A call to action is a prompt on any SaaS video or website, generally in the form of a hyperlink or button that typically uses action or command phrases like ‘Sign Up’ or ‘Free Trial’ to nudge the user to take the desired action.
A good CTA will direct your audience on what to do and where to go after the video ends. The goal for most SaaS companies is to get the consumers to watch more videos, thereby converting them into marketing qualified leads or to give up their contact information by engaging with more of your content and therefore driving up their lead score.
Hubspot analyzed 330,000+ calls to action to determine that personalized CTAs perform 202% better than non-personalized CTAs.
The key to strategic video marketing is directing your viewers to a clear next step. The best CTAs are direct and generate gravity and urgency, helping with decision fatigue and steering the user to the desired outcome.
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Whether it is getting the viewer on the landing page, or to book a meeting, or even watch more videos, the CTA for your SaaS video will depend on where your consumer is in the SaaS marketing funnel.
Videos in the awareness stage (top of the funnel) are created for the sole purpose of notifying the world about your company and what problems you can solve. Milder CTAs will promote better chances of the viewer exploring more of what your SaaS company is offering.
In the consideration stage (middle of the funnel), product overview and how-to videos work in swinging the customer in the direction of the product. Here in-depth videos can end with CTAs asking the viewer for free trials and demos.
Detailed product demo videos or customer testimonials are used in the Decision Stage (bottom of the funnel) to persuade the customer into taking the final lap and buying the product. Here the CTAs need to be enthusiastic and encouraging and should allow the users to reach you, especially through forms, asking for pricing information, or a meeting with a specialist.
| Stage | Purpose | Success metric | Type of Videos | CTAs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Awareness | Notifying the world of our presence | View count | Product marketing, Product demo videos, Repurposed webinar videos | Try, Check out our product |
| Consideration | Setting yourself up as a bankable source of quality information | Time spent by leads consuming the content | Product demo videos, How-to, Case study videos | Try, Check out our product |
| Conversion | Making a human connection | Click on CTA, request for a demo/ meeting | Product-related videos, Customer testimonials | SignUp for free trial, Request a demo |
| Retention | Cementing long-term relationships | Behavior after signing up | As applicable to Loyalty + Advocacy | SignUp for free trial, Request a demo |
| Loyalty | Focusing on THEM, not you | Behavior after signing up | Onboarding, how-to videos | Get Started, Subscribe, Book a meeting with an expert, Get pricing information, Sign up for a webinar |
| Advocacy | Continuing to add value | Number of referrals | Academy Video courses | Get Started, Subscribe, Book a meeting with an expert, Get pricing information, Sign up for a webinar |
1. Motivation
Figuring out what it is that will push your user to click on the CTA is critical. Generation of exigency can act as a great motivator. And so does scarcity.
Projecting the image that the user will miss out on the product because of shortage of supply or on a great discount offer will motivate them to immediately go to the SaaS company’s CTA.
Just changing keywords from ‘access’ to ‘uncover’, from ‘buy’ to ‘save’ or from ‘learn’ to ‘discover’ can generate mystery and excitement.
2. InformationÂ
Your strategy should be to clearly define the action. For that, the SaaS company needs to have clear goals as to where they want to take their customer next.
Some of the targets are reading a blog, watching another video, booking a demo call, or signing up for a free trial. This depends on what your company is aiming at in terms of awareness and profitability and how they want their customers to convert through their SaaS marketing funnel.
3. Clarity
Break down what emotions you want your customers to feel and what action you want them to take. A highly shortened combination of these two should provide the best outcome.
This will also reduce doubts and confusion in the user to choose your SaaS product. Be as creative as you want but don’t lose sight of the action you want to emphasize on.
With information being thrown at the user from every direction, they ultimately tend to close up their brain to new instructions. And that’s why your CTA needs to be fresh and imaginative.
Trial and error is the only way to keep improvising till your audience starts to respond more. Using time-sensitive words like ‘today’, ‘instant’, and ’till offer lasts’ can produce the desired urgency as they promise instant gratification to the user.
Fear of losing out on a great deal or a limited-time product can be an excellent motivator to push the user to hop on the bandwagon. Also with the tiny character limit, you will not have a lot of space to write descriptive lines to get your point across.
Therefore, using powerful command verbs that make the user jump and take action, makes more sense. Words like ‘buy’, ‘download’, etc. prompt quick action. CTAs work only if the client could connect to the fervor-evoking and zealous language and emotions in the video and then they are asked to click on an appropriate next step link.
An upbeat and enthusiastic CTA offering hope and a positive future would engage more users.
Even though some devices get clubbed together based on the user interface or screen size, all of them have different user behavior patterns and search intent. The users are looking for quick results and your CTA has to embody that. So, customizing the CTAs based on the device would be clever.
Offering incentives, discounts, and promotions increases traffic to the SaaS landing page. Also, people instinctively respond more to words like ‘discount’ and the numbers associated with the percentage reduction of the cost.
Even including the cost in the CTA is a good decision as the user is aware of the pricing and wants to immediately engage. But a viewer would not get motivated unless there is something in it for them.
This is directly linked to your value proposition and is the most important element of acquiring new leads. For example ‘Book your free trial now’ highlights the action to be taken and the benefit it will provide.
Even using humor or another informal language would be a great way for your SaaS company to catch the user’s attention amongst a sea of product marketing. Instead of writing a generic CTA, writing funny words or even negative stop-you-in-your-track words can be enticing.
Keeping your CTA short, simple, precise, and crisp will do wonders in promoting quicker reactions as compared to unnecessarily complicated, lengthy ones. Also align the CTAs at the end of the video with your company’s goal whether it is to take the traffic to your SaaS website, or if you need the viewer to continue watching more videos you can design the CTA accordingly.
It is your job to choose colors wisely to make the CTA pop and stand out against the rest of the space. You will therefore need to use bright colors. Also, the colors need to contrast well with the background colors of the video and the webpage.
Eliminate unnecessary middle steps to make absolutely sure that your CTAs do lead to your next goal immediately. If there are complex steps to be taken in between, the user’s attention span will fall through and he might not proceed further with the action.
Try to add visuals in the videos themselves as you ask the user to take action. You can show the viewer what you want them to do visually to add extra emphasis. This can be done by using animation graphics or even by making the person in the video point at the CTA button and talk about the action before the video ends.
The internet is flooding with blanket CTAs like ‘Sign up now’. They don’t strike the user’s consciousness anymore. So, unless the CTA states every single thing it offers specifically, the user will just tune it out.
Another thing to remember is using the same font throughout your video or the webpage you have put it on, makes your company look professional and formal. The placement of the CTAs depends on the content of your video.
If the video explains why the user needs to click on the CTA and how it would benefit him, then placing it, in the end, makes more sense.
However, if it is for something like subscribing to the series of information-giving videos, then doing it immediately at the beginning is a safer bet because the viewer might wander off from the video after the first minute.
The CTA should be positioned at that point in the timeline where you are sure the audience is convinced to proceed with the CTA.
Replacing ‘You’ with ‘My’ helps make a more concrete connection with the user as the latter is a first-person term. A small change makes a huge difference in the number of clicks and conversions. Also in some instances, this makes the CTA more precise and relevant.
It is also imperative to identify user cohorts and understand your audience. Armed with that information you can segregate the groups on the basis of where they are in their buyer journey. Also, geolocation tags can help in morphing the CTAs according to the user’s location.
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With A/B split testing, you can create two versions of your video, with two different CTAs and test them out not on the creativity of text, the colors, and crucial words CTA on the audience by showing half of them the first one and half of them the other.
You can observe which one fits into the overall design and gives you more conversions. A/B testing is for simple designs, small sample spaces, and for testing only one alternative and it is therefore limited.
Multivariate testing is an extension to A/B testing and allows testing of many combinations on a much larger sample space, but that also means you would need enough traffic on your page to try it out.
So as long as you can understand these permutations and interactions you will be able to decipher what copy works best for your SaaS video.
1. Building an email list
To get a web asset like an email list, you have to offer the viewer a lead magnet. It is something that the user receives in exchange for giving their email address. You need to map out and plan your CTA according to the resources that are available.
2. Keep people in the loop of watching more videos
You may want to get the users to engage, share and comment on the video and then move on to the next video. As your watch time increases because of binge-watching, your video starts performing better on the YouTube algorithm. Groupsets of related videos into playlists and link them on the end screen.
3. Take traffic to the website
The goal here is to direct people to your website so that they can download something. Here it is imperative that the content of your video echoes directly to your lead magnet. You can design your CTA accordingly, whether by putting a graphic next to it on the screen or the relevant URL in the description box.
What is the end screen?
It is a feature that YouTube offers, wherein a template can pop up in the last 20 seconds of your SaaS video. You can design and completely customize it by adding links and icons to more videos.
Things you can put on your video’s end cards to increase engagement:
1. Sign up for the free trial
2. Check out our product
3. Request a demo
Listed here are some call to action verbs paired used at the end of SaaS videos – Try, Get Started, Subscribe, Sign Up, Check out our product, Request a demo, SignUp for the free trial, Book a meeting with an expert, Get pricing information, Sign up for a webinar
22% of brands used product demos to get signups for their free trial while 62% of them used it to get viewers to check out their products and 16% of them wanted a demo video to get more demos booked. Check out this link to read about the analyses of product demo videos from 100 top SaaS brands.
Your CTA should be designed in a way that it resonates with the user and leads them to take the desired step for your SaaS company.
According to KissMetrics,
20% of viewers bounce from videos that are only 1 minute long and 40% of viewers bounce from videos that are 2-3 minutes long.
Therefore, CTA needs to not only be alluring and well placed but also to be able to showcase everything you offer in a few concise and exciting words. A clever CTA can be the key to converting users and increasing awareness and sales.
A few tips to creating an effective CTA for your SaaS videos are using persuasive language, making the trial look low-risk, creating a sense of urgency for the offer, using authorities words that trigger immediate action and making the CTA pop on the page by using bright colors and good design.
The call to action or CTA is the last part of any SaaS product video and is the most conclusive and important step because this is where the brand can prompt the viewers into taking the deal and signing up for free trial or subscription as intended.
A good CTA for any SaaS product is the one which offers clarity to the potential lead, creates an urgent trigger for a specific action, and showcases that the offer holds value and is beneficial to the user.
A few things to keep in mind for the CTA of your SaaS video are understanding the demographic of the target audience and what would appeal to them, identifying the best way in which the CTA can fit the video, narrowing down on tools which will effectively communicate the CTA- whether it is annotations, verbal mention during the video or descriptions, deciding on the end card of the video, and finally testing out the CTR and making changes accordingly.
Get more product signups, convert trial users, and improve product adoption, with videos
