Messages Use Cases and Scenarios

Tap your customers on the shoulder with Messages. The friendliest way to say hello 👋 to your customers, site visitors, or any other people who make your business real.

Messages is flexible and can help you meet various goals like increasing engagement with clients and customers, or surface helpful articles to improve the self-serve experience on your site or app. All sorts of teams can benefit from Beacon Messages! Check out some ideas below to get inspiration on how your team can get up and running with Messages.

Support

Smarter self-serve

We all have little things that trip people up from time to time that you just know you're going to get questions about. Stay on top of common customer confusions by offering helpful Docs articles exactly when and where customers need them. Target customers using the Sequence of events to pop up on a Specific URL after their Time on page hits 4 minutes to prompt someone who might be stuck.

Stay ahead of status events

A portion of your app or site down? Reduce the inbox flood of “are you down?” emails to a trickle with Messages. Plug updates on your marketing site, Docs, and in-app to keep people in the loop, and use the Go To URL action to link to your Status page.

Scheduled maintenance heads up

If you’ve got 24 hour customers, there’s no good time for a deployment. Soften the blow with a Message to let them know well in advance, then a different one during the maintenance window just to make sure.

Marketing

Plug webinars

Got an upcoming webinar? Messages are a great way to get the message out there to your existing customers, or interested parties from your blog or marketing site.

Help Scout Messages drive 45% of our webinar sign-ups compared to popular promotional channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google AdWords. When we included Messages in our overall promotional repertoire, it increased overall sign-ups by 13%.

Prompt trial sign ups

See someone lurking on a couple key pages, staring just a little too long? Wave them out of their daze and invite them to start a trial. Trigger Messages by page visits or time spent on pages.

If a prospective customer stumbles upon your Docs articles in search results, use Messages to lure them in! Use the Identify method in the Beacon JavaScript API and Customer Properties along with Messages Audience selection to detect if they are a customer already or not, and plug trials or demos to folks that aren’t.

Nudge to new products or features

Recently release something shiny and new or having something really awesome coming up? Keep your customers in-the-know with Messages. Use the Open a Docs Article action to get customers up and running with new app features, or use Go to a URL to send them to a landing, product, or pre-order page.

Using the Identify method, you can even target specific folks that might benefit most from the feature, like pulling in Clearbit data to see what other tools someone is using to point towards helpful integrations, or targeting a very special t-shirt to all customers named “Steve.”

Increase newsletter signups

Wave folks viewing your blog or visiting your site to get more goodies in their inbox, without interrupting their shopping or viewing experience with a pop-up. Just use the action to Go to a URL, and link to a Mailchimp or newsletter sign up landing page.

Promote relevant blog posts or case studies

Using something like Clearbit to detect your B2B customer’s industry vertical, location, or size? Use the Identify method and use Go to a URL to show them how other customer’s like them find success with your products by sending targeted blog posts, case studies, and customer stories. Your visitor will be thankful for the contextual advice, and social proof can be a very persuasive tool!

Offer promotional discounts

Reward loyal customers, or lure in customers that seem to lurk without making any moves with targeted promotional discounts. Use the Identify method to acknowledge a healthy purchase history or personal details like birth dates collected, and offer incentives accordingly.

Product

Get in-the-moment feedback

Capture heat of the moment frustration or that moment of surprise and delight with Beacon. If you’ve launched a new page, product, or feature, and want to gather gut reactions, use a Beacon to start a New Conversation or Start a Chat to collect. You can qualify the feedback using Custom Fields, so you can report on it or use automations to send the feedback to your Product Team.

Survey your Customers

How likely are your customers to recommend your product, service, or app to a friend? You’ll never know if you don’t ask! Use Beacon to prompt any in-app surveys, like gathering NPS responses. Just choose the action to Go to a URL and send a link to your survey.

You can send your survey responses over to your Help Scout Mailbox to manage them there and keep all that rich customer context together.

Customer Success

Accelerate onboarding

Effortlessly guide evaluating customers through account setup by suggesting next steps every step of the way. Use the Manual Event to ping when certain steps have been taken in your app, so they always know what’s coming next.

Increase product stickiness

The more your customers explore your products, the more likely they are to stick around and spend more money with your company. Use Messages to help customers on a contextual product tour, based on actions they’ve taken already with the Manual Event.

Send expiring trial notifications

Use a Manual Event to detect when a customer needs to make a buying decision soon and use the Go to URL action direct them to the payment page.

Flag expansion opportunities

Just like accelerating onboarding, the Identify method or a Manual Event can accelerate expansion. Start a coaching session or point towards features with upsell potential once an account reaches a specific size or takes actions inside your app that indicate they may be a good candidate for an upgrade.

Offer coaching sessions

When in doubt, talk it out. What better way to alleviate calls than to offer coaching sessions at key moments during the customer journey, like onboarding or anniversaries. Use Identify method to pull in information like account type, size, or stage in the customer journey, and offer coaching sessions where it makes sense. Use the Go to URL event to link to a calendar page to book a session.

Increase customer engagement

When it comes to conversions, live chat is a powerful engagement tool in every part of the customer funnel. In fact, 70% of the people who have chatted with us while on trial ended up as paying customers. Say hi 👋 and start a chat at key moments of the customer’s journey, like when they are starting a trial or poking around new features and may have questions that lead to upgrades.

Sales

Book more calls

Use the Identify method to target high profile evaluators and use the Go to URL event to link to a calendar page to book an intro call or demo.

Chat where it counts

Offer to answer questions in strategic places, like product or pricing pages. Answering questions and alleviating confusions eliminates friction during the buying process, increasing sales. Just use the Specific URL event to strategically place your Message and prompt a chat where it matters most.