Keep Customers In the Flow With Messages

Written By Emily Chapman•February 26, 2024

Keep Customers In the Flow With Messages

A customer is browsing your store, ready to spend some money on a new wardrobe for winter, but they just can’t find the perfect piece. A big company is trialing your software, but they haven’t quite got their setup right and are struggling to progress. You’ve just released an awesome new feature, and you’re looking for ways to get more people to use it.

These are key moments to reach out and offer help: Share some personalized style advice, pop up a helpful video guide, promote a new service, and keep those customers moving smoothly in the right direction.

With Help Scout’s new Messages feature, you can do all of that and much more. Messages takes all the powerful email, live chat, and self-service elements of Beacon and adds the ability to proactively reach out to the right people at the right moment.

At its core, Messages is all about Triggers and Actions. Triggers are what you’ll use to decide when to show the Message, and Actions are the next steps you can include at the end of any Message.

Here are just a few possibilities:

<th>When... (Trigger)</th>,When... (Trigger)

See the complete list of Message Triggers and Actions.

Setting up a new Message

Getting started with Messages is fast and simple. In many cases, you won’t need any help from a developer at all. All you need is a Beacon on the page where you’d like to show a message.

For each Beacon you can create multiple Messages, each triggered by a different rule. Here’s a quick overview of the process:

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Beacon Builder will show you a real-time preview of the Message as you create it — no need to guess what it will look like when it’s live. When you’re happy, save your changes and make it active.

Now Messages will work automatically, activating whenever the right conditions are met.

Getting fancier

Messages match your brand

Messages automatically take on the visual style of the Beacon which they are attached to. That means you can use all the Beacon customization options to get the look and behavior you are after, including color scheme, location and copy.

Trigger Messages manually

If you do have a developer on staff (or someone who knows a little bit of JavaScript), you can get particularly fancy. All of the visual customizations available for Beacon/Messages in the builder are available in the Beacon API.

Likewise, if your team has their own logic they want to implement for where and how a Message pops up, they totally can, using our manual JavaScript trigger option. We’ll provide the JS snippet, and they can do anything they like with it to create complex pathways for your customers to see the content you want to serve.

Try Messages in your account

We’re offering a free trial of Messages so you can get started! If you’re an Account Owner, visit your add-ons page and switch it on there. Account Admins can visit their Beacon page, click into a Beacon and then go to the Messages tab.

After your trial, Messages is available at our introductory price of $50/month. If you’d like to know more, or if you need any help getting set up, get in touch!