Employee Spotlights: How our Growth Team Uses Interactive Demos in Onboarding Drips to Activate Users

In this post, we’re highlighting pointers from Growth Marketing Manager, Raman Khanna. He’s been instrumental in transitioning Navattic from a sales-led org to a product-led one, rolling out the freemium plan and owning the end-to-end PLG motion.

Below, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at how he thought about Navattic’s self-serve onboarding drip campaign and how he used interactive demos to qualify leads, engage users at different stages of their journey, and personalize follow-ups.

Our freemium plan was the catalyst for an email drip — we wanted users to know what they were getting into with a free Navattic plan and how they could make the most of it.

To do that, we divided our drip into four parts:

1. User activation

We wanted to make it easier for new users to publish a demo. That meant we needed to accelerate them coming into the product and give them guidance once they got there.

Interactive demos were an ideal solution to both of those problems.

The demo on the Navattic site entices visitors to sign up for a freemium plan. Then there’s an overview interactive demo included in the first email of the drip campaign new users receive to give them a lay of the land.

2. Minimizing friction

From the customer data we already had, we knew there were two main places people might drop off in our freemium plan:

1. Creating captures
2. Publishing their demo

To address those concerns, we created two mini-tutorial interactive demos — each with just a few steps — pushing them toward the action we wanted them to take next.

Once those demos were created, I customized my drip in Customer.io to check whether a new freemium user had created captures or not:

If they hadn’t created captures: the user got an email with best practices for taking captures, along with a demo to show them how to collect captures step by step.

If they had created captures: the user got an email encouraging them to publish their demo, with an interactive demo showing them how and where to share it.

3. Driving upsells

Once users publish a free demo, they move into our nurture phase of the drip.

At this point, my goal was to make them aware of the many ways they can use interactive demos, such as:

• Feature announcements
• In-app demos
• Outbound sequences
• Help centers
• Activation

The more use cases that sound appealing to a user, the more they might consider a paid Navattic plan.

At some point, I’d like to use the use case they tell us about in onboarding as a signal for the types of emails I send them. For example, if they select the sales use case, I might send them emails about how to use interactive demos in outbound messaging or ABM campaigns.

Or, I could whip up a few different interactive demos for each use case and customize them to the industries in which our customers operate.

4. User reactivation

I knew we would get some drop-offs, so I designed an email sequence specifically targeting those users. The reactivation drip reminded users:

• That their plan existed
• The benefits that came with their plan
• The myriad use cases for interactive demos

I also created a “disqualified” drip for users who were disqualified by the sales team for being unresponsive or not fitting our ICP.

To get you started, here’s an example of one of the emails I used in the activation part of the campaign to encourage users to take the key action of adding captures:

After running this campaign for a few months, I learned it’s best to:

1. Keep interactive demos short

Ideally, they should be 3 to 7 steps and focus on the main action you want them to take next. The key is to give people the information they need without overwhelming them.

2. Use interactive demos strategically

Originally, I just sent one interactive demo at the beginning of the freemium plan drip.

But I soon realized that I could place them at key moments in the journey — where they may be getting lost or need an extra push in the right direction. The interactive demos I added to the activation part of the drip got the most engagement by far (more on that next).

With that said, try to make your emails and interactive demos as contextual as possible. In other words, only send users information about multiple use cases if users are in a position where they’re considering other use cases.

3. Include CTAs

Be explicit about what you want users to do, both in your email and in each of your interactive demos. And keep the message consistent.

For example, in the activation stage of the drip, I want to get users back into the product and take the next action — create captures. So, my CTA in the email and in the captures-focused interactive demo points them to their demo instance.

4. Set user expectations

At the start of the sequence, I explained that we’d be sending several emails over the next few weeks with interactive demos to walk users through how to use Navattic and incorporate it into their workflow.

Level-setting from the get-go caught people’s attention and stopped them from deleting our emails right away — they knew they would get something valuable.

Most of our engagement occurs in the activation stage. It’s exciting for users to get access to a new tool and figure out how it works.

We’re trying to make the most of that high intent to use Navattic by giving users the most value-add upfront.

Unsurprisingly, the reactivation drip has the least engagement. We’re experimenting with catchy subject lines, copy, and value-add content to get them back into their free plan. And I will say some people have returned and then converted to a paid plan.

Another thing we’ve done is send users an email after they’ve opened the modal to schedule a demo with our team in one of our interactive demos but didn’t follow through.

We try not to be super pushy, and we only send it once. Here’s what it looks like, for reference:

One more tip: Celebrate milestones

For us, a user publishing their first demo is a big celebration moment.

We send users an email congratulating them on their accomplishment and explaining where they can go next with Navattic — using, you guessed it, an interactive demo.