How Flagsmith used interactive product demos to increase signups by 1.7x
Flagsmith is an open-source feature flag tool for developers. They have a product led growth model and their ideal customer profile is data-sensitive organizations like banks (i.e. Citibank) who want to improve the way that they release features to their users.
The first entry point for a new prospect is often through their free offering. This leads to a purchase when users start considering paid team management features - for some large organizations, this can require a call with their sales team.
It's a technical product and the end-users are developers, but the purchase is often made by a different economic buyer. Interactive demos help all of these prospects see the product and UX in action before they get everything configured or speak to the sales team.
We hear from Anna, Flagsmith's Head of Marketing on how and why she started using interactive product demos and how the experiment has worked for them.
What were the results of this experiment?
"We have clear attribution and have been able to track results — demos are having tangible impact for us."
Headline statistics
HowdyGo worked alongside Anna to monitor these statistics over time.
We used a mixture of HowdyGo demo analytics and Flagsmith's Google analytics to monitor conversion rates and Heap product analytics to monitor user activation rates.
Our integrations with GA4 and Heap made this an easy process.
"We have clear attribution"
Beyond the numbers, Flagsmith have had multiple clear success moments from their product demos:
- Unprompted, organic reviews of Flagsmith that called out their demo.
- Multiple contact us form submissions that specifically mention the demo.
- Internal support from "marketing-hesitant" exec team members.
- Interest from board members who were impressed by how she'd put the product front-and-centre.
How Anna knew they needed interactive demos
"Looking at the data I could see that we had a lot of signups, but we could have better conversion rates from sign up to paid. And equally, we could increase the rate of conversion from web visitor to sign up.
I was looking specifically at how I could fix that problem by nurturing people better."
Anna wanted to show prospects how Flagsmith worked without making prospects get everything configured before they saw what kind of value the platform offered.
She knew that getting the product into a prospect's hands was an important stage of the purchasing process and that despite having a free trial, most people didn't make it to a true "aha" moment.
Flagsmith started small with just one demo
"The home page is one of your most important assets, making changes to it can be such an intimidating thing.
So easing into the demos, getting some metrics on them and then bumping them up in the hierarchy felt safe."
Working closely with the HowdyGo team (in a shared Slack channel) to build her first demo. She then used Webflow to add a new /demo page to the Flagsmith website, and a secondary CTA button to their home page.
The button said "Try Interactive Demo" and it's stayed that way ever since!
This approach was low-risk and allowed for easy expansion. Starting with a simple embed of just one demo.
We followed the data with Anna using HowdyGo's demo analytics and identified opportunities to improve her conversion rate.
"Some of the other demo vendors on the market made it feel like this was going to be a big project to get started.
With HowdyGo, it felt like you would help us and that was important for us."
Why HowdyGo?
"Before I found HowdyGo, I thought interactive demos were for teams who were one or two levels higher than the point we were at in our startup journey.
That they were for 5-person content marketing teams."
Anna wanted to use interactive product demos because she'd seen other companies using them successfully, but a couple of things were holding her back:
- As a small marketing team, she needed support building her demos, and
- She needed a low-commitment entry point because this was an experiment for her.
She chose HowdyGo because we were willing to get into the weeds and create demos alongside her, and the monthly subscription option made it easy to fit into her budget as an experiment.
An experiment that's grown over time
"One of the things that's working really well for us right now is running segmented campaigns for specific industries using repurposed content. So our next experiment is to repurpose case studies into interactive demos.
This is because interactive demos are already working really well for us to show people the SaaS platform in action."
Flagsmith is a power user when it comes to HowdyGo, Anna and her growing team are always pushing the boundaries on where demos can be used, how they can be incorporated into different distribution models and helping us understand how we can facilitate their success.
When Anna has an idea, we get excited because you just know it's going to happen!
Demos have been added to all of their feature pages
The obvious next step for Flagsmith was to start showing off more of their product to prospects on their website.
We looked at which product pages they saw the most traffic from and started there - building demos that were all about the feature the prospect was reading about and helping them understand how Flagsmith solved the problem.
A demo centre to bring everything together for prospects
The demo centre has given website visitors the opportunity to explore Flagsmith at their own pace without leaving the demo page.
Over 25% of visitors have view more than one demo since they added an embeddable demo centre to the page.
Paid advertising on LinkedIn and other platforms
"Our interactive demo adverts are one of our best performing creative assets."
Flagsmith started using links in their paid advertising that take prospects directly from platforms like LinkedIn and HackerNews to the demo centre on their website.
They used the GIFs generated from HowdyGo to speed up that process and grab people's attention.
Lead scoring prospects if they've seen a demo
"We've started scoring leads based on whether they've viewed one of the demos to completion.
It's a sign that they already know how Flagsmith works and that's great for the Sales team."
Flagsmith uses Hubspot's CRM and scores leads based on a variety of actions, like pages that the prospect has seen or actions that they've taken in the free version of the app.
With HowdyGo, they are receiving events directly in HubSpot, helping them contact prospects at the right time in the customer journey.
Case Study Demos
"So our next demos are going to be just a little bit different.
They're going to help prospects from the banking industry specifically understand how other teams are using Flagsmith to solve problems that are familiar for them, whether it be migrating infrastructure, running A/B tests or whatever that might be.
The cool thing is that all of this will happen in the context of the product and alongside quotes from other existing customers."
Anna is always looking for new ways to use content. We brainstormed a new approach to using demos, and helped her get the demo created - it incorporates case study content and customer quotes into a walkthrough of the Flagsmith platform.
Flagsmith's Demo
This is Flagsmith's high-level platform overview demo, we've tweaked and improved this demo using our demo analytics to maximize the conversion rate over time.
It's a fantastic example of what is possible with a completion rate of over 90%. This demo is the basis of an entire content strategy surrounding demos that started off as a simple, low-cost inbound marketing experiment.
Pretty cool!