Effective product walkthroughs are critical components of the sales, customer success, and marketing functions within software companies. When done right, they ensure clear customer understanding and product adoption - thereby increasing loyalty while reducing the risk of churn.

But beyond simply reducing user frustration and support work, effective walkthroughs can also reinforce value propositions and hightlight unique features - forming an integral part of the SaaS onboarding and expansion experience.

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to SaaS product walkthroughs, here are several best practices on how to design an effective one, using popular tools like Supademo:

Make product walkthroughs engaging and user-friendly

• Make walkthroughs interactive: guide customers step-by-step instead of relying on unengaging videos or static PDFs. For instance, guide them through a clear, cohesive flow of clicks, text entries, and feature benefits to drive engagement;
• Make walkthroughs self-paced: the customer should be able to snooze the product walkthrough and come back to it when they’re ready;
• Create multiple entry points: ideally, the customer should be able to access the walkthrough via multiple entry points - essentially “meeting customers where they are”. This includes making walkthroughs accessible in-app or out-of-app, like in support docs, onboarding playbooks, and help centers;
• Keep walkthroughs concise: make sure the product walkthrough is concise and to the point - ideally modularized enough to be less than 10 steps per walkthrough for maximum engagement;

What is the future of SaaS product walkthroughs?

In the future, customers will universally expect simple, interactive product walkthroughs within the tools they use (or are in the process of evaluating). With the growing pool of software options and shortening user attention spans, software companies will need to continually improve the walkthrough design to remain competitive.

Furthermore, as product-led growth becomes an area of focus for more companies, clear, async product walkthroughs will become more and more important.

Finally, frontier technologies like Generative AI will unlock previously unforeseen ways to reinvent product walkthroughs - whether that be via synthetic AI voice overlays, conversational flows, or instant walkthrough creation based on viewer intent and prompt.

A great SaaS product walkthrough drives user adoption and retention

At Supademo, we've analyzed hundreds of examples of how effective product walkthroughs directly translated to decreases in churn, time-to-activation, and customer support queries.

In fact, we leverage Supademo (example here) across our product on-boarding flow to help drive our customers to successful product outcomes.