Building an Engaging Click Through Product Demo

12 minute read

Now more than ever, buyers expect to “try before they buy.” In fact, your product can be your best lead gen tool.

However, many of the tools sales teams use can be cumbersome and boring:

  • Free trials with too many steps cause prospects to give up before reaching an “aha moment”
  • Traditional sales-led demos alienate today’s buyers who want a self-service experience
  • Video tours lack a hands-on feel, are hard to customize, and are expensive to produce

So, how do you give prospects an engaging hands on product experience?

Click-through product demos. Interactive demos shorten time to value while providing an engaging prospect experience.

Learn what a click through demo is, why you should use one, and how to create a winning click through demo.

What is a Click Through Demo?

A click through demo, otherwise known as an interactive demo, is an interactive product experience that lets your prospect get hands-on with your product. It is entirely no-code and doesn’t require prospects to log into your app to see your product’s value.

Using click through demo software, you can:

  • Replicate your product experience without coding to give prospects the “look and feel” of a live product
  • Overlay guides to educate and quickly demonstrate your product’s value
  • Create a sharable link to share with prospects or embed on your website

And, unlike a full in-product tour, most click through demo software is low or no code, enabling marketers and reps to create, update, and share product value quickly.

Why use a Click Through Demo?

A click through demo is a key tool for shifting towards product-led growth (PLG).

Traditional sales-led growth is a top-down strategy where sales reps qualify prospects and walk them through the product’s features and benefits.

This approach can be costly, time-consuming, and inefficient. It also doesn’t match the behavior of today’s buyers, who want to self-serve and discover the product’s value for themselves — on their own time.

Instead, many of the world’s top software companies (such as Slack, Dropbox, and Zoom) have adopted a PLG approach.

A click through demo fits into PLG by highlighting specific features and capabilities in a guided product walkthrough. It gives prospects a hands-on, interactive opportunity to discover the product’s value.

On top of that, interactive demos gives your product more visibility. Although many PLG companies think their free trials are the best way to capture leads, the data indicates they are missing out on a significant percentage of potential users.

  • According to Andrew Capland, 3% - 5% of website visitors actually convert to a free trial.
  • According to Saad Khan, 30 - 40% of people who sign up for free trials will come back.

That means only about one in every one hundred website visitor will see your product’s value with a traditional free trial.

While people may be interested in your product, they’re not always ready to commit to setting up a free trial.

Interactive demos allow prospects to explore your product before they even jump into their free account. And it pays off — our research shows that one in every three website visitors engages with an interactive demo.

But what if you’re not product-led (or not yet)?

Many companies can be deterred from PLG because their product isn’t designed for it.

Considerations may include:

  • Complex products which may be confusing or overwhelming without proper onboarding
  • Products where extensive integrations are needed in order for value to be apparent
  • Products that touch sensitive data that prospects are unwilling to give access to during a free trial

A click through demo is a great way for companies facing these scenarios to enable a more product-led approach. A click through demo gives the user freedom to explore the product on their own time while also providing necessary guardrails to ensure prospects can see value and avoid risk.

Use cases for click through demos

Another key benefit of creating click-through demos is that they can be used at every stage of the sales funnel and beyond.

The main use case for click through demos is as a CTA on your website. But you can also incorporate them in your:

  • Blog content: Inserting interactive demos in your blog content can improve dwell time and accelerate prospect education
  • Ads: Interactive demo-based ads can improve click-through rates and decrease cost per lead while driving engagement
  • Partner enablement: Interactive demos can teach partners what they need to know about integrations, new feature releases, and existing product functionality
  • Conferences: Giving a live demo of your product can be risky — interactive demos help your sales team bring your product to life without worrying about technical issues

Click through demo software options

When creating a click through demo, choosing the right medium is essential to create an immersive end user experience. Common options for click through demos include slideshows, product screenshots, videos, and interactive product tours.

Slideshows

Interactive slideshows can mimic your product’s environment. The benefits of using slideshows include:

  • Familiarity: Your team may already know and understand the software well
  • Low cost: You may already own software licenses or be able to use free software
  • Proof of concept: You can test making a click through demo without investing in new software

However, the drawbacks may outweigh these benefits:

  • Time consuming: Creating a click through demo in software that wasn’t designed for the purpose can take much longer
  • Lower production value: Your final click through demo may not showcase your product in its best light
  • Limited options for interaction: You may not be able to create as flexible and immersive a tour as you want

Software options: Google Slides, Powerpoint, or Canva

Screenshots

Using product screenshots to create a click through tour has the advantage of being familiar, easy, and cheap.

However, there are serious disadvantages to this medium:

  • Not interactive: Static images prevent users from feeling as though they are engaging with the actual product
  • Time-consuming: Screenshots take time to capture and must be updated manually each time the product interface changes
  • Low quality: Screenshots quality will vary depending on the size or type of device which could give a bad first impression to potential customers

Software options: Snipping tools on Windows and Mac

Videos

With the rise of product-led growth, videos have become an increasingly popular marketing tool for SaaS companies. They:

  • Showcase look and feel: Static screenshots and slideshows don’t give users a true picture of how your product features fit together
  • Allow you to show multiple features: In a video, you can easily show multiple aspects of your product at once

But there are some distinct ways SaaS demo videos fall short of other go-to-market activities.

  • Low engagement: Product demo videos don’t enable leads to interact with your product — a key element of a product-led sales process.
  • High cost: The average cost to produce a product demo video is between $1,000 and $3,000 per finished minute, and cream-of-the-crop narrators bring up the total cost to $5,000 or more per minute.
  • Time inefficient: Just one video can be a significant drain on sales, product, and customer success teams who want to weigh in on the script
  • Obsolescence: Product features can quickly become out of date, and redoing your product demo videos every time there is an adjustment can be overly expensive and time-intensive

Software options: Zoom, Riverside, Loom

Interactive demo builder tools

Interactive demo builder tools help teams to create dynamic and responsive click through tours. Demo builder tools are:

  • Designed to create demos: The right tools make it easy to craft your tour
  • Immersive: Use dynamic features to help prospects experience the product “hands on”
  • Easily customized: Simple to update with new features or to target towards specific verticals or user personas

However it's worth noting that there are some drawbacks to click through demo software:

  • Time to set up: Teams will need to be trained on new software
  • Learning curve: Teams will need time to understand how to make the most effective demos using software.

Click through demos are helping sales and growth teams build better product demos. A click through demo provides enough of a framework to showcase product functionality while giving users the freedom to explore and uncover their own aha moments.

Software options: Navattic, Reprise

Click through demo examples

To give you some inspiration, we’ve pulled several examples of how companies are using interactive demos on their websites.

Gorgias

Gorgias, an all-in-one customer support helpdesk for ecommerce businesses, incorporates interactive demos in multiple areas of its website.

The Gorgias Product tour has its own spot in the top navigation bar.

Gorgias click through demo

Expanding this section reveals Gorgias’s product features and asks users to Take a Tour.

Clicking on the CTA button takes users to a full-page interactive demo highlighting the advantages of Gorgia’s centralized support ticketing system, 360-degree customer views, and automation capabilities.

Panther

Panther, a modern security information and event management system, manages to ease prospects into its product’s complex functionality with multiple interactive demos on their site.

Panther click through demo

Panther also encourages prospective customers to use their interactive demo by adding “Product Tour” as an option under the Product header of their nav bar.

Panther click through demo below the fold

Clicking this option takes users to a landing page that explains what an SIEM like Panther is for and “Launch Product Tour” shows users how the platform can help them ingest data, add more log sources, and more.

Demandbase

Demandbase, an ABM and sales intelligence tool, uses the Products section of its navigation bar to guide users to multiple interactive demos.

Demandbase click through demo

Users can choose to explore the “Smarter Go-To-Market Platform” or take other Self-Guided Product Tours.

In their self-guided product tour center, Demandbase has built customized interactive demos that show users how each part of the platform works — from data integrity to sales intelligence, to orchestration.

Click through demos are helping sales and growth teams build better product demos. A click through demo provides enough of a framework to showcase product functionality while giving users the freedom to explore and uncover their own aha moments.

If you’d like to see how other B2B SaaS companies are leveraging interactive demos, check out our Customer Showcase.

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