How Clockwork Attracts New Customers and Discovers Key Business Insights With Arcade

Learn about how Clockwork published over 10 demos...and learned which use case had 5x engagement

Clockwork Uses Arcade to:

  • Demo an overview of the product on its homepage.
  • Share interactive product updates in blog posts.
  • Create interactive videos and tooltips to share best practices with customers via email.


When an emerging software company wants to reel in new users, a free trial often does the trick. But that wasn’t working for Alex Wunderlich, VP of Product at Clockwork, a financial planning and analysis platform. Even with a trial offer, getting prospective users to understand Clockwork’s value was challenging.  

Because the trial requires integration into a user’s accounting system, including sensitive financial data, people were sometimes hesitant to take the plunge. “That’s a big hurdle when you’re not really sure what the product even does, or if it solves your problem,” says Alex, who also runs marketing and data analysis for the company. To usher prospective customers past that initial step in the trial and actually connect their data, he needed an easy way to show exactly what Clockwork could do. 

He tried static screenshots, but those weren’t capturing the full power of the platform or how you’d use it. Images by themselves lacked context. A “features” page full of screenshots and text was no better—users would lose interest and just drop off. Same with a two-minute iMovie walk-through of the product on the homepage, and that’s not to mention the time-consuming task of updating the iMovie every time Clockwork added a new feature. Without a larger team to support such marketing efforts, it was hard enough to put together a low-quality video, let alone update it.  

Then Alex found Arcade. Using Arcade’s flow builder, Alex was able to quickly create a demo for Clockwork’s homepage that gives potential customers an interactive walkthrough of the product and its most compelling features, without asking them to start a free trial.

“Arcade was so easy to set up and use,” says Alex. “Our CEO was worried that I was spending a lot of time setting it up. I told him that it literally took five minutes.”

Any time Clockwork launches a new key feature, Alex is able to add that into the existing demo in a few minutes. Much more efficient than, say, creating a bunch of screenshots and captions, or re-editing an entire iMovie demo.

The flexibility of the “Arcades”—interactive demos—themselves is a huge selling point for the Clockwork team too. They can try using them in different ways across the website, on blog posts, and in emails to customers, seeing what works best without a ton of overhead. 

After some experimentation, Clockwork has deployed more than 10 Arcades across their blogs, changelogs, and website. Alex says he’s also constantly learned something new about how to optimize Clockwork’s marketing messaging through analytics available through Arcade’s platform. Seeing how users interact with each Arcade, he’s able to pull insights that help him tweak messaging and actually boost inbound leads. For example, when he noticed that an Arcade showing a particular feature (one that lets financial professionals adjust growth rates in models) was getting 5x the conversion of others, he knew where to direct future marketing efforts. So Arcade has become an essential piece of Clockwork’s marketing toolbox. “I think everyone with a software product they sell on a website would use it if they knew about it,” says Alex.

Final Thoughts

To wrap up, we asked Alex what he’d tell other product and marketing leaders who are thinking about using Arcade: 

“Just try it. It's only going to take you a couple of minutes to put an Arcade together, and you’ll see the results for yourself. I’d say probably 99 out of 100 times, an Arcade will get more engagement than a regular image.” 

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