Why SaaS Companies Need Explainer Videos to Onboard Users Faster
A practical look at why short product explainer videos reduce onboarding friction for SaaS products, and how to brief an agency to make one well.
Most SaaS products lose new users in the first few minutes after signup — not because the product is bad, but because the value isn't obvious fast enough. A well-made explainer video compresses that gap: instead of a new user reading a wall of documentation or clicking through an empty dashboard, they watch a 60–90 second video that shows exactly what the product does and why it matters to them.
What an explainer video actually solves
Explainer videos work because they combine three things text alone can't: motion, voice, and pacing. A feature that takes three paragraphs to explain in a help doc can be shown in five seconds of screen capture with a voiceover. That's not a stylistic preference — it directly affects how quickly a trial user reaches their "aha" moment, which is the single strongest predictor of whether they convert to a paid plan.
Where explainer videos fit in the funnel
There are three common placements, and they each need a different video:
- Landing page hero — a 30–45 second video focused on the problem and the core value proposition. This one has to work with sound off, since most visitors won't unmute.
- Post-signup onboarding — a 60–90 second walkthrough of the first action a new user should take, shown inside the product itself.
- Feature announcement — a short, focused video for existing users when you ship something new, usually distributed by email or in-app.
Trying to make one video do all three jobs is the most common mistake we see — a landing page video needs to sell the idea in seconds, while an onboarding video needs to teach a specific action. Conflating the two usually produces a video that's too long for the hero section and too vague for onboarding.
Briefing an agency well
The single biggest lever you have over the quality of the final video is the brief. Before reaching out to a motion or video team, have answers ready for:
- Who is the video for — a first-time visitor, a trial user, or an existing customer?
- What's the one action you want them to take after watching?
- What does the product actually look like on screen — do you have clean screen recordings, or does the UI need to be recreated?
If your product's UI changes frequently, ask for a motion system built around abstracted UI shapes rather than pixel-accurate screen recordings — it ages much better and won't need a full re-shoot after your next redesign.
Measuring whether it worked
Resist the urge to judge an explainer video purely on watch-through rate. The metric that matters is what happens after the video — activation rate for onboarding videos, trial-to-paid conversion for landing page videos, and feature adoption for announcement videos. A video with a mediocre completion rate that still moves those downstream numbers is doing its job.
If you're scoping a video for your own product, our SaaS & App Explainers service page walks through how we structure a typical engagement, from script to final export formats.
