The importance of SaaS customer onboarding & how to create an enjoyable experience using video
A product walkthrough/ product tour video aids in making the user onboarding process efficient helps in creating a good first impression of the SaaS and improves product adoption rates.
More than 85% of people say they prefer to purchase from a SaaS that invests in welcoming and educational onboarding content for new users.
Gone are the days when product tour videos were only automated versions of feature overview videos. They are now an integral part of the user’s experience, influencing the engagement and adoption of the SaaS.
Many brands take the assistance of product tours or product walkthrough videos to diligently guide the new users into finding their bearings and actively introducing them to the UI of the SaaS.
Product tour videos help in decomplexifying the SaaS, helping with the learning curve, and teaching how to use key features that are most relevant to the user.
Product tour videos use combinations of different UI showcasing techniques such as beacons, tooltips, short explainer videos, pop-ups, and interactive walkthroughs to aid in learning the ways of SaaS, thereby also increasing customer retention rates.
Read More: Directory of SaaS Product Demo Videos
1. Personalize: For a more personal experience, segment your SaaS product tours based on user roles.
2. Length: The leads can abandon the product tour before taking the key action if the video takes too long to show the value of your SaaS.
3. Design consistency: While adding product tour UI patterns to your SaaS tool make sure there is no mismatch of colors or style for a seamless adoption.
4. Address the ‘Why’: Motivate engagement by focusing the data of your prompts and tips on why the SaaS would be beneficial to them.
5. Updates: Study analytics and update with changes to make the product tour video more effective for onboarding.
Read More: What’s Right for My SaaS Business —
In-House Video Production, Freelancers, or a Video Production Agency?
Why we like it: The video immediately addresses the pain points of the user and quickly explains how Stackby can solve them. The colors and styles resonate with the branding of the company and further aid in knowledge retention and recollection by the user.
It makes the viewer comfortable by using hooks from tools that the user is familiar with. The video length is perfect for showcasing how the UI works, what the benefits are, and how Stackby brings together tables, spreadsheets, databases, and business APIs in a single customizable platform.
Why we like it: This video tour functions as a tutorial and is a part of a series of videos, each one teaching a feature of Squarespace to the user. The tutorial shows how Squarespace works for website building and hosting, as the user here works on adding products to their store.
The voiceover is soothing and engaging while the pop-ups with real-time screen recording provide for an almost interactive experience. This product tour helps in gaining factual insight into how Squarespace allows users to use pre-built website templates and drag-and-drop elements to create and modify web pages.
Read More: Guide to improving your SaaS product usage via videos
Why we like it: The video starts with the engaging speaker establishing a human connection as she addresses the pain points of managing a project. She then goes on to highlight with the help of the UI that instead of using spreadsheets, whiteboards, or other project management tools, Asana helps any type of team plan, collaborate on, and track their projects.
Her ‘top tips’ highlight all of Asana’s features that will help in easy and powerful project management. The UI represents their colors and branding, and the entire video is upbeat and engaging, with the woman’s voice guiding the user through to the software.
Why we like it: The video takes you on a complete walkthrough of Evernote. Brittany takes over to explain how Evernote Home is a one-stop dashboard that consists of widgets designed to put the most relevant information front and center in a simple, organized view.
The tour guides you through the UI in real-time, with Brittany in a pop-up window next to the UI screen. The overall experience is welcoming and the video is detailed enough for strong user onboarding for note-taking, organizing, task management, and archiving through Evernote.
Why we like it: With highly engaging human characters and bright colors the video keeps you hooked from the get go. It immediately addresses the pain points of starting a podcast and the solutions that Anchor offers.
The rest of the video takes you through a detailed tour of the benefits provided by this SaaS, all on its bright and fun UI using beacons, alerts, and icons to grab the viewer’s attention. The overall color scheme is pleasing and coherent with the brand. The pop-ups help in understanding the iScout better.
Why we like it: The video begins by outlining what all that this app can do and then quickly skips on to explaining its workings of it. The video looks interactive and is engaging, and sticks to the colors and fonts from the branding.
The short length is apt and with simple screen recordings, the video takes you through the basics of monday.com. A clever method used in this video is to provide visual breaks by including real-life footage of people working in different environments.
Using hotspots and pop-ups the video easily explains how to track workloads, how to do integrations with outside services, how to use the privacy settings, and how to automate manual processes. The upbeat and enthusiastic voiceover keeps the video light and fun.
Why we like it: The video starts by hitting the solutions to pain points, and highlighting the benefits in terms of how InsideView can help in discovering and engaging a new lead.
It uses simple screen recordings to showcase different sections of the SaaS and how it will allow sales and marketing teams to aggregate and curate information about target markets, segments, and organizations. The length is ideal and the colors and styles are consistent.
Why we like it: The starting of the video underlines the main purpose of this SaaS. This product tool video uses a combination of techniques to grab the attention of the user and explain it as a platform for financial forecasting, headcount planning, and KPI dashboards.
Animations incorporated with screen recordings of the UI help in understanding Pry better while pop-ups engage and explain the features. Beacons highlight crucial elements by casting the spotlight on small elements. The color scheme and styles are soothing and the voiceover is steady and easy to follow. The video ends with a powerful CTA.
Why we like it: Since Intercom is a product tour-making platform their video is crisp, straightforward, and delivers the point home. The pop-up window with the woman speaking helps in establishing a human connection and keeps the user engaged as she explains the features and benefits of this SaaS.
It also helps in explaining why different sets of product tours are important to engage users at different stages of adoption and how to send it across various platforms and formats, all in Intercom’s classic branding colors.
Read More: How can SaaS Companies Boost User Engagement With Videos?
Why we like it: It begins with highlighting the logo and branding of the SaaS. The entire video has Tapcart being used on a mobile device or on a laptop to establish familiarity and easy accessibility for the user.
The animations incorporated with showcasing the hotspots, the addition of textual data to anchor the point and interactive pop-ups keep the viewer engaged throughout the length of the video.
The video explains how it helps you to build dedicated pages and how each block offers a different user experience for your customers to engage with on your app.
Why we like it: Placing a friendly and enthusiastic human face at the beginning of the video immediately loops people into watching the product tour.
Even though Mailchimp is primarily an email marketing service for managing mailing lists and creating email marketing campaigns to send to customers, this video explains the unique feature of Mailchimp that helps to create an online store. Cody, from Mailchimp, explains the benefits of this SaaS and then takes you through the process of creating a store, adding a product, and publishing the store.
The video is highly helpful as it shows Cody, in a popup window, working on the UI in real-time. The length is crisp, the colors and branding are clear and the UI screen recording is broken by chunks of human footage as the user watches this man talking and interacting. The end screen points the user in the direction of other such videos for help.
Read More: How to Use Video Content to grow your SaaS email list?
Why we like it: This video started with the introduction of Hadas, who will be showing the user different ways to add animations to the designs and how to create and edit basic videos with Canva, which is essentially a graphic design platform.
She defines what the end product will look like and then guides the user through the different tools and features of Canva in real-time. Whether it is putting up engaging text, relevant images, or applying animation to all these different elements, the user is comfortable in watching the creation of the video and is now equipped with enough knowledge to replicate the process.
Why we like it: From the onset, the SaaS explainer video shows how cloud guard is a solution for cloud email and productivity suite security and how it works for all email-related tools.
The colors and font pulsate with the company’s branding. The video then proceeds to demonstrate a section of the onboarding process, step-by-step in a way that takes the user through the UI in a comprehensible way. It has no fancy effects but does a good job at achieving its purpose through simple screen recordings of the usage of the SaaS.
Why we like it: The video begins with underlining how iScout optimizes safety management, equipment management, offerening instant alerts, custom reporting and online training and tracking, etc. It also covers how iScout can be used on all platforms and devices. With the help of its UI, the video shows different features and activities on different devices to keep the viewers engaged.
| Software | Pricing | G2 | Capterra | Top Features |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Appcues |
Essentials Plan: $249 per month Expanded Growth Plan: $879 per month |
4.7 | 4.8 |
- Interactive user onboarding - Strong integration suite - Options for segmenting and targeting users - Extreme Customization - Provides turnkey NPS prompts and custom surveys - Analytics of product tour performance |
| Whatfix | Custom quotes | 4.5 | 4.7 |
- No-code in-app messaging creation - Real-time user feedback - Supports Google Analytics - Smart contextualization - Quick content creation - Custom branding for product tours - Seamless integrations with other applications - Multilingual support |
| Intercom | $149 per month | 4.4 | 4.5 |
- Code-free and seamless integration - Segmented audience targeting - Integrates with more than 300 apps - Creates a coherent Multipage tours - personalized borderless video tours - Click-to-advance for customers |
| UserPilot |
Growth Plan: $249 per month Enterprise Plan: $749 per month |
4.7 | 4.6 |
- Provides growth insights - lets you gather User sentiment - wide range of one-click integrations - Segmentation and targeting - A/B testing - translation service provides language localization |
| Pendo | Custom quotes | 4.5 | 4.5 |
- Comprehensive product analytics - Allows qualitative and quantitative user feedback - Custom User segmentation based on breakdown of user demographics - Helps you visualize strategy with Product roadmap - Web and mobile guides - Broad range of integrations |
| Chameleon | $279 to $6,000 per month | 4.4 | 4.2 |
- Bespoke coding - Contextual and targeted microsurveys - Advanced user segmentation and targeting - Wide range of UX elements - Customizable in-product widgets/launchers for checklists |
There probably cannot be a better strategy for improving the overall user experience, feedback, and customer success of a SaaS than by investing in a product walkthrough/ product tour video.
As an add-on, listed below are some Important Benefits of SaaS Product Tour videos:
Product tour video for B2B SaaS companies is a walkthrough tour of the product for the user. In such videos, the company tries to showcase the product in action by taking up each and every feature of the product and illustrating how it works at least once on the video.
The best way to demonstrate a product is to make a product demo or product tour video. Most B2B companies tend to hire an outside agency to create professional videos that give an entire explanation of the UI and not just a peep into the product. The style and design of such videos is extremely important as it needs to resonate with the customer, to not just demonstrate the potential benefits of the product but also to tell the brand’s vision and goals regarding customer success.
A good product tour video generally is easy to understand, it can be exhaustive but not unnecessarily long and prioritizes the customer and their frequently asked questions. Product demo videos that give good ROI are generally creative with engaging motion graphics and have a human touch to them.
One of the key factors for a successful product tour or demo video or is to make it sequential in a way that it covers the features in the same flow that the user would. Providing clear and crisp instructions can go a long way for customers to retain the information. The focus needs to stay on the core benefits and value that the product is proposing to provide.
