When you search for something on the Net, one of the top three things that come up is videos. It doesn't matter whether they show how to fold your clothes properly or explain quantum physics in detail because people watch them no matter what.
Or at least people who are interested in the subject will watch as they are more engaging than texts. That's why nobody could deny that videos are very popular nowadays.
Thus, it isn't surprising that onboarding videos are in great demand as well.
Since videos can lessen the time spent on a page by offering all the steps without any distractions, e.g., overly-used pop-ups or lengthy explanations, they are marvelous helpers that ensure interaction during the onboarding process.
Before delving any further, let's define what video onboarding is.
What is an Onboarding Video?
Video onboarding presents the product features and your company value to your users/customers via videos during the onboarding period. For example, you could put some of the steps involved within the onboarding process into a video that would greet your users once they start their onboarding.
With ease, you might benefit from onboarding with video by displaying your product as it would inform of your product or service. Fortunately, there are types of onboarding videos that you could choose from employee onboarding videos to customer onboarding videos. Adding video content to your user onboarding flow would also boost your retention rate.
These types of videos are able to:
- intrigue new customers,
- assist and inform customers to make sure that they enjoy the most satisfying user experience,
- improve both customer retention and employee retention,
- instruct new users and convince prospects to invest in your product or service,
- display and demonstrate a product, service, brand, company, or idea.
Why Should You Use Onboarding Videos?
Because onboarding videos are amazing sidekicks when it comes to conveying what you say in a concise and engaging manner, and components of effective onboarding quite often as they can welcome your users and display your product or service exhaustively.
Nowadays, people tend to use videos for anything, and thus they even convert the written content on their site into video content. This decision is rightfully justified as there are a lot of benefits that come with interactive videos. Here are some of the benefits of video onboarding:
1- Easier to Apply for Users
No matter how complicated your product or service is, a series of videos can make it easier to understand in seconds. If your audience doesn't see the value of your product or service due to the dull and long texts, try switching up to videos, and see how it affects the entire process.
Keep in mind that your users' initial experience with your product is of high importance as that is when they decide if your product or service is worthy of exploring more or not. That's why you have to make sure that all they have is a positive experience in the end.
2- Useful for Employee Onboarding
An employee onboarding video could put your employees on the right track by onboarding them successfully.
Provided that the onboarding video consists of a warm welcome, the introduction of your product or service, company culture and goals, and a training process regarding the employees' position and department, it is safe to say that the employees' onboarding experiences would be more than satisfactory.
3- Creates Emotional Connection
Videos generate memorable onboarding experiences due to their inspirational position within the human mind; they can easily evoke our emotions, which makes them powerful. Suppose you can use this to your advantage within the onboarding process. In that case, it is highly likely that not only the customer retention will increase but also brand loyalty will be built through emotional connection.
4- Users Control their Learning Process
Using videos throughout the onboarding allows users to schedule themselves according to their time and needs. Consequently, users can explore the product on their own thanks to the videos when they wish to do so.
5- Customer Support Team Can Take a Breather
The customer support team helps out both new users who are trying to understand the features which are new to them and existing users who could use a helping hand with a fairly new feature. However, if you succeed in video onboarding and put out instructional onboarding videos, your customer support team will start answering fewer questions.
10 Steps to Creating Good Onboarding Videos
Onboarding videos are virtual models that assist new users by providing the fundamentals to make the most of your product. Also, it can help equip the new employees with the essential information to get them familiar with your company and its policies.
However, it is quite important to scrutinize every step when designing a user onboarding flow with videos because they are helpful only if you know how to apply them correctly.
Everything aside, this is where you make your first impression. Therefore, you need to have a successful onboarding that is easy to comprehend and sufficient. Apart from that, these are the steps that will help you create good onboarding videos:
1- Settle on an Onboarding Video Type
Your onboarding video must have a purpose already. However, what you need to do is to decide which onboarding video type could be the best fit to achieve this goal.
- Do you wish to present a demo of your product to boost sales?
- Do you wish to enlighten your customers via instructional videos?
You might start asking yourself these questions and alike in order to plan out the road you'll take.
Here are some of the most trendy onboarding video types of 2022:
- Interactive Videos
- Demo Videos
- Animated Onboarding Videos
- Live-Action Videos
2- Customize Onboarding
You must ask some personal questions after the sign-up in order to successfully divide your users into segments because they might have very different goals that they're trying to achieve by using your product. Onwards, you should try to detect the problems they encounter and come up with solutions.
Also, you should offer onboarding checklists according to the segmentation that you've done to align your product to your customers' expectations.
3- Make Use of Onboarding Videos on Your Homepage
Your homepage makes the perfect place to show an onboarding video because your audience could witness your product's worth and what they could achieve when using your product beforehand, which would only end up with high conversion rates.
It doesn't matter whether you put a welcoming video or informative video which is directly related to the product or service since your main page is where you could do your own marketing with minimum effort because your prospects are already there to see your product.
4- Indicate Where Your Support Center Is
No matter how good your overall user onboarding is, your users might still have something to ask.
For that reason, you should always reveal where they can obtain more information about the product.
It can be leading them to the support center or escorting them to a page where they can find more about all product features and functions on their own.
5- Add Videos to Tooltips
Many onboarding processes contain tooltips to help your users and customers. Even though tooltips are very useful for showing the core functions of the product, they might be a little boring to follow throughout the whole process.
That's why you should enhance the process by adding videos to the tooltips. In addition, your audience could witness every action without any worry as they can pause and replay any time.
6- Include Videos in Help Center and FAQ Section
Whenever a customer is in need of help, they consult to the help center and FAQ page. However, one thing is common among these pages: They are long and full of texts.
Yet that isn't what customers look for; they are looking for answers and they want to reach them as soon as possible.
This exhausting process is more like looking for a needle in a haystack, but you have the power to change this by adding videos for your audience to easily find what they actually are looking for. Additionally, having short and informative videos on the help center and FAQ pages will decrease customer support costs.
7- Attach Videos in Welcome Emails
After first-time users sign up for your product, you are to send them a warm welcome email.
As many businesses send dry "first tasks" emails, maybe you could try something new and add a video for your users to watch and listen instead of reading.
It definitely is a way to elevate customer experience in an innovative sense.
8- Offer Onboarding Videos During Free Trials
Free trials are free for a limited amount of time. During that period, what you need to seek is the ways to keep these users. You need to convince them to stay and keep using your product or service long after the end of the free trial.
Provide your users with onboarding videos in order to maintain user engagement on a different level.
9- Promote the Perks Once Again
During the onboarding process you might have emphasized what the users gain from using your product or service, but never forget that what's out of sight is also out of mind. Therefore, it would be best if you could use every chance you have to promote the key benefits.
This time instead of using a modal window or tooltip, try using a video listing the perks coming with the usage of your product on the homepage, landing pages, or even attached to emails.
10- Split Sessions into Shorter Chunks
Nobody would want to spend 20 minutes on an onboarding video; they would either stop paying attention to it or skip it. Therefore, what you need to do is split a session into shorter chunks to be able to maintain user engagement in videos.
Conclusion
Video onboarding is a very helpful practice that runs to users' aid when they are tired of reading long, long, long texts. Therefore, they should be included in the onboarding process more, but you should be careful not to overdo it - e.g., using it all the time and everywhere.
If you know how and when to use videos, then you can provide your users with an effective onboarding process that will bring about a happy user experience.
After checking out the steps above, you should be able to put video onboarding in a more solid place in your onboarding flow.
Frequently Asked Questions
1- How do you make an onboarding video?
By observing the needs and expectations of the users and providing them with those two. The process is just like using another tool in onboarding, however, this time you record them for your audience to see the steps before doing them on their own.
2- Do people watch onboarding videos?
Yes, they do. Mostly due to the fact that they want to pause when they have another thing to do, and replay when they miss a step during the onboarding process. This is why customer success people should put more importance on video onboarding.
