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 and interactive product 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, product demo, product walkthrough, 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 teams: 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 sales teams to create a pixel-perfect interactive product demo of the real front-end product experience, showcasing the product’s value in a secure and reliable environment. Many sales 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 product demos and product tours by capturing their application’s functionality. Interactive product 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, sales 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 custom demos, 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 sales 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 and product walkthroughs 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 interactive product 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. They are often an important starting point for creating a comprehensive demo program, which includes sales demos and other types of custom demos that GTM teams can leverage throughout the enterprise sales cycle.

The Best Click-Through Demo Software

Reprise

Key Features:

• Reprise is the only demo creation platform featured that caters to the needs of the entire enterprise buying cycle. With it, you can create a wide variety of demos ranging from interactive product tours provided on the website, to customizable live demos for sales or presales teams, to interactive leave-behinds for committee decision-making.
• Reprise offers three core products in its platform: Reprise Reveal, which enables anyone to create demos on-demand with no-code tools, regardless of technical skill level; Reprise Replay, which captures a product to create personalized, shareable demos; and
• Reprise Replicate, which clones an application’s functionality down to the code level.
• Robust analytics tools help users track viewer behavior and optimize their presentations.
• Reprise is highly scalable, allowing for the creation of standardized yet customizable demos.
• Personalization options enable tailored presentations for specific prospects.
• Advanced security features, including RBAC, anonymization capabilities, and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance demonstrate the company’s commitment to enterprise security.

Primary Use Cases: Reprise is a complete demo creation platform, suitable for users across a wide variety of industries. It can be used by any demo creator in the organization, including product marketing, marketing teams, presales, sales, and more.

Consensus

Key Features:

• Consensus is a tool used to create videos that act like demo recordings.
• Interactive tours can be created by stitching a combination of videos together.
• Personalization is possible by re-recording new videos based on individual use cases.

Primary Use Cases: Consensus is best suited for SaaS companies looking to deliver video-based product tours on their website or as sales leave-behinds.

Walnut

Key Features:

• Walnut specializes in creating click-through software demos using screen capture technology.
• It offers lightweight editing tools for quick, simple product tours.
• Analytics tools are available to track engagement, but lack important elements such as session details.

Primary Use Cases: Walnut is best suited for SaaS companies looking to create simple, customized product tours and sales leave-behinds.

Navattic

Key Features:

• Navattic provides screen capture technology optimized for SMBs.
• There are some lightweight editing functionality and customization options to create tailored presentations.
• Best for linear product tours where a prospect should follow a singular path through the product, vs. allowing prospects to explore its functionality on their own terms.

Primary Use Cases: Navattic is suitable for SMBs seeking to create product tours based on screen captures.

Demostack

Key Features:

• Demostack focuses on application cloning capabilities, with limited screen capture options.
• It offers templates and predefined elements for quick content creation, yet SE involvement is required for advanced customization.
• Analytics tools are included for performance tracking.

Primary Use Cases: Demostack is suitable for SaaS companies that lack the technical presales resources to customize a demo environment for sales reps.

Key Takeaway: Reprise stands out as the most complete enterprise demo software for the entire buying cycle, offering a balance of usability, interactivity, analytics, scalability, customization, and security. Other brands cater to specific use cases and preferences, making them suitable for different SaaS companies based on their presentation needs.

For more examples of product tours, live demos, and sales demos in action, check out the Reprise customer demo library.