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Demo success? Conversion rate skyrocketed after making an interactive live demo

We made a live demo for our free Twitter tool and our conversions have skyrocketed. In this post I'm going to explain why. If you're struggling with a low conversion rate, a live demo might be something you could try since it both explains what your product does and convinces people that your product is for real.

For our demo, you put in your Twitter handle and at least one sitemap and it'll show you what your actual Twitter profile could look like with Cohoist Autopilot.

Cohoist Autopilot Demo

For those that don't know, Cohoist Autopilot lets you pick up to 10 websites and it'll automatically tweet one of their articles every 4 hours without you having to schedule a thing. It's a great way to passively build authority in your niche and a cool way to recycle your own blog content if you have a blog.

For our demo, you can enter up to 10 sitemaps or you can choose one of our preset configurations - just like our actual product.

Cohoist Demo Form

One of the lessons we learned is that it's extremely important to make your demo as simple as possible for your users. This seems obvious, but it really does make a difference. If you're able to, get some cold users to test and provide feedback because you're likely taking the complexity of some of the steps for granted.

When we launched our demo, we didn't have any presets, we didn't display a default timeline and we didn't have an easy way for people to find sitemaps. We added a bunch of preset categories, added a default timeline that appears before the form is filled and we even built a sitemap finder to make it as easy as possible for people to customize it for their own interests.

In addition to being great for warming an organic audience, a second byproduct of our demo is that's been a fantastic cold marketing tool - which is something we really struggled with before the demo. With our live demo, we can now send people links that prefill and submit the form so they can land on a landing page literally customized just for them. Their Twitter profile automatically appears with posts we think would be appealing to them. To demonstrate, here's a custom link focused on startups for @NickFreiling, who recently made a post on IH about not being able to gain traction on Twitter.

The bottom line is, building an interactive demo for your product can be even more work than building your actual product, but it really can make a difference when convincing people to join. I hope you found our experience encouraging! If you want to see our demo, check it out here and feel free to ask me any questions you might have about it.

  1. 2

    Congrats! Funny thing, I'm working on something similar - interactive tutorials!
    I hope to be posting a new version that includes a interactive tutorial later today -- and then create another 5 or 6 until Monday.

    If you'd like to check it out - https://cinematicstudio.app 😁

    1. 2

      Very cool! Keep me posted on how those interactive tutorials work for you!

      1. 1

        Thanks, will do😁Fyi, just released the update that contains the first interactive tutorial 😛

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