A complete guide to Intercom banners: Features, pricing, and limitations

Getting a message to your users without interrupting their flow is a tricky balance. You want to be helpful and proactive, but you definitely don't want to be annoying. That’s pretty much the job description for Intercom banners, a popular tool for sharing updates and promotions without getting in the way.

In this guide, we’re going to walk through everything you need to know about them. We'll cover what they are, what you can do with them, and most importantly, where they fall short. While banners are handy for simple announcements, you might find that modern support teams need something a bit more conversational and automated to keep up.

What are Intercom banners?

You know those little notification strips that stick to the top or bottom of a website? That’s an Intercom banner. They're designed to be a gentle tap on the shoulder, not a jarring pop-up that takes over your screen.

Their main purpose is to catch your user's eye for things like new features, upcoming sales, or a heads-up about scheduled maintenance. They’re visible enough to get the message across but subtle enough that users can keep doing what they were doing. It's a solid choice for messages that are important, but not "drop everything and look at this" urgent.

Core features of Intercom banners

The real power of Intercom banners comes from how much you can tweak their look and who gets to see them. Let's dig into what you can control.

Making your banners look on-brand

You can adjust your banners to feel like a natural part of your site. Intercom offers two main styles:

• Inline: This makes the banner stretch across the full width of the page, sitting just below the browser's address bar. When a user scrolls, the page content slides underneath it.

• Floating: This style centers the banner on top of your page content. It stays put as the user scrolls, kind of like a sticky note.

You can also change the background color (the text color adjusts automatically so it’s always readable) and choose whether it appears at the top or bottom. One thing to note is that you can't add your own custom HTML or CSS, which can be a bit of a bummer if you need every pixel to be perfectly aligned with your brand guide.

Customizing banner actions

A banner is more than just a pretty message; it’s supposed to get people to do something. Intercom gives you a few options for your call-to-action (CTA):

• Open a URL: Send users to a new feature page, a blog post, or a specific promotion. You can choose whether it opens in a new tab or the current one.

• Collect visitor emails: A simple field right in the banner to capture leads without sending them to another page.

• Ask for reactions: Let users respond with an emoji for some quick, low-effort feedback.

• Launch a Product Tour: A great way to kick off an interactive walkthrough for new users or to show off a new feature.

Targeting the right audience

You probably don’t want to show every single banner to every single user. Intercom lets you target banners to specific audiences using filters. For instance, you could show a discount banner only to users on your free plan or a feedback banner to people who signed up more than a month ago.

You can also schedule banners for specific times, which is perfect for weekend sales or event announcements. The only tricky part is that if a user qualifies for multiple banners, Intercom just shows them in the order they were created. This priority system is all on you to manage, and it can get messy once you have a bunch of campaigns running at the same time.

Common use cases for Intercom banners

While you can get creative, these banners really hit their stride in a few specific scenarios. Here's where they tend to work best:

They're fantastic for announcing new features and promotions. A quick banner pointing to your latest product update or a limited-time sale is a classic, effective use. They’re also great for onboarding new users. You can use a banner to share a "getting started" tip or link them directly to a product tour to help them find their way around.

Another smart use is for proactive support and incident communication. If you have scheduled maintenance coming up, a banner is an easy way to let everyone know ahead of time and hopefully cut down on a flood of support tickets. And finally, with the emoji and email collection features, they're a simple, non-intrusive way to gather feedback or capture new leads.

Limitations and pricing of Intercom banners

Before you dive in and start building banners for everything, it’s worth taking a second to understand their limitations. These are the details that might make you think twice.

The headache of manual banner management

At the end of the day, a banner is a one-way street. For every single message you want to send, someone on your team has to write the copy, set up the audience rules, and schedule it. That’s fine for planned announcements, but it just doesn't work for real-time, dynamic conversations. If a user has a specific question right now, a banner can't help them.

Intercom banners: One-way messages vs. real conversations

A banner can link to a help article, but it can't actually answer a question from that article. When a user clicks, they're pulled away from what they were doing and forced to go on a scavenger hunt for the information they need. It creates extra steps and doesn't solve their problem in the moment.

This is where a different approach, like an AI-powered tool, can provide a much smoother experience. For instance, an AI chatbot from a provider like eesel AI does more than just announce things; it can have an actual conversation. It can understand what a user is asking and give them an instant answer by pulling information from all your knowledge sources, including your Intercom help articles.

A lack of deep AI smarts

While Intercom does have other AI features, the Banners tool itself is pretty straightforward. Its targeting is based on rules you create, not on learned user behavior or the context of a conversation. It can’t adapt its message on the fly or personalize the content beyond dropping in a user's name.

The pricing structure

Banners aren't something you can buy on their own. They come bundled with Intercom's broader subscription plans, which can get expensive, fast.

Plan	Starting Price	Key Feature
Pro	$74/month per seat	Includes proactive messaging like banners and product tours.
Premium	Custom pricing	For larger teams needing advanced features and scalability.

The seat-based model means your costs go up every time you add a new person to your team. You end up paying for a big suite of tools, which might be more than you need if you're just trying to find a better way to communicate with customers.

The AI-powered alternative to static Intercom banners

If you’re starting to feel boxed in by what simple banners can do, it might be time to look at the next step in customer communication.

Go beyond announcements with conversational AI

People today expect instant, helpful answers. An AI Chatbot from eesel AI can do the job of a banner (like announcing something new) but then takes it much further. It can answer follow-up questions, look up order details, and help troubleshoot problems on the spot, 24/7. It turns a simple announcement into a helpful conversation that actually solves problems.

This image shows an eesel AI chatbot answering a question in Slack, demonstrating a conversational alternative to static Intercom banners.

Unify all your knowledge instantly

One of the coolest things about eesel AI is that it connects to all of your company knowledge, no matter where it's stored. It doesn't just learn from your public help center. It can instantly train itself on your past support tickets, internal wikis in Confluence, and even project plans in Google Docs. This lets it give much more complete and accurate answers than a static banner ever could.

An infographic showing how eesel AI unifies knowledge from multiple sources, a key advantage over one-dimensional Intercom banners.

Get started in minutes

You don't need to book a demo or sit through a long sales call to get going. eesel AI is designed to be completely self-serve. You can sign up, connect your helpdesk, and have a working AI agent in just a few minutes. It puts your team in control, letting you test, simulate, and launch on your own schedule.

A workflow diagram illustrating the simple, self-serve setup process for eesel AI, an alternative to more complex Intercom banners configurations.

Are Intercom banners right for you?

So, what’s the final call? Honestly, it depends on what you need. Intercom banners are a solid, well-designed tool for simple, one-way announcements. If you’re already deep in the Intercom ecosystem and just need to share promotions, feature updates, or basic proactive messages, they're a great choice.

But their limits become obvious when you need to grow. The process is manual, the communication is one-sided, and it's all tied into a potentially expensive, seat-based plan.

For teams that want to automate their support, provide instant and accurate answers, and handle more conversations without hiring more people, an AI-native platform is the natural next move.

Ready to see what a true AI support agent can do? Try eesel AI for free and build an AI that learns from all your company knowledge in minutes.