Interactive Product Tours: All You Need To Know

Are you looking for a way to qualify leads and improve conversion on your website? You're in the right place. Let's step into your prospects’ shoes to see what they need in order to build trust and sign up for your product:

• Lengthy copy outlining every detail about your product? No.
• Multiple demo calls with your team? No.
• Static images and endless forms to fill out before they can try your product? No.

The best way to build trust with your customers is to show them your product in action but with minimal commitment. That's where interactive product tours come in.

Interactive product tours are embeddable demos that allow prospects to get a real feel for a product in action firsthand. They allow viewers to self-qualify by walking them through your product before having to sign up or talk to the sales team.

Interactive product tours are much more than recordings. They guide users through the interactive experience of using your app at their own pace and provide personalized explanations, annotations, tips, and CTAs before they even sign up for your product.

It's important to distinguish them from onboarding tools though. Onboarding tools such as in-app guides, tooltips, hot spots, and pop-ups are intended to facilitate user onboarding and increase activation rate once a user has signed up for your app.

Keep reading to learn more.

Why should you have interactive product tours?

Here are three great reasons to start using interactive walkthroughs as part of your marketing and lead generation strategy:

• Reduced friction for prospective customers: An interactive product tour not only guides users through your product explaining its features, but it also automatically filters out people who aren’t your target audience. This proactive approach minimizes friction during the decision-making process and can make sales much easier. For more tips on reducing friction, check out these 8 examples to increase SaaS landing page conversion rates.
• Improved engagement: Good product tour software helps you shift users from passive observers to active participants and boost customer engagement. Rather than passively reading or watching information about your product, users interact with its interface as if they've already purchased and set it up with meaningful data.
• Less pressure/commitment from the start: Engaging tours provide a less formal, more relaxed way to learn about a product's key features before purchasing it or signing up for a free trial. They allow users to get to know the product at their own pace without feeling the pressure to commit or decide immediately. Reducing the barriers to seeing your product will increase the number of people who want to try it out as well as the number who will convert into paying customers. Check out these SaaS demand generation tactics and strategies to see how to attract even more prospects.

How to create an interactive product tour?

We'll now show you how to create a great interactive product demo.

The quickest way to create interactive product tours is to use HowdyGo, an interactive demo recording software that allows you to capture your first demo in just a few minutes. Here's how:

1. Setting up your account

1. Sign up for HowdyGo using your email address. You can get started for free! We offer a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
2. Download our Chrome extension. We suggest you pin it to your toolbar so it's easier to find whenever you need it.

2. Capturing a demo

1. Open the web app you want to create a product tour of, then click “Start Recording” in the HowdyGo extension. As you can see in the screenshot below, you can record any screen size, but we provide you with a suggested size that will make your tour suitable for every device.

2. Now, to add new steps to your product tour, simply click through your app and the tool will capture each screen. It's simple: you get one step for each click you make. You can pause the extension if you want to click something without it being recorded, but if you accidentally record something, don't worry, you can edit and remove steps later.
3. When you're done recording, simply click  “Stop Recording” or “Cancel Recording” if you want to start again.

3. Keep your browser tab open until we've finished uploading your files. The process is usually quick, but it depends on the number of steps you’ve recorded. Once the files are uploaded, the app automatically takes you to our Editor.

3. Editing your recording

It's enough to capture your demo once as you can edit anything you need in the HowdyGo editor. Here is what you can do:

1. Edit an annotation: Each step includes an annotation at the position you clicked while recording. You can edit and change these annotations, move them around, add more text or change styles to better call out specific elements.

2. Delete a step: To remove a step, click the trash icon next to its thumbnail. Alternatively, you can use the delete button on your keyboard.

4. Reorder: You can reorder the steps and organize them any way you want by dragging and dropping their thumbnails.

5. Insert a step: Click Insert step at the bottom left corner. You can either insert any step that you captured in your original recording or capture brand new ones to add into your demo.

‍

4. Adding lead capture forms

You can use our interactive product tours to capture leads and their contact information. Here's how:

1. First, add a section break to the demo.
2. You'll then be guided to add one or more fields for your leads to fill out. Some of the options are name, email, phone, company and country.

3. You can add lead capture forms wherever you want, but we suggest adding one at the end of your product tour in the CTA step.

4. As leads submit their details, you can see their data in our app, your CRM or one of our other integrations.

5. Adding chapters

You can break down longer tours into chapters so users can easily skip steps or quickly jump back to a particular step.

1. First, click on the Chapter Settings menu on the right side of the screen.

2. Then, add chapter markers to particular steps where you want each chapter to start. Depending on the length of your product tours, you can add as many chapters as you want.

3. Then, preview your product tour to see what the chapter navigator looks like and whether you should add more chapters or remove some so as not to make it overwhelming.

6. Animating steps

This is one of the coolest features – our interactive product demo video production tool goes beyond pixel-perfect HTML snapshots of your page.

If you want to show users how your app changed between steps and what happened, you can add that as an HTML animation. This might be useful to show how your drag-and-drop, notifications, live pop-ups or data input works.

Here's how to enable animated steps:

1. Click the Play button on the right-side menu to open Step Playback Settings.
2. Turn on the Animate option.
3. The steps containing motion will automatically be animated. You can check out the thumbnails to see which ones are animated, and you'll see a videotape icon on them.

7. Editing captured HTML

You can edit the content of your UI after recording it. This feature is handy if you want to hide user names for privacy, correct typos, or personalize a product tour for an important prospect.

1. To start, enable HTML editing from the menu on the right side.

2. Click the element you want to edit, and our Edit bar will open. Simply type the new text you want to add instead.

3. If you don't want to edit every step manually, you can also bulk edit. Just click Find and Replace at the bottom of the screen, enter the text you want to replace and the text you want to replace it with, just like you'd do in text editors like Word and Google Docs. This feature comes in handy if you want to anonymize users' names or personalize the demo by adding your client's company name.

4. You can also edit images and blur out any content in the app.

8. Personalizing product tours

HowdyGo takes personalization to the next level. You can take your prospects through a guided tour where the user interface is personalized to them and their company.

You can personalize your annotations or the recorded UI by using variables. All you have to do is use double curly brackets and write your variable name between them like this: {{variableName}}. You can then set them via query parameters in the “Share URL”.

9. Customizing branding

With HowdyGo, you can completely customize your product tours to keep them on brand. Here's what you can do:

• Use custom colors: Use your brand's colors for all interactive elements, such as buttons, inputs, ripples, tooltips, etc.
• Customize your font: Use your brand's font for the text in annotations.
• Customize browser frame URL: Add your website's URL.
• Add your custom domain: Finally, host product tours on your domain. For a complete guide on how to do it, click here.

10. Sharing your product tours

There you have it! You've successfully created and customized your product tour.

Now it's time to share it with your prospects. Different prospects have different preferences, so we provide three ways to share your product tours:

1. Sharable link: The quickest and simplest way is to share a link with your audience. You can add the link to your email campaigns, social media posts, or landing page.
2. Embedded tour: You can embed your tour on a specific page on your website, no matter what kind of website or CMS you have. You don't need any coding skills, as we'll provide you with our HTML embed code that you can copy and paste.
3. Demo center: If you have multiple product tours, you can set up your own demo center, which can be shared as a link or embedded on your website.

If you want to increase the number of people who see your product tour, check out these product marketing examples for B2B SaaS marketers.

Tips for building an interactive product tour

As a team that’s collectively built 100’s product tours, here are our top tips for better interactive product demos:

• Focus on quality over quantity: You may be tempted to show every feature, but it's important to find the right balance and not overwhelm your potential users. Highlight the most important features and briefly describe the rest. If your demo is over 10 steps long, use chapters to split your content into sections so viewers can easily skip to the bits they find most relevant to them.
• Personalize it for your target audience: You should always keep your audience in mind and create product tours targeted to them. Create different tours for different use cases and personas. Keep demos high level for viewers unfamiliar with your product and feel free to dive deep for warmer prospects or people already familiar with your offering. 
• Focus on benefits, not just features: You're creating a product feature tour, so obviously, you want to showcase your product's features (and rightly so). However, it’s a good idea to help your prospects contextualize what’s going on by explaining how those features apply to their intended use case.
• Keep your tours up-to-date: As you improve your product and add new features, remember to update your product tours. Use demo analytics to see how viewers interact with them and revise content to improve engagement throughout the tour.
• Add the right type of CTA:  If you’re looking to drive signups, keep your demos ungated and push viewers to sign up at the end of the demo. If you’re looking to drive demo bookings, add a lead capture form to your demo to make it easy for viewers to reach out.

Finally, product walkthroughs can't work on their own. They're part of a much larger user journey. For them to work, you first need to attract the right audience to your website. These 8 inbound marketing software for SaaS companies can help you do so.

Top 3 examples of good interactive product tours

Check out these interactive product demo examples created using HowdyGo.

1. ADInstruments

Lt is an e-learning platform by ADInstruments that offers pre-made interactive lessons for life science, chemistry, nursing and medicine classes. They’ve used HowdyGo to visualize the platforms from both the student's and professors' views and demonstrate the process of finding a lesson, editing and teaching it.

With annotations, chapters and lead generation forms, Lt turns interested prospects into qualified leads.

2. Flagsmith

Flagsmith is an all-in-one open source tool for managing feature deployments. With HowdyGo, the Flagsmith team has created an interactive demo library for the whole platform and its main features.

Potential prospects can easily browse through the multiple demos, replay important parts and sign up directly. 1000’s of visitors have viewed their demos so far, and those visitors have been almost twice as likely to sign up for their product.

3. Bogio

Bogio is an ecommerce SMS marketing tool for campaign creation, audience segmentation and customer data analysis. 

They’ve embedded a short, interactive demo they made with HowdyGo on their homepage so interested prospects can see how the tool functions and looks. After the interactive walkthrough of the tool, potential leads can sign up for the tool or watch a longer, more in-depth version of the demo.

To learn more about different types of product walkthroughs and how to structure them, check out our interactive demo hierarchy.

Conclusion

As you can see, it’s easy to level-up your marketing with product tours to boost your conversion rates. Today, having an engaging product tour helps you stand out from other SaaS companies offering static presentations and lengthy tutorials on their websites.

Get started for free and create your own product tour within minutes!

FAQs

Are product tours effective?

Product tours can be highly effective. The two biggest benefits are increased user engagement and conversion rate. With HowdyGo, you can expect 1.7 times more sign-ups, 1.5 times more activations and over 90% of prospective customers to engage with your demo.

How to create a product walkthrough?

The best way to create a product walkthrough is with an easy to use product tour software like HowdyGo. Even if you have no experience creating interactive product tours and demos, you'll find the process intuitive and user-friendly, as we'll guide you every step along the way.

How to improve a product tour?

The best way to improve your product tours is by observing demo analytics. HowdyGo offers rich data that allows you to see how viewers interact with your demo and where they drop off. You can then tweak and optimize those parts to increase conversion.

‍