3 Ways to Customize Your Video Call to Action

If you’re hosting your videos on Wistia, there’s a good chance you’ve debated between the different Call to Action options to direct your viewers to their next step. Should you use text? What’s the most effective copy? Is an image more enticing? We did a deep data dive into a few of the out-of-the-box options and how to use them effectively in our recent Guide to Calls to Action in Video Marketing.

But there’s one Call to Action option that’s often overlooked, or perhaps too intimidating, too vast: the Custom HTML Call to Action.

This Call to Action is awesome because, well, it allows you to do whatever you want, as long as you (or one of your colleagues) can write some basic HTML code. In this post, we’ll share a few of our favorite HTML Calls to Action we’ve seen to help you get inspired.

Link to a related video

When your video’s goal is to keep viewers focused on your business, YouTube’s related videos are a menace. But that doesn’t mean you might not want to direct viewers to a related video of your own! We’ve used custom HTML CTAs in our own Library to link viewers to a related video after they’re done watching. Our Scripting Tips video leads well into our Shooting for the Edit video, so it makes sense to nudge viewers in that direction after they finish watching.

A fun trick for getting this code started? Grab the Wistia email campaign thumbnail embed code and work from there, making sure to set the email provider to “none”:

Below is the final code for the CTA above. We just added some text and a bit of inline styling to Wistia’s email campaign embed code:

<a
  href="https://wistia.com/library/shooting-for-the-edit"
  style="color:white; text-decoration:none; font-size: 20pt;">
  You’ve got your script — now prepare for the shoot!
  <img
    src="https://embed-ssl.wistia.com/deliveries/246aaeda88daf2c9617f72828d86b1985070c952.jpg?image_play_button=true&image_play_button_color=87d452e0&image_crop_resized=640x360"
    alt="Shooting for the Edit"
    width="640"
    height="360">
</a>

Split your CTA

Wistia Community member Jeremy Wick, video marketer at Sticker Mule, uses a custom HTML CTA to achieve a pretty simple function: including more than one link at the end of the video. In this FAQ video, they include both a help link, for those who might want to reach out, and a Twitter link for those who just want to stay up to date.

Even if you’re an HTML beginner, a CTA like this should be fairly easy for you to set up! Here’s how Sticker Mule formatted their two-link CTA:

<a
  style="color:white; text-decoration:none;"
  href="mailto:help@stickermule.com">
  help@stickermule.com
</a>
<br>
<br>
<a
  style="color:white; text-decoration:none;"
  href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?screen_name=stickermule">
  @stickermule
</a>

Just switch out the link href="" information and link text, and voila, you’ve got two links in your CTA!

Turn your video into a conversation

Wistia’s Turnstile email collector allows you to ask for a viewer’s name and email address, but sometimes, you need different information. Maybe you want more viewer data, maybe you want to collect survey data at the end of a video, maybe you want to include a poll. With a custom HTML CTA, you can embed a form of your choosing, with custom formatting and no limitations.

We used a Wufoo form at the end of our Vulcan player launch video to include a playful question, but you can also imagine use cases for collecting deeper feedback on what viewers are thinking about at the end of your video:

After watching Slack’s “Slack Teams Do Amazing Things” video, their viewers are presented with a simple survey that they built using Knotch:

In this particular example, Slack uses a popup YouTube video, then brings viewers back to the survey on the page once the video is finished, but you could include a custom HTML CTA for a similar survey right in your embed to create an even more seamless experience.

Have you seen or built any good custom CTAs lately? Leave them in the comments!