Announcing Banners – the simple new way to engage your customers
Main illustration: Kristin Raymaker
Today, we’re excited to unveil the newest message type in Intercom, Banners.
The name suggests how simple this new message type really is – you can now create a message that occupies that prime real estate at the top or bottom of your website, on desktop or mobile, where it can capture the attention of visitors and customers with announcements, promotions, proactive support, you name it. Banners are a highly effective new type of message for your customer engagement strategy.
Furthermore, while they might be highly noticeable, they don’t interrupt a customer’s flow – banner messages are unobtrusive and persistent rather than intrusive and fleeting.
What makes Intercom’s Banners better
In true Intercom style, though, the apparent simplicity of Banners hides a lot of power and flexibility. Traditionally, banner messages have been relatively blunt instruments – eye-catching, sure, but not exactly sophisticated.
“You can set rules to trigger the banner, and also goals to measure its effectiveness, so you’ll get insights into how well your various banner messages are engaging customers”
The real power of Intercom’s Banners lie in the targeting capabilities of our platform – allowing you to reveal specific Banner messages to different groups of customers based on criteria such as how they’ve engaged with your product.
For example, if you’re announcing a discount on your pro plan, you might target all users currently on your free plan. You can set rules to trigger the banner, and also goals to measure its effectiveness, so you’ll get insights into how well your various banner messages are engaging customers. And you can then A/B test different variants and optimize your banner messages.
Banners are perfect for capturing visitors’ attention
Once you’ve captured someone’s attention with a banner message, you can now drive a range of actions, such as:
- Click a CTA, opening a new feature page and triggering a Product Tour
- Submit an email address
- Start a conversation in the Messenger (coming soon)
Intercom’s Banner messages also take advantage of the full power of Series, our visual campaign builder – our banner messages can fit seamlessly into a carefully orchestrated customer messaging campaign, rather than existing as standalone messages.
As a result, banner messages can be used in concert with in-app messages or a Product Tour to engage customers in sophisticated ways.
Highly customizable banner designs
Intercom’s Banners also bring a rare level of easy, code-free customizability – for instance, you can match the look and feel of your website or app, customize position layout or colors based on message urgency, and so on. You can even use customer data to ensure the banner message is personalized to the reader. While the banner messages will be eye-catching, they will never stick out as looking out of place or off-brand.
Banners also come in two styles – inline and floating – so they always fit your website.
Floating banner messages sit above your content
Banners in action
The possibilities for Banners are endless – they are flexible and powerful enough to support a range of messaging needs:
- You can announce a new feature or promotion
- They make it easier to onboard new users by surfacing tips or next steps
- They allow you to proactively communicate known issues
- You can use an email sign-up field to capture leads
Our templates cover a range of use cases
Intercom’s famed ease-of-use is again in evidence with Banners – we have created a range of templates to help you get started, with designs available for announcing events or promoting a sale.
Messaging with Intercom just got better
With Series, you can easily craft very sophisticated customer messaging campaigns across all these channels:
And to this list you can now add Banners – a distinct, discreet way to engage your customers on desktop or mobile. Banners are effective on their own, and exceptionally powerful in combination with all the other message types.
As we often point out, great customer engagement requires getting the right message to the right person at the right time, and in the right place. Sometimes, it just so happens that the right place is at the top of your website or app. We look forward to seeing what you create with Banners.
