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June 21, 2024
SaaS Explainer videos are the latest video trend in the SaaS industry. And, it’s understandable why product marketers are witnessing impressive growth in brand awareness, and lead generation by leveraging dedicated explainer videos for their SaaS tools.
Speaking of facts, 87% of marketers who leveraged video marketing in 2024, report to have noticed a direct impact on revenue. This is truly remarkable. Video is turning out to be the most impactful marketing tool to boost your brand’s messaging.
Particularly in the SaaS industry, there’s often a need to create content that will help the prospects decipher value with ease. However, it’s easier said than done. Remember, your prospects only have so much time on their hands to go through all of your marketing collateral.
More often than not, they won’t even come across your brand content because the market is already saturated, and winning their attention is not easy because everyone is already vying for it.
This is where having a SaaS explainer video can be a masterstroke. SaaS demo videos help raise awareness using storytelling and an animated theme that is bound to delight viewers. These explainer videos are perfectly engineered to not only grab attention, instantly, but to capitalize on those 60-90 crucial seconds, to tell a powerful story about your product, while keeping the customer at the center of everything.
To understand how exactly SaaS promo videos work, and unleash an impact on product sales, we’ll look at five highly insightful SaaS explainer video examples from the SaaS industry. We’ll deep dive into what the product was about? What was the obstacle? What was proposed as the ideal solution? and what were the exact results? or the precise impact of the video on sales.
So, if you’re interested to learn about the immense potential SaaS explainer videos hold that can skyrocket your product’s impact, make sure to read till the end.
Drop Box: SaaS Explainer Videos
About
DropBox is a secure and superfast file hosting service. It’s a product of the American company, DropBox Inc. It was launched back in 2007 by founder Drew Houston. Today the company offers both personal storage solutions as well as dedicated file hosting products for multiple industries.
Challenge
The challenge dates back to the startup phase of DropBox. People in the industry weren’t really familiar with the potential of a file hosting service. Even though the company had already invested in paid search, the results were not even close to satisfactory. Advertising endeavors didn’t work; DropBox was suffering from stagnant sales, and no product awareness at all.
The Problem:
DropBox was incurring a cost of $233-$388 per acquisition (CAC). What was even more alarming was that the price of the product was only $99.
Solution
The founder, Drew Houston, had recorded a SaaS demo video showing how to use DropBox. This was a screencast showing how to actually operate DropBox for file sharing and storage. The purpose of this video was to raise product awareness.
Results
The SaaS demo video turned out to be a massive success, attracting a tsunami of traffic to the website. Moreover, the waiting list for DropBox’s demo skyrocketed to 78000, which was previously only 5000.
Realizing the success of the screencast video, this time the founder opted to create a professional SaaS explainer video to garner attention of the audience. They hired a professional explainer video company to nail the job to perfection.
The Cost:
This new explainer video was created in 2009, and it came at a price less than $50000. But the results it drew were staggering.
The new explainer video was meant to have an instructional tone of voice. So, they opted for a whiteboard presentation. The SaaS explainer video was 2-minute long. However, viewers watched it, and their response was phenomenal as well.
It reeled in 10 million more customers, with an ROI of $48 million in revenue. This really is an astounding number. The story of DropBox in its startup phase quite easily makes up for one of the finest case studies that highlight the potential of a SaaS explainer video.
Note: To promote the SaaS product video, DropBox also utilized affiliate and referral channels, and grew its customer base from 0 to 100 million users worldwide.
RankWatch
About
RankWatch is a powerful SaaS SEO tool that provides you with data-driven insights to guide laser-focused SEO marketing strategies. It’s not just a plain tool for tracking ranking of your site’s keywords, but an entire platform that is meant to analyze your holistic search performance, enabling you to grow traffic, and translate it into profitable sales.
Challenge
Just like any other SaaS product, the problem with RankWatch was the same. It wasn’t able to communicate value to its prospects with written copy. Long-form content wasn’t doing the trick for the SaaS product. Instead of garnering more attention, they were only losing more prospects. It was now an alarming situation.
Solution
The team came up with the idea of an SaaS explainer video that would highlight value for marketers working in the search industry. The video not only targets professional SEO strategists, but also taps another segment of agencies.
It walks us through the pain points, and how inertia could jeopardize SEO performance of a business. The video then introduces us to RankWatch, and how exactly it helps marketers get a bird’s eye view of search analytics, and make data-driven decisions to inform their search strategy.
Plus, the explainer is even better in selling the white-label aspect of the product, empowering agencies to grow their clientele in their own name.
Results
The launch of this SaaS promo video turned out to be a masterstroke for RankWatch.
As per RankWatch, they soon realized a 27 percent increase in the number of FREE trial subscriptions. Plus, the sales also boomed after uses were satisfied with the FREE trial.
If you want to create a stellar SaaS explainer for your product, and have no idea where to start, you’re better off connecting with a dedicated SaaS explainer video company.
Rypple
About
Rypple is a social performance management product, currently owned by Salesforce Inc. Unlike traditional performance management systems, Rypple takes a more modern, and collaborative approach. Its interface is meant to engage teams, help leaders track performance, and provide more open, and yet constructive feedback to their team members.
Challenge
The product is complex, and helping prospects realize value is hard. The team needed to do something exceptional, yet creative for a promo to sell on its USP. They sought the goal of increasing the number of Free trials for the tool. Those Free trails would eventually translate into high-quality leads.
Solution
Rypple’s marketing team had previously heard the impact an animated SaaS explainer video could produce to get the word out, and spike conversions. So, to boost the number of Free sign ups, the team sought creating multiple landing pages, and tested them with a SaaS explainer video. Here’s what the A/B test would like like:
First landing page only featured minimal text, and graphic images
Second landing page included live testimonials from Facebook
The Final landing page featured a whiteboard style SaaS explainer video
And, unsurprisingly, the landing page with a SaaS explainer video did exceptionally well.
Here’s what it happened:
Results
The whiteboard video not only resonated with the target audience, and increased FREE sign ups, but worked perfectly to reel in more customers. The brand saw a spike of 20% in sales. This was truly impressive.
CrazyEgg: Animated SaaS Explainer Video
About
Founded in 2005 by Neil Patel, CrazyEgg started off as an analytics tool to track user behavior on a website. It was meant to disrupt the market by offering a heat map tool to show user activity on a web page. You could visualize where users clicked on your website. Since it provided the opportunity to plan and organize your landing pages for conversion rate optimization (CRO), it was a remarkable development in that time.
Challenge
Despite the product having astounding potential for growth, the sales were not up to the mark. The numbers were stagnant perhaps due to the fact that marketers weren’t really familiar with the utility of a heat map tool. It was somehow just a bit hard to comprehend how the product would actually work.
Solution
Neil Patel came up with this amazing idea of creating an animated SaaS explainer video that would educate the prospects about the product while keeping them at ease.
Results
This SaaS animated video was 158 seconds long. This is a bit more lengthy for an explainer video. However, the video garnered hundreds of thousands of views, and boomed conversions by 67%. The founder also revealed later on that courtesy of this animated SaaS explainer video, Crazy Egg started earning an additional $21000 per month.
CaseComplete: SaaS Explainer Video Examples
About
CaseComplete is a requirements management tool that was created by Serlio Software. It enables users to produce use case diagrams, wireframes for graphical user interfaces, and even flowcharts to design workflows, and business processes. Today, the tool stands as a prominent choice among Business Analysts for generating specific project requirements, and managing workflows.
Challenge
Site visitors were not really thrilled to learn about the software by going through long pages of technical guide. Written content was not the appropriate medium to communicate value. Moreover, the marketing team was also confronted with the challenge of a declining attention span as well as the buyer perception that getting used to a requirements management tool was really complex. It was the same case with most of the competitor SaaS products on the market.
Solution
The team at CaseComplete had already seen the fruit of SaaS explainer videos that were made for Rypple, and DropBox. They decided to experiment with the same marketing tool. So, they created an animated SaaS explainer video, and expected a 5% increase in customers.
A SaaS explainer video that walks users through exciting features of CaseComplete. Builds on the USP of getting complex done the easy way. Connects with viewers on the pain point of specialized complicated tools that are hard to get hands on.
It showcases value for a comprehensive project management tool that will enhance processes for teams working on projects. You’re not just organized, but super-efficient with the SaaS tool.
Results
The video turned out to be a big success. The marketing team had estimated a 5% growth in sales. Instead, they saw the conversion rate booming by 23%. This was truly impressive for a SaaS explainer video that showcased how a requirements management tool could ease the job for business analysts.
Wrap Up
It’s time to conclude the discussion. This blog covered five impressive case studies from some of the top SaaS products in the industry. Each case study offers great insight into the potential of SaaS explainer videos in raising brand awareness, without losing authenticity of the message.
More importantly, each case study points to measurable results that the product teams were able to drive from the campaigns. It’s fair to conclude that SaaS explainer videos indeed have the potential to enhance a product’s growth by having a positive impact on the revenue numbers.
Therefore, if you have a product that is somewhat hard to understand, consider creating an animated SaaS explainer video. It’s bound to draw engagement, and help you level up with your competitors, who’re already making great sales.
Hope you got a nugget or two from this one!
