Customer Interview Series: Product Email Updates and Onboarding with Anna Wendt

About this series:

We spoke with the builders whose interactive demos were part of the top 1% of top-performing interactive demos from our State of the Interactive Product Demo 2024.

See how Anna Wendt at Skipio uses Navattic to let sales bypass basic introductory demos, onboard new customers, and share product releases.

We are a sales engagement tool for locally owned businesses and franchises to reach out to their leads and help them get those leads to the next step in buying, which is usually scheduling a consultation. That eventually leads to selling them a service.

We use interactive demos to allow our sales team to bypass basic introductory demos about our product. It gives people a way to click through the products in a controlled environment without having to provide a free trial or freemium product or anything like that.

Additionally, we use these demos for sharing information about product releases and updates with our existing users. For our new features or even small updates the tours usually get the highest click-through rates in our emails.

We integrate interactive demos extensively in our onboarding emails for new customers and in our monthly newsletters to existing customers.

For new customers in our onboarding, we use demos to make sure they're getting into the product. We also use there for a more in-depth look at how they can specifically use a feature to solve a problem.

Our monthly newsletters to our existing customers have been pretty successful in terms of open rates and how long people are spending looking at them. So anytime we're teasing something coming soon, we include a really short tour.

If it's a big enough thing where we're doing a larger release process, then it will get its own dedicated email and we'll have pop-ups in our app. And we'll almost always link to a Navattic tour in those as well.

The focus is on specific use cases and capabilities of the new features. Like what will people actually do with a tool or feature?

We often rely on initial feedback and our historical understanding of what users might need.

My goal with those tours is to show people how they would use a specific feature because I want our tours to fill in the blanks and connect the dots for them when it comes to a capability that they get with Skipio.

This helps us craft demos that are immediately useful and contextually relevant, showing how new features can solve specific problems or enhance our customers' experience.

I often start by duplicating a past demo, which saves time as it already contains some necessary elements.

And then I honestly just kind of go for it. I’ve been with Skipio for about five and a half years now.

I've gotten really good at telling our product’s story, at least as it currently stands. And so having that experience helps being super familiar with our product really helps.

Jump right in and start building. It's helpful to draft a quick outline of the key points the demo should cover.

That's how you're going to see the results. Obviously, you can show it to your teammates and other people you're working with because they can give you the gut check on like that's not related to this topic that we're trying to show with this tour.

But you really just want your site visitors or your customers to see those tours as soon as possible. And then you can always make more changes later.

The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, particularly from our sales and customer success teams.

What gets me most excited is when we hear from our sales or customer success team that they're talking to someone and that person said the tour helped them see exactly how they'd use Skipio and made it easy for them to use the app.

We signed two pretty big partnerships with corporate franchises and in multiple cases we have had franchise owners from those organizations say to people on our team, those tours specifically helped me see, yes, this is a solution that I need and I could actually use it.