“People nowadays don’t want to get phone calls from sales...they want to check out products themselves.” — Ariel Long, Growth Hacker at Bynder

The way that Bynder, a leading Digital Asset Management solution, has been selling was 100% through personalized sales demos. Each demo lasted up to 2 hours, and required preparation and commitment from both Bynder’s sales rep and the prospect.

The sales-heavy process was hard to scale as Bynder grew, and it didn’t give prospects the opportunity to play around with the product in-depth and in their own time.

Jack Saville, SEO Specialist at Bynder, helped champion the problem:

“If we had continued down the personalized demo path, we would have lost potential clients and would also have spent an unnecessary number of sales hours guiding potential clients through our demo”

So, Bynder decided to build a new self-service demo app that let users explore the product on their own.

Why Bynder added guidance to their self-service demo app

Prospects access Bynder’s demo app directly from the home page. Access to the demo app is limited to 14 days to add urgency to a prospect’s evaluation process.

Bynder typically sells to global enterprises with a lot of digital assets to manage, and“because of Bynder’s immense number of different features, it can be quite complicated.” As Jack described, even with the new demo app in place:

“Prospective customers might get confused as to how the software works and can get lost in the number of different options.”

Robust software products often need a little guidance. Jack and his colleague Ariel Long, Bynder’s sole Growth Hacker, recognized this need, and decided to implement Appcues to create guided tours.

With Appcues, Jack and Ariel hoped to better introduce the demo app to users in order to drive engagement and convert trial users to paid customers.

“Appcues helps the customer to know exactly how our software works as fast as possible.”

— Jack Saville

How Bynder drives self-service demo engagement with Appcues

For user onboarding

To ensure that users would understand the value of the demo app right from the start, Bynder built their demo app’s user onboarding experience using Appcues.

Understanding that they were taking away from a traditional sales conversation, Bynder creates a friendly welcome message with a video introduction from its CEO, Chris Hall, with expectation-setting details.

The video and rest of copy in the welcome message emphasize support, which reassures users who may want to contact sales with specific questions. To spruce it up, Bynder personalizes the experience immediately by greeting users by their first name, “Hi Julia.” They do this by merging the user-property into the modal.

Despite being built in a third party tool, Bynder’s welcome message looks native to their product in every way. Their brand colors and fonts are thoroughly apparent—just as one might expect from a company focused on enabling brand consistency. 

Appcues makes this easy. A WYSIWYG styling editor let Bynder customize the look of their messages and walkthroughs globally:

For further product adoption

After the initial onboarding tour, prospects are free to play around with the demo app. To drive users deeper into each feature or module, Bynder uses Appcues-built product tours.

Here’s how Jack describes the experience:

“The user is free to explore the software themselves, and Appcues is there to help the user along the way. This all means that the customer is able to quickly understand how our digital asset management software can benefit them, which means they are more likely to buy! 

Appcues acts as our ‘in demo’ sales team!”

Here’s an example of how Bynder uses Appcues to drive deeper user engagement:

Bynder uses two-step modal window series to introduce the “Creative Projects” feature. They use each modal to explain the benefits and how it works respectively just as a sales person would.

Users are also guided with unobstructive hotspots that draw a user’s attention to specific, targeted actions. Here’s an example of how Bynder uses a hotspot to entice users to pick a project:

To determine which actions are most valuable, Bynder combines hard CRM data with qualitative user research.

Bynder uses this modal window-to-hotspot pattern throughout the demo product.

For user feedback

Ever determined to improve the user experience, Ariel used a modal window to create a survey to collect feedback. She built the survey entirely with an Appcues form, preferring it over the look of an embedded survey.

When asked “Did you find the tutorial tour helpful?,” 80% of users gave a resounding yes.

On top of that, the survey had a 60% completion rate, which shows pretty high engagement overall. Some users, roughly 10%, even provided valuable qualitative feedback that Ariel used to simplify the experience.

Ariel describes how she uses Appcues to continuously improve the customer experience: 

“UX should always be user-centric. Appcues provides the opportunities to gather both hard and soft data.”

Appcues’ ability to collect feedback and offer user insights helps Bynder continuously improve the engagement of the product tours.

Finding more use cases for Appcues

Since implementing the free trial demo app with Appcues, Bynder has increased the speed of it’s sales cycle—including both its original sales process and the self-service demo—from MQL to SQL by 9%. Bynder no longer had the problem of overwhelming the wrong prospects with lengthy demos.

The self-service demo app is still a new project for Bynder. They’ve just rolled it out for all languages in October, but they’ve already seen nearly 20% of their SQLs come in from the self-serve demo experience. Prospects who come in through this channel process not only require less hand-holding from sales at any later conversations, but are often more informed about Bynder’s capabilities.  

Ariel and Jack are already working on ways to optimize the experience and using Appcues to help. They’re looking into Appcues to help find different users’ aha! moments and to set up a paywall after the self-service demo is over, allowing users to start using the product without ever talking to sales.