Why Add Calls To Action To Your Customer Onboarding Video

Jan 03, 2023

Every customer success professional knows that if you successfully onboard your customers and get them productive, they’ll continue to use your product. If not, they’re likely to drop you for another solution. This is especially true for companies that are running a product led growth motion. A successful onboarding is their chance to turn a new customer into a product champion and activate a powerful growth loop, or lose them to churn. Read on to learn 

• What you lose by not adding CTAs
• Why putting your video on YouTube doesn’t help you
• What CTAs you should add
• Why per-viewer analytics are important
• What to look for in a video hosting platform 

What you lose if you don’t add CTAs

Here are just a few examples of what you will miss out on if you don’t add calls to action (CTAs) to your customer support videos:

1. You don’t know which features your customers are having trouble with
2. You don’t find out that a customer is having trouble and likely to churn
3. You miss out on chances to upsell your customers

I’m sure you can think of others

Why YouTube doesn’t help with CTAs

Many customer success videos end up on YouTube. It's free but there’s a catch! You can link to your website from info cards and end screens only if you are in the YouTube Partner Program. All other links keep the viewer on YouTube.

This is a problem for many SaaS providers. To join the YouTube Partner Program, you need to have 4000 public watch hours in the last year. If you don’t have a large collection of videos and a  large user base, it will take significant effort to qualify.

What does this mean for most businesses?  If you want to drive customers to your website, you have to add calls to action in the description of your video, not in the video itself. If, like many viewers, you’re wondering where that section is, look below your video, then tap “show more” to see the entire description. That’s where you add your CTA links and hope that viewers will tap “show more” and find them.

Which CTAs should you add

There are at least three calls to action you should add to any video, even if they do have to go in the description of your YouTube video

• Links to related videos and a link to a list of all videos you have available
• A link to a Slack channel, or other chat, where you offer help
• A link to schedule a meeting with someone on your team.

One of these CTAs will assist most viewers who are looking for help. You may be tempted to add all three CTAs to each of your videos. If you’re adding them in the description of your video on YouTube you don’t really have a choice so go ahead. 

If you’re using a more sophisticated video tool you can place different CTAs at different points in your video. You might add a CTA that recommends a more detailed video at the end of a particular onboarding topic or chapter, for example. Then, you might add a link to your Slack channel and perhaps a link to book a meeting with you at the end of the video. 

This is better than most onboarding videos but it’s still a static and limited approach. All your viewers get the same treatment. In my opinion, what you really want to do is to present different CTAs to different viewers, depending on who they are and which parts of this video or other videos they’ve watched.

Per-viewer analytics guide you to the right CTAs

Unfortunately most video platforms don’t give you the analytics you need to present the right CTA at the right time.. Most video hosting platforms don’t accumulate analytics for each viewer. They provide aggregate analytics only., and that limits you to a “one size fits all” approach. Since you don’t know which call to action is appropriate for a particular viewer, you have to present the same CTAs to all viewers. 

Let's consider how your CTA strategy might change if you had per-viewer analytics available to you. In that case, you would have detailed information about each viewer. You may not necessarily know who they are, but you would still know whether they had viewed this video or other videos previously. 

If your video hosting platform provides chapter analytics, you would also know which chapters they had viewed in this session and perhaps in previous sessions. Now, you could make intelligent decisions about what CTA to present when. Consider the following two viewers

1. One is viewing this video for the first time. You might present this viewer with pointers to more information as they view different chapters in your video
2. The second viewer has viewed this chapter previously, as have other viewers from the same company. If this chapter deals with a critical product feature, this behavior should set off alarm bells. It's likely that the customer is having trouble implementing your product. Not only should you present this customer with an opportunity to chat with your support team instantly, you should also alert your sales team to schedule a call with them. 
3. If  a chapter deals with a feature that is only available in a premier edition of your product, it presents an opportunity to upsell the customer. Again you would want to present a special offer or alert your sales team to connect with the customer.

What video hosting platforms must support

A video hosting platform that can add targeted calls to action to a customer support video needs to have these minimum features

1. Give you the ability to add chapters or topics to your video.
2. Let you add calls to action to a chapter
3. Accumulate per-viewer analytics. If you need aggregate analytics, they can always be computed from the per-viewer numbers
4. Present different CTAs to different viewers based on their viewing history

Sadly, most video hosting platforms don’t support much of this. Youtube and many other platforms provide chapters but don’t let you do much with them. And very few, if any, accumulate per viewer analytics. There is one platform that does, so if what I’ve talked about here interests you, read on.

AudienceGraph

AudienceGraph is a video hosting platform with a twist. You get to keep your videos where they are currently hosted - YouTube, Vimeo or a platform of your choice.  AudienceGraph “wraps” each video in an AI cloud that automatically presents the right CTA to each viewer at the right time based on what they’ve watched previously. Keep your videos on YouTube or wherever else you host them, just wrap them in AudienceGraph!. Wrap your first video here.