Area: Customer support and education
Goal: Educate customers at scale and provide accessibility to easy-to-digest and visual information on specific features and use cases without the reliance on answering questions from customer support.
User cohorts: Applicable to all user cohorts, especially for those from 1 day - 90 days of signing up.

Many SaaS companies do a good job of building out documentation, resources, and content on their blog and even videos on YouTube, but what many don’t do a good job at is leveraging the content they produce to help users across specific cohorts and segments within the product experience.

In particular, I’m referring to incorporating enough videos or easy-to-access resource documentation through the main product dashboard.

Why building a video library into your product dashboard experience is effective for retention

• Helps users quickly find and visually see how a feature works faster - regardless of the cohorts they’re apart of

• Empowers the user to learn that they can easily find information without continually messaging customer support

• Great way to encourage power users to contribute content that can help other users (UGC/community-led content)

So, what does a good video library and resource center experience look like?

A great example from a SaaS company I love is Loom. They’ve built a community section that is easily accessible via the dashboard.

Once you click ‘community’, you then head to all these video tutorials from Loom staff, as well as user-generated Loom community content from real users (really powerful for conversion and product upgrades).

(Image credits: Loom)

Mistakes to avoid (and recommendations)

• Don’t just rely on in-app notifications and emails alone to communicate - it can lead to ‘alert/notification’ fatigue.

• Of course, you need to incorporate in-app messaging and email flows no matter what as part of your strategy (which I’ve touched on already), but users can get fatigued.
  So, I recommend there’s a specific area that users can always head to within the product, and the dashboard, for users to explore in their own time. Remind users periodically that they can always access it at any time.

Experiments and optimizations to consider trying

Don’t have a video library?

If there’s one thing you should implement that doesn’t require significant resourcing, it’s creating a video library. The best part is that you can use tools such as Loom to quickly produce product tutorials.

Add links to dedicated video resources to relevant feature sections as part of your product.

Through analytics, measure how many users are clicking on the links and maybe test different placements of where you place them. Particularly good to test for cohorts of customers who signed up in the first 90 days.

Have videos on YouTube that aren’t easily accessible within the product?

Based on what I said above, if you’ve already created videos, make them more accessible within the dashboard by adding a video library. You don’t want to ‘force’ users to try and find relevant information on how to get the most out of the product.