5 Creative Ways to Use a Video for Onboarding

The onboarding experience is one of the most crucial parts of a customer journey. It helps educate customers on how to use a product and take the most benefit from it. It’s a make-or-break part of the overall product user experience. 

Companies use onboarding to retain customers, engage them, and reduce the bounce rate. It also allows brands to increase the product’s value since an onboarding process is a great moment to set more personal and warmer relationships with users with the help of lovely characters and engaging animation.

Here we are going to uncover the five most creative ways to use a video for onboarding. Are you ready to start?

Feature Your Onboarding Video on a Homepage

Actually, the onboarding process starts when a user first enters a marketing website. That is why a homepage or a landing age is a perfect place to introduce your product to the audience with the help of an engaging video uncovering its essence and demonstrating its beauty

An excellent example of this practice is Dropbox’s case. When the company was focusing on growing brand recognition, its main goal was to make it easy for customers to understand a product without any confusion. So, they placed an onboarding video with a download button below it directly on a homepage. This straightforward concept helped them to earn 5 million new customers and $24 million in revenue. 

Welcome Users With A Video in Your Product Interface

You can also help your users to acclimate to an unfamiliar user interface by welcoming them with an onboarding animated video. Instead of directing them straightforwardly to an interface, which they have never seen before, it’s recommended to introduce your product to users, guide on how to use its features, and tell the key points they should know for seamless interaction.

Inbuilding an animated onboarding video right into your product, you may kill two birds with one stone: help your users to navigate a dashboard and establish trust and loyalty toward a brand. The animation is a perfect way to entertain, evoke the user’s interest in a product, and set a more “human” communication between a company and its target audience. 

Use a Video in Your Welcome Email

Instead of sending users to a product right after they have signed up for it, you can send them a welcome email with a cute and fun animated video. Just imagine that a lovely animated hero welcomes your users and tells how they can benefit from the interaction with this brand and its products. Show that you care about your customers.

As known from the practice, email open rate is 4 times higher if the letter contains a video. It makes it a great place for your onboarding video promotion. You can try to conduct A/B testing to define the true power of video in emails.

Add a Video to a Tooltip

When people start navigating throughout a complex and unfamiliar interface they, actually, expect the brand to help them. Many product designers and developers incorporate animated video tooltips right inside of the product user journey. 

Now guess what does make a good tooltip even more helpful and engaging? Exactly! If it is an animated video. You can show people how to complete a certain action instead of writing about it in a text copy, that is most likely boring to read. Let users enjoy creative animation, easily perceive explanations, and take rest from long-written instructions.  

Add a Video to Your FAQ Section

You might already know that people would sooner watch a video than read any written tutorial to learn how to use a product or its features. Your company can make the FAQs page on a website more engaging by accompanying answers to the most frequently asked questions with animated onboarding videos demonstrating users how they can tackle their issues with a product. It can simplify the work of a customer support service and significantly improve user experience.

Conclusion

Here are the five ideas of how you can use onboarding videos creatively and make a product user experience even more enjoyable. We hope that this shortlist will inspire you to produce an amazing onboarding video that will help you boost your digital presence.