"Book a demo" vs. "Get started" - When is which better?
Some SaaS products use "Book a demo" instead of "Get Started" (or similar) for their call-to-action.
Anyone have experience about when which was better? Any general rules to apply, or how you tested it?
I guess in one case, you get the lead and can always follow up. Whereas a demo might scare off people who are just mildly curious. I often do demos for new users, and get good feedback on them, so i'm considering whether I should try switching my CTA.
Interested to hear your thoughts!
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It usually depends on how complex and hard to get started with the product is. If you suspect your target audience won't be able to activate without your help (because they're not technical enough, your in-app onboarding is not good enough yet, or just that the product is hard in its nature), then requiring them to go through a demo may be a good solution. If the product is simple enough, go with the self-serve option.
You can also allow users to sign up without a demo and then offer it as an additional 'product training' after they've started to use the product.
If you're not sure which one to choose, just use them both and make one the primary option, and the other one a ghost button (as Mixpanel does for example). Then, keep an eye on which segment of users performs better down the funnel in terms of activation and retention. For example, you may notice that the majority of users who select the self-serve road convert to customers at a much lower rate. Or, even if they do convert to customer, their retention is much worse than that of the other segment.
Hope this makes sense ;)
Makes a lot of sense! Our onboarding is definitely not refined, but I'd say the big challenge is that since it's an analytics tool, our "empty state" is really damn empty. So unless you've collected a fair amount of data already it can be hard to explore and understand the features. There's really not much to "do" after you've set up.
I like the idea of the two buttons, perhaps I'll try that. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
The best for me to try a SaaS product is providing a demo account (all fake data is OK) without booking or signing up. That can let me see how it actual works, what's feature you have, what's you can do, for free without considering anything. Really straightforward and clear.
There is no secret data or technical barrier for most of time. If I don't know you and your company, why I need to send you data and waiting for your response, and then getting an account, and spending time to read documentation, and setting up my product (installing SDK, adding code or something), sharing my product data to your server...?
At one glance, "Book a demo" sounds professional and "Get Started" sounds a bit friendly. While I do not have any experience in using either of them, I can tell you from the psychological perspective.
When you say to book a demo, people always know in their mind that "this is a demo, not full product and most probably, i will have to pay for the full part". That thing, hinders the mind and is always going on in their mind, even if their taking the demo. It is not the same case with "Get started". As a layman, It feels that we are already beginning to use it and thus, we are part of it. I hope you get the point, I am trying to explain here.
Why are you asking our opinions when you could be A/B testing it yourself?
@momoko
I agree with most of what is posted here - some great insights.
I would also say - what stage is your business? If you're still in a product market fit stage, then I would be taking calls day and night. Especially if they convert better, and increase your understanding of the buyer persona and problem.
hey olly! Yes i do loads of demos and get enthusiastic feedback from them, but i don't make them a requirement for people to sign up. hence i was wondering if people have experience making a demo required to get started and if there was anything they learned by doing that.
I can speak from my experience from splitbee.io
Mostly B2B products or projects that have big competition offer a "Book a demo" CTA.
We added it because people that are researching analytics tools for companies just book a demo on multiple services to get an overview of all features and can just ask a couple of questions without having to research a lot.
So it highly depends on the product itself and complexity as @kacper already mentioned.
We also want to create an A/B test for this one in the future.
For now, we just tested "Get Started" vs "Start free trial"
hey tobias! we're also building an analytics tool, but for smaller/solo businesses. part of that fact (being an analytics tool) makes me think requiring a demo might be better because onboarding in an analytics tool is a bit boring when you have no data yet? curious if you've had the same experience.
Ah - for affilimate? :)
An interactable demo is amazing for non-enterprise customers I think. I also want to implement that - but it's not that easy to implement.
I just have "Book a demo" to get a 1:1 call with me - I showcase the platform and they ask questions or they have requirements that I can answer.
Yeah that's a great idea. Definitely hard as you said, given the data would need to be updated daily. Our tool also involves heatmaps so it would be pretty complex to "fake it". I typically do a demo using my live site :)
Maybe I could indeed include a secondary CTA and try that! Thanks for your input.
I would say it depends on the focus of the product and who the target user is. Don't think there is a general rule in this, some also have a "Start for FREE" CTA. Test both, until you have tested them you won't know which one works better for you
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That's what I was worried about! Some other comments suggest having two buttons, which could be an easy way to test it without the risk of totally turning off visitors who avoid human interaction (i.e. lots of us ahaha)