Imagine this - You have arrived in a new city for the very first time. You don’t speak the local language and don’t have a GPS or smartphone to navigate and find your way. You might know where you want to go, but without a clear roadmap, you’re likely to take the wrong turns, get lost, and waste time and effort.
An interactive product tour is like a GPS for users, guiding them through the product's features and functionalities, helping them to navigate and make the most of their experience. Just as a GPS provides real-time directions to help you reach your destination, a product tour provides real-time guidance to help users reach their goals, succeed with the product, and achieve customer satisfaction.
What are interactive product tours?
Interactive product tours are video walkthroughs of your product that allow users to engage actively with the product features and functionalities. Unlike traditional product tours that are passive and static, interactive product tours are designed to be dynamic, immersive, and engaging. They offer customization options so that you can tailor-make your product tours to meet the unique needs of your prospects.
Interactive product tours come in especially handy when you want to make sure your prospect gets the most out of their interaction with your product tour. This becomes critical since you’ve got to prove your value right from the first interaction.
There are numerous ways through which you can actively encourage your prospects to continue exploring your product.
Some of these include:
- Product feature checklists and tooltips so they don’t miss out on key features of the product
- A gamified experience where potential customers can choose their own adventures based on their unique use cases
- Personalization in the form of text, images, or even video to pleasantly surprise them
- Providing a safe playground for them to explore your product with no strings attached
- And so much more!
The goal of an interactive product tour is to help users better understand and appreciate the product's features and benefits, increase the prospect’s confidence in using the product, and instantly prove your product’s value.
Role of interactive product tours in your sales process
A study by Hubspot says that 54% of prospects want to know how a product works on their first call with a sales representative. And when done right, these interactive product tours can help overcome sales objections and also shorten your SaaS sales cycle.
Here’s the role that interactive product tours play in your sales process:
Interactive product tour for lead generation
You can embed interactive product tours in your website and marketing materials to gather leads by giving your prospect a chance to learn briefly about your product and encourage them to learn more. And since you’re giving them a look and feel of your product upfront, the intent of these leads is generally higher since they’re convinced of your product’s capabilities.
Interactive product tour during prospecting
Due to their highly interactive nature, automated interactive product tours help in engaging with your prospects better. This proves helpful during the prospecting stage when prospects usually want to understand about your product and how it can solve their pain points. An email outreach with a quick personalized demo video does the job.
Interactive product tour during qualification
Once you’ve identified the prospects at the previous stage, the next step is to qualify them based on how well they fit your targeted persona, have the purchasing power, etc. Interactive product tours work well at this stage as a second level of qualification because they let you identify how engaged your prospect is, how much time they’ve spent going through your demo, which aspect of your product they’re really interested in, and more, through the engagement analytics.
Interactive product tour during discovery
At this stage, your sales team wants to dig into the pain points of the prospects you’ve identified in the prospecting stage and qualified in the qualification stage. It’s critical here that you’re able to clearly differentiate yourself from your competitors and show the impact your product can have on your prospect. With an interactive demo, you’ll be able to prove your product’s value instantly and outshine your competition.
Interactive product demo during trial
Once your prospect is convinced your product might be a good solution for their pain point, the next step they undertake is to sign up for a trial if you offer one. Typically, companies manually create a trial environment for each prospect, spending a lot of time and effort from the production as well as the engineering team.
But with an interactive product demo platform, you can easily replace the need for multiple sandboxes by creating highly engaging demo environments. These demo environments give the potential customers a hands-on experience, creating a safe playground to explore the product in a guided way.
Interactive product tour during follow ups
The sales team can create quick interactive demos and attach them with their follow-up emails. This could be focused on specific product updates, use cases, or outcomes. Using personalized demo leave-behinds empower your champions to sell your product internally and buy-ins from decision-makers. This way, interactive product tours help you to accelerate your sales cycle and close deals early.
Interactive product tours during onboarding
The role of interactive product tours doesn't just end at the sales stage. During the handoff to the customer success team, they can create detailed and personalized interactive onboarding tours too. Interactive product demos can be also used to create knowledge bases like this and can be used for training even after the onboarding is over.
Why interactive product tours are your strongest sales collaterals
Content has become important in B2B buying decisions. A 2022 Content Preference Survey reports that 55% of decision-makers say that they like to research before making a purchasing decision. That’s where sales collaterals come in as sales enablers.
Sales teams equipped with strong sales collaterals are a step ahead of their peers who’re not leveraging them. Sales collaterals come in different shapes and sizes. The common ones include:
- Research Reports
- Whitepapers and Ebooks
- Customer Factsheet
- Customer Testimonials
- Datasheets
- Case Studies
- Battle Cards
However, all these sales collaterals have one common problem.
No matter how much 'they' keep screaming, the prospect can't correlate the words with the product.
And that's where an interactive product tour comes in.
- Interactive product tours give prospects a hands-on product walkthrough experience of the product with zero friction.
- Moreover, interactive product tours help you capture high-intent prospects and put more control in the buyer’s hands. It empowers them to explore, research, and play around with the tool’s capabilities without any sales intervention or any strings attached.
Here are some interesting stats to ponder upon:
TrustRadius revealed that:
- Buyers who have access to interactive product tours/ demos spend on average 40 mins researching on their platform. This is pretty amazing considering that the average web user spends 45-54 seconds on a website.
- Interactive product tours/ demos have 3x the engagement of video demos. Video demos are in demand and drive a lift in engagement unto themselves, but they are outperformed by interactive demos.
Using an interactive product tour,
- Toplyne was able to witness a growth of 25% in their marketing leads and an increase in trial signups
- Groundwell was able to enable its sales team to setup and customize multiple demo environments in no time
- Quorum was able to accelerate its enterprise deals by 2-4 weeks with guided demo environments
Thus interactive product tours become your strongest sales enabler.
How to create an effective interactive product tour
You can build a guided product walkthrough of your product and use it for multiple use cases like:
- Website embeds
- Demos in your email campaigns
- Blog and landing page embeds
- Guided clickable sales leave-behinds
- Live demos
- Sandbox environments
- User onboarding
But how do you create an effective interactive product tour? Here's a step-by-step guide to help you get started.
Know your target audience
Before anything else, identify your target user persona. Once you identify them, find out what are their biggest challenges and how your product can help overcome these challenges.
Outline the customer journey
Once you know your target customer and their pain points, identify their journey to take into account all the necessary touchpoints of your product that will help resolve their pain points, which you’ll cover in your interactive product tour. Once identified, also plan the AHA moments where your customers can be fully convinced that you’re the best solution to their pain points.
Draft a storyboard
The best thing about interactive product tours is that they let you tell a story! So which story do you want to tell your audience? To begin with, you might want to answer all the customer objections in your interactive product tour’s script.
Choose your tech
While choosing the right interactive product tour software, consider factors such as learning curve, sharing limitations, personalization capabilities, pricing, integrations with your existing tech stack, etc.
Create guides
An ideal product tour should help your audience to navigate through the tour seamlessly and learn the key benefits of your product.
If you're using product tour software like Storylane to create your interactive product tour, by default a flow will be created. Flows are a series of steps that allow users to progress. You can use various widgets in your flows.
For example, you can add Hotspot (Has pulsating beacon to point at specific things in your demo) and Walkthrough (Useful to point certain sections of the screen when combined with a backdrop) from the Tooltips widget.
You may also want to use various other steps like a popup with text and a CTA button, a popup with a custom image, or a popup form to capture lead details from the Modals widget.
If you want to showcase multiple features of your products to the different personas in a single demo, the checklist tool lets you do so.
Share the product tour
Once your interactive product tour is ready, you should be able to share it in multiple ways like embedding it in your website, sharing it on mail, landing page, exporting it as GIF, etc. you should also be able to integrate it on your CRM, data warehouse, and marketing automation tool.
Consider an interactive product tool platform that’ll let you securely share your product tour using a passcode and expiry date.
Track analytics and tailor follow-ups
Once your interactive product tour is shared, you need to track the analytics to understand how your prospect engaged with the tour so that your sales team can follow up. These advanced analytics can reveal key info such as the time spent on each screen, CTAs clicked, product features they were interested in, etc. so you can take key actions based on these analytics.
Points to remember while creating an interactive product tour
Here are some best practices to follow to make an effective product tour demo:
Keep your interactive product tour short
Don't make your product tour too long. We recommend having less than ten steps. And if you need to have more, consider breaking it up into multiple flows.
Focus on storytelling
Have a compelling narrative for your interactive product tour to garner prospect engagement. Many brands do it wrong and focus only on guiding their prospects through their product.
Begin with a hook
Grab your prospect's attention by beginning your product tour with an attention-grabbing video, image, humor, or a fun message that the prospect can relate to.
Embed a strong CTA
Your interactive product tour should end with a strong call-to-action which can be either encouraging the viewer to book a demo with you or relevant pages, depending on your use case.
It's always a good idea to have a secondary CTA in between the product tour since not all viewers will watch the product tour until the end. Adding a widget with both NEXT and CTA buttons in the middle of your story is suggested.
Track engagement
Track the engagement of your product tour demo for crucial insights so that you can tweak and improve your interactive product tour. Remember to consider this while choosing the tech for building your product tour.
Lead capturing
If you want to track who is going through your interactive product tour, capture the lead by asking the viewer to share their email addresses or passing the email address as a UTM parameter. So, choose an interactive product tour software that offers such advanced functionalities.
Wrapping up
Sales collaterals play an essential role in B2B buying decisions. Decision-makers prefer to do the research themselves rather than talking to a salesperson, so you can’t ignore creating strong sales-enabling content.
While many options are available, interactive product tours are the strongest sales enablers because they create a safe playground for the prospect to play around with the tool without talking to anyone before purchasing. If you’ve not tried interactive product tours, you’re leaving money on the table.
And if you’re ready to give it a shot, Storylane is a great interactive demo tour platform to help you create highly engaging interactive product demos and give top-notch analytics of the demos. Willing to give it a try?
