Customer Interview Series: Website Redesigns with Aston Whiteling

See how Aston Whiteling, used 15 Navattic tours across the Jellyfish website to increase interactive demo website engagement by 250%.

I'm a firm believer in having all different kinds of content on your website because people learn in different ways. So when we were thinking through our website redesign, that was top of mind for me. A Navattic product tour would be our crown jewel — it’s interactive and super versatile.

And I thought, why limit tours to the homepage? Why not embed tours across the breadth of our website? Today, we have 15 demos across twelve web pages.

We’ve had interactive demos pretty early on. Our sales leader was friendly with a founder in the space, so we were aware of them and their value.

In fact, the interactive demo was our main CTA on our home page, and we got a huge amount of inbound pipe from that, which validated how important interactive demo tours were.

But we could’ve been doing more to capture those leads. We’d occasionally spin up new tours for more tactical use cases, but when we got around to the website redesign discussion, the CMO, Kyle Lacy and I realized interactive demos would be critical.

I pushed for spreading Navattic tours across the full breadth of our website.

The natural kind of thing that happens with interactive demos if you're just starting with them is that you have your core demo. But then, you get a new feature, so you bolt that on.

And suddenly, there’s another new feature. Bolting that on your existing demo would make it kind of long, so you spin up another one. It can be a bit ramshackle because of the nature of how products grow — especially at a scaling startup like Jellyfish.

We decided to take a step away from product tours for a period of time because the company was codifying our messaging. Once that was finished, we were in a good spot to tie interactive tours into that framework and break them down by feature.

So we now have three categories: feature tours, value framework tours, and persona tours. They are more digestible than our previous tours and really capture the user’s attention and goals.

I see tours as a sort of interactive highway to our entire content library. If someone’s engaging with a tour, they’re actively thinking about what they're doing. It’s a captive audience you want to leverage, and product tours can be a great foray into helping users learn whatever they want or need to about Jellyfish.

But adding CTAs is a delicate balance.

You don’t want a form fill at the beginning because you want people to experience the product as soon as possible. But you don't want to bombard people with a million CTAs during the tour, either. That gets annoying and contributes to a negative view of the product and brand.

You need to make CTAs relevant. They have to be very pointed.

My philosophy was that in every single tour, I wanted one CTA that made sense for where the user was at in the demo. It could be for a blog, a video, or any other content.

Here’s an example: “This is how powerful X feature can be. Why don't you watch a video to learn even more about that?” and then link to the video or give them the option to continue the tour. In longer tours, I gate the rest of the tour so I can grab their email — at the end of the day, this is a lead capture strategy for us.

At the end of each tour, I add another CTA encouraging users to run through different (also very relevant) tours or request a live demo with sales.

Exact numbers are tough because the tours were coupled with our big website design, but I’d say we’ve driven a lot more traffic on the whole, and we’ve got some impressive engagement stats:

• A 250% increase in engaged visitors interacting with the Navattic tours.
• A 300% increase in CTA clicks
• A 25% CTR for those CTAs

All this tells me people are on a specific page, they’re doing the tour, and then they may scroll down and look at a blog or video embedded on the same page.

The tour has a big part to play in keeping people on your website, sparking their interest so that they look at the other things as well.

We’re using Navattic to enhance our lead scoring. So if someone gives us an email in a tour, we score that lead with pretty high intent and feed it into our Salesforce instance for when the sales reps engage.

We also have a book a demo button at the end of some tours, and that’s one of our highest intent inbound signals.

The next step is committing to regular updates. We decided on a quarterly cadence to maintain consistency.

And then, aspirationally, we are trying to use product tours in a variety of ways, not just as an inbound driver on the website.

We’ll work closely with the business development team to understand what they’d want from a tour like this. My grand vision is to have reps record some kind of video to get their face in front of prospects, embed that into the tour, and use the personalization capabilities of Navattic to make selling engaging.

The BDRs who are most successful are the ones who are already leveraging tours, so they’ll love this. Interactive demos are great conversation starters; they won't replace the technical deep dive. They’re meant to give prospects a tasty morsel of whatever you're trying to push.

In my previous role, I was left to my own devices, and I built out all these big product tours. Someone on the product team saw it and told me it packed in way too much. They suggested getting me a UX designer to help.

Together, we walked through my product tours and he taught me a lot about UX. Now, thinking about the user experience is foundational to how I think about everything in marketing. You want to keep the tour on rails versus making it more of a sandbox. You want it to be tight and consistent — users shouldn’t be able to get lost.

Then, the hard work is writing the scripts, pulling the CTAs together, and putting UTMs in the CTAs. It takes some thinking — where are you going to pin things? Where are you going to capture things? You have to be really organized.

But if you do all this planning early, it makes it much easier to treat an interactive demo build as the marketing team’s product. And, like any product, the tour will need updates, so keep that in mind.

Finally, build an interlaced content experience. You have a captive audience; use it. If you want to promote something else, a webinar, a blog, or a video, do it. Just make sure it's relevant.