Customer Show + Tell: How ActiveCampaign Transformed Customer Engagement

In our Customer Show + Tell series, we highlight how Navattic customers solve real business challenges through interactive demos.

At a recent Chicago Navattic User Event, Joann Ng, Product Marketing Manager at ActiveCampaign, shared how her team overcame the challenge of constantly updating product demos by implementing an interactive demo strategy that dramatically improved customer engagement.

"Have you guys ever felt like you're constantly building the plane while you're flying in it? That was me and my team just a few months ago," Joann explained.

As a PMM at an autonomous marketing platform, Joann's role was to make their complex platform feel simple and valuable to customers. However, they were trapped in a cycle of creating demos, scripting, editing, and rerecording for every new feature; an incredibly time-consuming process.

"Just as we finished with the perfect demo, we'd get hit with a new AI capability," she shared, "Every time we recorded a demo, it felt like we were hit with a built-in expiration date."

Facing this challenge, Joann's team shifted their mindset: "Instead of just telling people about our platform, what if we could let them explore it themselves?"

This led to the creation of an interactive demo library that allowed visitors to "get their hands on the wheel" from the moment they landed on the website. The team built:

• A dedicated page for product tours highlighting different parts of their platform
• Filtering capabilities so visitors could sort through topics of interest (Active Intelligence, Reporting, Email Marketing, SMS, and WhatsApp features)
• Guided tours with helpful built-in prompts, especially for AI features

"This is no longer a passive demo, but a practice run for them," Joann emphasized. "By the end, they can feel confident to prompt our Active Intelligence product and get rid of that friction about how to use AI."

The impact was substantial and measurable:

• 23 product tours built in just three months: "something that would have been impossible with our old video recording process"
• A 467% surge in engaged visitors
• Increased steps viewed per session, indicating genuine curiosity and content consumption
• Significantly longer session times: "It's not just a page view anymore. It's a meaningful session capturing their attention much longer than static content."

The team also identified opportunities for improvement: "We can leverage that strong intent and refine our messages, timing, or call-to-actions within the tour to better convert this high engagement into more completed demos."

The ActiveCampaign interactive demo center was designed with user experience in mind:

• Clean, structured design with intuitive navigation
• Persona-based introductions to make demos relevant
• Category filters allow users to quickly find relevant content
• Seamless transitions between different product tours

For AI features specifically, they included sample prompts to help users get started quickly: "We share some of the prompts that you could use with our active intelligence, giving them a quick launch pad to start."

Joann's team found Navattic "very easy to use," saving countless hours while building a resource that grows with their product. Their experience highlights several benefits of interactive demos:

• They put users in control of their learning experience
• They eliminate the constant burden of updating videos
• They create practice opportunities rather than passive viewing
• They increase engagement metrics significantly compared to static content
• They scale easily as products evolve and new features are added

By transforming their approach to product demonstrations, ActiveCampaign not only saved valuable time but also created a more engaging and effective way for prospects to experience their platform, proving that sometimes the best way to explain a product is to let customers experience it for themselves.