Imagine this: You've invested in a top-notch SaaS solution to ramp up your business's productivity. But how do you keep that value flowing and retain loyal customers?
Enter feature and upgrade videos—the secret sauce for keeping customers hooked and showcasing the ongoing enhancements of your SaaS platform.
In today's crowded SaaS market, customer loyalty is crucial for long-term success. Yet, many companies focus only on acquiring new customers, leaving existing ones to fend for themselves.
By creating and delivering videos that address common pain points, highlight new features, and familiarize customers with layout or function changes, SaaS companies can ensure their customers fully understand and utilize their software.
Here's how and why to make Customer Success videos that highlight features and upgrades.
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Why do feature and upgrade videos increase retention?
For customers to remain loyal and engaged with a SaaS product, they need to understand its full potential. Feature and upgrade videos act as powerful tools that educate users about the latest enhancements and capabilities.
By presenting simple, step-by-step tutorials, these videos eliminate guesswork and enable customers to unlock the full value of your SaaS product and maximize its benefits. Instead of leaving customers to decipher complex documentation or figure things out on their own, feature and upgrade videos simplify the process.
Additionally, videos provide a more interactive and engaging experience compared to other forms of communication, making them an effective means of customer education – in short, people would rather watch a short video than read a thick manual.
Lastly, feature and upgrade videos serve as an ongoing touchpoint with customers, even after the initial purchase. Providing regular updates and highlighting new features keeps customers excited about the new things they can do (as well as how to do them), which in turn keeps them invested in your SaaS platform.
They're much more likely to stick around if they know that their needs are being met and the software is evolving alongside their business.
New features and upgrades often come with their own set of challenges for users. By creating videos that specifically address these pain points, SaaS companies can help customers overcome obstacles and fully leverage the latest enhancements.
We know that software needs to constantly evolve to meet the demands of the users. But, ironically, each new change can disengage a loyal customer if they don’t immediately know what the new features do, how to best use them, or what value they bring.
Basic topics, like "Mastering the New Dashboard Interface" or "Optimizing Workflow Efficiency with the Recent Update" can guide users through the changes and offer practical solutions – but the corresponding videos must be up-to-date and exactly match what the customer sees when utilizing the software. Otherwise, those pain points will become agony points, and your customers will leave.
An easily searchable, up-to-date video library is a SaaS company’s best vanguard against customer churn and the best way to increase customer success metrics.
To create compelling feature and upgrade videos, SaaS companies should adhere to a few key best practices:
Firstly, keeping videos short and to the point is essential, as users often have limited time and attention spans. People want to get in, get the info they need, and get out-- because they've gotta get back to work.
Secondly, utilizing high-quality visuals and audio ensures a professional and engaging experience. Nothing makes a brand look worse than cheap-looking video and audio. And you certainly don't want users associating "low quality" with your product, even on a subconscious level.
Providing subtitles or closed captions caters to diverse user preferences. Many people even watch their streaming services with the subtitles on, and they're used to keeping it on online videos as well. For some, reading the words while listening helps retain information.
And lastly, chaptering allows users to navigate to specific sections easily. It also has the bonus of optimizing your video for search engines. If your video is indexed by Google, then when a user searches a specific question, Google will take them directly to the section in the video that answers it. Of course, not all SaaS companies want their videos out there for free, and require logins to access their content. If that's the case for you, it's still important to add chapters for easy navigation.
One additional challenge with feature and upgrade videos is ensuring customers actually see them, especially when they are not actively searching for them.
While customers might not actively search for these types of videos, optimizing the content for search engines can ensure that they find accurate and reliable information directly from the SaaS company – not some rando on YouTube.
Some simple optimizations for SEO that can enhance visibility and discoverability:
These videos can also be strategically placed within the SaaS product itself, like onboarding screens, in-app notifications, or within the knowledge base.
This way you can reach your customers at all stages of their lifecycle (such as onboarding, feature adoption, or during support interactions), and you can maximize the impact of these videos.
It's crucial to maintain a seamless video experience for customers. But there are challenges you're going to run into, like:
In the competitive SaaS landscape, maintaining customer retention and promoting product adoption are critical for long-term success. Feature and upgrade videos serve as powerful tools that address common pain points and guide users through the latest enhancements.
But if they're outdated, or your team doesn't have time to make them, or they're in the wrong language, your customers could easily get frustrated and churn.
This is where Videate can help. Videate makes it fast and easy for SaaS companies to create, update, and globalize their how-to and software tutorial videos.
Without Videate, companies often need entire teams devoted to screen recording and editing. Now, you can produce a full library of up-to-date onboarding how-to videos automatically.
Stop working harder and work smarter: get a demo and see how Videate makes a full library of how-to onboarding videos in minutes.