.
• Push Notifications: Send targeted push notifications to bring users back to your app when you have important updates, even when they are not active.
• User Onboarding: Use tooltips and interactive tours to guide new users through your product. This helps them understand key features and improves the initial user experience.
• Analytics: Track the performance of your announcements. You can see metrics like views, clicks, and user reactions to understand what content resonates with your audience.

Beamer Pricing Plans

Beamer offers several pricing tiers to fit different business needs. The plans are structured to scale with the company's growth.

• Free Plan: A starting point for individuals or small projects. It includes basic changelog features but has limitations on the number of monthly active users, team members, and access to advanced features like segmentation.
• Pro Plan: Designed for startups and growing businesses. This plan typically offers more features, such as user segmentation, custom branding, and a higher limit on monthly active users. It allows for more team members to collaborate.
• Business Plan: Suited for larger, established companies. It includes all the features of the Pro plan, plus advanced capabilities like NPS surveys, feedback management, and more in-depth analytics. It also offers priority support.
• Enterprise Plan: A custom plan for large organizations with specific needs. It provides advanced security features, custom integrations, a dedicated account manager, and unlimited usage for most features.

Beamer Free Plan

Beamer offers a Free Plan that is a good option for getting started. The free plan allows you to use the core changelog functionality to announce updates. It includes limitations, such as a cap on the number of monthly active users (MAUs) who can see the notifications, a limited number of team seats, and Beamer branding on the widget. Advanced features like advanced segmentation, NPS surveys, and feedback portals are not included in the free tier.

How to use Beamer

Getting started with Beamer is a straightforward process:

1. Sign Up: Create a free account on the Beamer website. No credit card is required for the initial setup.
2. Install Beamer: You need to add Beamer to your website or application. This is done by copying a small JavaScript snippet and pasting it into your site's code. For WordPress sites, there is a dedicated plugin that makes installation even easier.
3. Create a Post: From your Beamer dashboard, create your first announcement. You can add a title, write a description, and include images or videos. You can also categorize your posts (e.g., 'New Feature', 'Improvement').
4. Target Your Audience: Choose who should see the announcement. You can publish it to all users or use segmentation to target a specific group based on their attributes.
5. Publish and Analyze: Once you publish the post, it will appear in the Beamer widget on your site. You can then go to the analytics dashboard to track how many users have seen and interacted with your announcement.

Pros and Cons of Beamer

Pros:

• Easy to set up: Installation is simple with a code snippet or WordPress plugin.
• All-in-one platform: Combines changelog, NPS, and feedback tools in one place.
• High engagement: In-app notifications are more effective than emails for reaching active users.
• User segmentation: The ability to send targeted messages is very powerful for personalization.
• Clean user interface: The dashboard is intuitive and easy to navigate.

Cons:

• Pricing: Can become expensive for businesses with a large number of monthly active users.
• Limited free plan: The free version has significant limitations on users and features.
• Customization: Advanced branding and styling options are reserved for higher-tier plans.
• Focus on in-app: While effective for active users, it is not a replacement for other channels like email for reaching inactive users.

Beamer integrations

Beamer integrates with over 3,000 applications, primarily through Zapier, which allows you to connect Beamer to a wide range of tools. It also offers direct integrations and webhooks for more custom workflows.

• Slack integration: Automatically send your Beamer posts to a designated Slack channel to keep your internal team updated on product changes.
• Zapier integration: Connect Beamer to thousands of other apps. For example, you can create a new post in Beamer when a task is completed in Jira or automatically share new posts on your social media accounts.
• Intercom integration: Sync user data and display Beamer notifications within the Intercom messenger for a seamless support experience.
• Segment integration: Use your existing Segment user data to create powerful, targeted segments within Beamer without extra development work.
• Google Analytics integration: Send Beamer events to Google Analytics to track how your announcements impact user behavior and website goals.

Beamer Alternatives

• LaunchNotes: A strong competitor focused on product change communication. LaunchNotes is great for managing communication across different teams and stakeholders, including private roadmaps.
• AnnounceKit: Offers a very similar feature set to Beamer, including in-app notification widgets, email notifications, and user feedback tools. It is a direct alternative with competitive pricing.
• Headway: A simpler and more lightweight option. It provides a clean, embeddable changelog widget. It is a good choice if you only need a changelog and not the extra features like NPS or feedback.
• Appcues: More focused on user onboarding and in-app messaging for driving feature adoption. While it can be used for announcements, its primary strength is in creating user flows, tooltips, and modals.
• Pendo: A comprehensive product experience platform that includes in-app guides, analytics, and feedback collection. It is a more powerful, and more expensive, alternative for enterprise-level companies.

Beamer API

Yes, Beamer provides a REST API for developers. The API allows you to programmatically interact with your Beamer account. You can use it to create, update, and delete posts, manage user feedback, and fetch data for custom reports. This is useful for automating your release communication process.

To use the API, you need to obtain an API key. You can typically generate your API key from the settings or integrations section of your Beamer dashboard after logging in.

Here is a basic example using cURL to create a new post:

curl -X POST 'https://api.getbeamer.com/v0/posts' \
-H 'Beamer-Api-Key: YOUR_API_KEY' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{
  "publish": true,
  "category": "new",
  "title": {
    "en": "New Feature Released!"
  },
  "content": {
    "en": "You can now do amazing things with our new feature."
  }
}'

For more details, you should consult the official Beamer API documentation on their developer portal.

Beamer Affiliate program

There is no publicly advertised affiliate program for Beamer at this time. Their website does not provide specific details on commission rates or a public sign-up page for affiliates. However, companies of this nature often have partnership programs. If you are interested in promoting Beamer, it is recommended to contact their support or partnership team directly via email to inquire about any available partnership, referral, or influencer programs they may offer.