How to Build a Click Through Demo
Many enterprise software companies want to offer prospects opportunities to see their products in action, yet aren’t seeing the desired conversions from freemium products or free trials. Even so, the modern customer journey requires some element of buyer self-service.
According to Gartner, modern buyers only spend 17% of their time meeting with suppliers, and highly value when companies provide information up front to navigate their purchase.
For complex products, click through demos can provide the self-service experience buyers crave, while allowing companies to showcase product value at every turn.
Let’s explore more about click through demos and how to create them, along with some examples of successful click through demos.
What is a click through demo?
A click through demo is also known as an interactive product tour or interactive demo. With a click through demo, product marketing and marketing teams can create a guided demo that enables a prospect to discover the product experience step by step. Rather than traditional product-led growth (PLG) tactics such as free trials and freemium products, a click through demo guides the prospect through the product experience — reducing abandonment rates and increasing conversions.
Click through demos are great assets for multiple stages of the buyer journey. Here are a few examples of how they can be used:
- On the company website: Including a click through demo on a homepage or product page is an effective way to showcase what your product does up-front, or zoom in on individual features that matter most to certain personas or verticals.
- In marketing campaigns: Embedding click through demos in email marketing campaigns or thought leadership pieces can be a great way to bring prospects into the funnel, or nurture prospects with intent.
- As a leave-behind for sales: Rather than providing a PDF as a sales leave-behind, click through demos can be a dynamic way to follow up with interested prospects, or empower champions to convey your product’s value to a buying committee.
How to create a click through demo
Click through demo software or a demo creation platform can dramatically simplify the process of creating a click through demo. Demo creation platforms make it possible for go-to-market (GTM) teams to generate and share high-fidelity, custom interactive demos that look, feel, and behave just like a software solution without developer involvement—no need for coding experience, no hassle, and no delays.
Demo creation platforms enable teams to create a pixel-perfect clone of the real front-end product experience, showcasing the product’s value and interactivity in a secure and reliable environment. Many teams create interactive demo libraries targeted toward different personas, verticals, or use cases, making it simpler for prospects to discover the “aha” moments that matter most to them.
Using Reprise Replay, marketing and sales teams can create their own interactive demos and product tours by capturing their application’s functionality. Interactive demos will look and feel like the live application, without the risk of downtime or accidentally exposing customer data. Even if the product isn’t in production, teams can capture screens that demonstrate the application’s core value for prospects. Using a powerful suite of editing tools, GTM teams can easily make changes to the product experience, including anonymizing data, or changing text and images.
Click through demo examples
The best click through demos engage the buyer’s attention and reduce time to value by replicating the authentic product experience. They enable buyers to discover complex products without the commitment of a free trial or freemium signup. And, they can accelerate “aha” moments for buyers, helping them discover key features they may not have found if they were left to their own devices.
Here are a few examples of powerful click through demos.
Zendesk
Zendesk, a customer support SaaS company, uses click through demos to increase GTM efficiency. The marketing team leverages interactive demos as a primary CTA from their homepage to showcase how their software works for a variety of use cases. Using interactive product tours, the team is able to show prospects what customers, contact center agents, admins, and sales representatives can see while using their product. The team is currently scaling to support more than 110,000 product tours per month.
Pendo
Pendo, a product experience company, leverages interactive demos as an alternative to free trials for prospects. The company’s marketing team has spun up an extensive demo library to showcase all of its offerings. The company’s demos are the highest-performing CTA, dominating website conversions and scaling to 200,000 visitors per month.
EvaluAgent
EvaluAgent’s quality assurance platform is so robust that it almost needs to be test driven in order to grasp its full potential. As a result, the EvaluAgent team launched an entire library of custom, interactive product tours that highlight specific product features. The brand sees more than 400 monthly visits to its product tours, resulting in faster sales cycles. Check out how EvaluAgent created a library of product feature demos to see it in action.
As you can see from the examples above, click through demos can be a powerful tool to engage leads in the early phases of the buyer journey, and accelerate the enterprise sales process overall.
For more examples of product tours and live demos in action, check out the Reprise customer demo library.
