How Beamer Notifications Drove $800K in Revenue for AppSumo

My name is Luke Francis and I’m Growth Manager on the AppSumo Plus team. AppSumo Plus is our retention program—and it’s also so much more.

Plus really serves as a swiss-army knife for entrepreneurs, providing: discounted access to all our tools on-site, masterclasses with some of the biggest names in business, complimentary essential tool packs, and access to our world-class business community, The Sauce.

Those are just the highlights—there are plenty more benefits to being a Plus member. And that means we have a frequent list of things to communicate to our best customers. Previously, our main and most consistent channel for connection was email.

But, as you might imagine, AppSumo’s email channel can get quite bloated with all the different deals we feature and promotions we run. There are only so many emails you can send in a day before customers start to get upset. And with over 10,000 deals in our store, there’s a lot to talk about.

At the same time, we get over 50,000 unique visitors per month to the AppSumo website. So it was clear there was an on-site opportunity to communicate more opportunities to our customers to get the deals that serve them best.

Enter Beamer.

Beamer is an incredible notifications platform that allows us to send on-site communications to customers. The best part? We wouldn’t have to pull dev resources to build our own in-house notifications system.

We chose a notification system as our solution so we could interact with Sumo-lings during their browsing experience. Email can pull them into our website, but it’s not a channel we 100% own: messages we send often compete with other brands and folks may be less receptive. With Beamer, we could reach customers when they’re already on our site and interested in buying—and then curate the most interesting options for them.

‍In less than a day, we had notifications up and running, targeted towards our community of over 14,000 AppSumo Plus members.

Our initiatives

When we set out to include Beamer into our marketing workflow, we had three initiatives to track and monitor:

1. Would Beamer drive more unique traffic to Plus-specific offerings?
2. Would Beamer generate more revenue on Plus-specific offerings?
3. Would the results of the first two initiatives justify and validate opening up Beamer as a sitewide notification platform?

Driving more traffic to Plus-specific offerings

Our Plus-exclusive offers are specially negotiated rates that provide even more value to our incredible lifetime deals (LTDs).

Plus members love these offers, but not everyone is aware of these incredible opportunities when they’re happening. That’s why we needed a robust notification tool to alert customers.

Incorporating Beamer into AppSumo was as simple as integrating via the API. Once we implemented Beamer, we were able to share these deals directly on our site.

With Beamer, a typical notification will show up with a red dot next to the bell icon in our navbar.

Here’s an example of what one of these notifications look like for us.

To create these notifications, all we had to do was write the value prop for the tool in a few lines and then encourage folks to purchase. Since these customers were on our site, the high intent was already there.

The results were immediate and clear: we saw a 10% CTR average on all notifications with over 15,000 unique views every single week.

‍Now we’re split testing other messaging to see whether other formats perform better and optimize our results.

Generating more revenue on Plus-specific offerings

Once the traffic we saw was validated, the next question became: does this new traffic drive revenue?

The answer was a resounding yes. If the immediate effect on traffic wasn’t already enough, the revenue uplift sealed the deal.

‍We saw $800K in revenue attributed to Beamer since we rolled out the tool from the 3rd week of January until now!

‍A little bit of background. The Plus team runs two events: Last Call, where we bring back certain deals for 96 hours, and Plus Exclusives, where we negotiate special deals for Plus members only.

During the same test period, our special Plus events generated their highest revenue to date. On both of these events, we overshot our expectations by $100K each!

Did we validate using Beamer sitewide?

Yes! As I write this, our dev team is working to roll out Beamer sitewide.

Now every visitor to AppSumo will have access to notifications.

And they’re not just a constant megaphone to everyone that visits, where some messages will land and others will not be relevant.

Beamer’s API allows us to segment users depending on a number of criteria we can report to the API.

For instance, we’ll be segmenting our users in three segments based on the types of messages we send out:

1) Plus members

2) Logged-in Sumo-lings who are not Plus members

3) Anonymous visitors

Our admin sends user-level data to the Beamer API and tells Beamer which segments to display the notifications to. This way, we can be very targeted in how we deliver meaningful notifications to each of these segments.

After all, the last thing we wanted was message fatigue.

Beamer gives us a way to deftly target the right audiences on-site without the need for an email address! That means we can communicate with anonymous visitors that our emails may not be able to reach.

Now that we’re rolling out Beamer to all visitors, we’ll be monitoring for two new validation metrics:

1. Total revenue
2. Conversions of anonymous visitors to registered users

Other ways we used Beamer

There are a few additional aspects of Beamer that we really love.

1. Quick feedback on posts/products through the comments

Beamer offers two different ways to receive feedback on a notification.

• Three types of smileys to gauge reactions: happy, sad, or indifferent
• Comments

The comments are not public and we don’t get stats on the number of smileys that users select. Still, both of these give us immediate feedback on how well a message, product, or idea was received.

1. Solid data tracking so it’s easy to A/B test content and offerings

Beamer has a robust analytics dashboard. You can look at Tracking Views, Clicks, Users, and Post-level data.

This allows us to create a post and get immediate feedback on its effectiveness.

That combined with link tracking gives us a solid view of conversions from Beamer. Beamer also allows for UTM links to be auto-added to any link on a notification. (However, we opted to use “/?ref=” links as to avoid session tracking issues with internal UTMs.)

Beam me up, Scotty

As a growth and marketing organization, we love Beamer for the speed and ease it allows us to deliver highly segmented and converting marketing messages.

Our dev team loves Beamer because it’s one less product feature that needs to be designed and maintained.

It just works. The proof is in the numbers.

Grab Beamer here and see amazing returns on this tool!

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