Companies often rely on text-based forms to collect customer and employee feedback, get applications, nurture leads further down the sales funnel, encourage signups, and more. Written forms are simply seen as the status quo, so we don’t even consider whether there’s a better method to get responses or interact with our audience.
But there are several drawbacks to using written forms:
- Response rates can be frustratingly low. Faced with a long list of questions or a wall of text, customers can be less than enthusiastic about responding.
- The info you get can be limited and inauthentic. Compare reading about someone’s job history in their resume to hearing them describe their achievements in their own words — you’re bound to get more interesting, credible, and valuable insights when someone speaks freely. This also holds true for filling out surveys and completing interviews.
- The content you produce from the forms might not spark engagement. For example, there’s a big difference between reading a product review and watching a person talk about a product on video. The video content can be more engaging, more convincing, and spark more conversions from your target audience.
For all types of use cases — from recruiting to training to marketing — using a form of video content can help you get better responses from your audience, whether it’s an employee describing the company culture, a customer leaving a product review, or a job candidate expressing why they would be great in a role.
And finding the best video form app can help you get these highly authentic and engaging responses without spending a fortune.
In this post, we look at how Vocal Video, our video form app, can help you replace written forms and surveys with video responses.
Vocal Video is affordable and easy to use — simply decide on the kind of video you want to collect, send an invitation link to your respondent, and wait for them to record their response on their phone, tablet, or computer. To simplify the process even further, we’ll cover five customizable video templates our customers love.
You can see our full list of 45+ templates here.
Sign up for Vocal Video — no credit card required — to create and personalize your first video form today.
Vocal Video makes it easy to introduce video forms to many different areas of your business with templates for every type of video. This means you can stop using ineffective written forms without investing a lot of time or money in video production and editing.
1. Internal and External Surveys
Conducting video surveys of the people on your customer list can help you understand trends in your industry and develop a stronger product. Likewise, surveying your employees can give you an idea of workplace morale and uncover new ideas from the people who know your product or service best.
Because the video format sees a high rate of engagement, you’ll have a larger sample size to draw conclusions from. This means the results will be more representative of your whole team or customer base.
Check out this video survey response from student Anna Davidson, whose video gives her university useful insights into the factors that motivated her choice of program at MTSU.
Plus, using video to survey your audience can help you get more qualitative insights.
Start collecting similar responses with our popular Video Surveys template.
2. Product Reviews
Video reviews of products or services have a clear advantage over the star ratings and walls of text that make up traditional online reviews.
Vocal Video reviews are more detailed and more structured because your customer will respond to clear prompts — set by you — that invite them to speak about the most relevant aspects of their experience.
Video form reviews also create a human connection that’s difficult to make with text alone. It’s much easier for future customers to trust the review is genuine when they can watch the person speaking.
In this product review for Mountain Sweet Honey — an online store for beekeeping supplies and bees — the respondents give a hands-on video review of the product in action. The customers put on their apiarist suits, pick up a mobile device like an iPhone or iPad, and introduce potential customers to the bees.
Get our E-commerce Review video template.
3. Customer Feedback
The insights you record from the people who use your product of service can give you quantifiable, actionable information to help improve your future offerings. An email link to a written feedback form might see a low response rate, but with Vocal Video it’s easy to write or record a message letting the respondent know how much you value their time and opinion, which encourages participation.
The other main advantage of video feedback is that you get an insight into the customer’s emotional response to your business, which can be difficult to discern in written feedback.
In this video recorded after the ACCP annual conference, Otito Iwuchukwu recalls her experience.
Get our Customer Testimonial template.
4. Job Applications
Application videos, sometimes called video screening interviews or asynchronous video interviews, help you screen applicants faster so you can find the best candidate for the job. These video forms can be completed whenever and wherever a candidate has time, on iOS or Android, giving them the chance to speak about their experience and interests in an environment where they feel comfortable.
This content format can help you get to know a person better than a resume or cover letter alone, and this first impression of a candidate’s personality can help recruiters to decide if they’re a good fit for the team.
This job application video was made 100% within our video content creation app.
Get our Video Interview template.
Written signup forms are an important tool for gathering the data you need to add a new customer, applicant, or member to your system. But, when someone has come to your signup page because they want a tool or an event with a small community or collaborative aspect (for example, a training course or conference), a video form can be a great way for them to introduce themselves, give you an idea of their background, and tell you about their expectations or reasons for taking part.
Get our Event Video templates — including templates for speakers and attendees.
By customizing Vocal Video’s industry-specific templates with your brand assets as presets, you can send an engaging video form to your audience and start getting relevant, authentic responses in minutes. You don’t need video creation experience to produce memorable, professional video content that’s perfect for internal use, your website, or your social media channels.
Create Your Video Collector
The Vocal Video collector is the interface where you present your questions to your respondents. They’ll use the collector to record and fill in the information that will be added automatically and seamlessly to the finished video.
You can choose to build your collector with one of our templates.
You can also select “Start without a template” to build a video collector from scratch. This opens up even more potential use cases, including surveys about specific aspects of your products to use in an industry case study video, or getting videos from your potential customers to help you quote more accurately for your services.
To build your video collector, add up to five questions and a short message to thank the respondents for their time. You can also upload your company logo and set the background and highlight colors to match your branding. Our dashboard makes it easy to complete the process step-by-step (even for beginners), and you can preview how your collector will look on mobile or desktop in separate windows at every stage.
As well as writing an intro to your survey, you can also record a short video welcome. This further personalizes the process for the respondent and makes completing a video form feel like a friendly conversation. Simply go to the “Welcome Page” menu and click “Welcome Video” to record or upload a short hello.
To encourage your respondents to continue to engage, you can add a call-to-action button to take them straight to a URL of your choice — great if you want someone to register for an event, subscribe to a podcast, or sign up for your newsletter.
When you’re ready for your customers or employees to start recording, click “Get Responses.” We’ll automatically generate a link to send to your audience, which will take them straight to the welcome page of your collector.
How to Get More Responses
The more responses your video forms receive, the more actionable data and insights you can apply, and the more content you can share with a wider audience — whether that’s your company or your future customers.
There are four tried-and-tested ways to ask for client reviews and video feedback and gather more videos with your collector.
1. Use a personalized link.
You can either change the collector URL manually or integrate Vocal Video with your CRM. This will send the video collector link to your respondent with their details pre-filled. We’ve found that the convenience of personalized links consistently increases the number of responses video surveys get.
2. Include an incentive.
In the video collector builder, you can select from incentives you fulfill — like a discount code, contest entry, giveaway, or donation — or you can enter each respondent into the monthly Vocal Video prize drawing.
3. Use our proven email sequence.
Our simple 3-touch email sequence has been proven to increase the number of people who respond to your collector invite. Simply send an initial email introducing the idea of recording, send the link to the collector and tips for making a great video, and remind customers who haven’t responded within a few days.
Get the templates for our 3-touch email sequence.
4. Add a video collector to your website.
Because you share our video maker interface with a simple URL, it’s easy to link to them from your website for “always-on video collection” functionality. This is a great option for accepting applications, for signup pages, and for collecting personal stories from your audience. People can contact you whenever it’s convenient for them, and we’ll notify you by email whenever you have a new response to view.
For example, the charity Project Sweet Peas, which supports families through a stay in the NICU, uses a permanent video collector form so people can record a non-profit beneficiary testimonial when they feel ready.
Whenever someone records a response with your video collector, we automatically edit a draft of the video with…
- Question cards
- Overlays including the attribution information
- AI-generated subtitles
- Music from our selection of royalty-free tracks
- Animations to transition between scenes
Each video includes your logo and brand colors, making it instantly recognizable if you publish it later.
You’ll also have access to our manual video editor software, which includes a suite of video editing tools for making changes to the videos. You’ll be able to use our editing features to switch the theme of the video and instantly change the fonts and style, or make precise changes to the video length or order of the clips. You can even splice shorter videos from different speakers together to make a highlight reel.
For example, if you want to repurpose customer stories as part of a sales campaign or use employee testimonials for video recruiting, you’ll be able to trim longer videos and change the aspect ratio to fit the platform where you want to post — all without leaving Vocal Video for an external video editing app like Adobe Premiere or a design app like Canva.
You can view and organize the videos in your library by searching, starring your favorites, organizing the responses by collector or by freshness, and filtering out any videos where the respondent didn’t provide a name. These features make it easier to identify the best video responses for customer insights or your favorite content for social media.
Remember, Vocal Video paid plans remove the watermark from the finished video and include library access for multiple users. Our Pro plan includes advanced features like the API key you need to integrate Vocal Video with messaging platforms like Slack. This makes it easier to share and work on the videos together, so you can come up with a plan for sharing the video clips or putting the feedback you’ve received into action across your company.
Once you publish a video, you’ll also be able to access a full, downloadable transcript to use. Simply click on any of the published videos in your dashboard and scroll down to “Transcript” to copy or download the text. If you find a glitch or a pause in the text, you can make changes to the transcript within the Vocal Video editor.
Collecting these transcripts is a way to understand the keywords people use when they discuss your business, helping you to recognize trends and pick up on the most meaningful insights. Plus, publishing a transcript is a great way to generate blog or news content quickly. We call this “two-for-one testimonial writing.”
Read more about the SEO benefits of testimonials.
Share Authentic Responses to Build Your Brand Identity with Video Marketing
When you use video forms to gather user-generated content like client stories and employee testimonials in your marketing strategy, you can also use Vocal Video to share the responses across your content marketing channels. Including stories from the people connected to your brand as powerful social proof shows how much you value them and creates a sense of community that makes new connections and encourages new people to get involved.
You can share the high-quality videos your collector gathers in a few different ways:
- Add a link to the public Vocal Video page where your video is hosted — a great option for including long-form video or bite-sized testimonials in your cold outreach and prospecting messages.
- Use one-click sharing to post straight to social media platforms like your Facebook newsfeed, LinkedIn, or Twitter.
- Download the video in order to upload it as a YouTube video or to short-form video platforms like YouTube Shorts, TikTok, or Facebook and Instagram Reels (where you can then add gifs, stickers, sound effects, and emojis).
- Generate an embed code — automatically — to add the response to your website as a standalone video or an eye-catching video testimonial card with a featured quote.
For example, Grafana Labs shared the video responses they collected from the speakers at their annual conference on LinkedIn. This was a way of spotlighting the speakers before the event, encouraging more people to sign up and share the details with other people in their professional network so more people could discover the event.
Knowadays Learning shares testimonials from their course graduates on their Instagram grid. They encourage the person scrolling to swipe through each question to see responses from the graduates.
And Prepared4X uses a seamlessly embedded testimonial carousel gallery on their website. Here, the gallery shows proof of the value of their product in the real world, encouraging more people to buy in, or even record their clip when they have the product in their hands.
Find out how easy it is to create and embed a testimonial gallery — including slideshow galleries and beautiful walls of love from your supporters — with the tutorials in the Vocal Video help center.
When you use Vocal Video surveys to gather this type of content, you gain valuable insights that get to the heart of how your customers, clients, beneficiaries, or team feel about your organization. The responses you get can be more thought-out, more detailed, and more believable than a simple star rating at the top of a written review, which means they can do more to inform your business decisions, motivate your team, and help potential customers understand your brand.
Our easy-to-use video app makes it simple and affordable to replace your written feedback with video all across your business, so you can enjoy:
- Higher engagement rates, which results in a higher quantity of reviews and responses.
- More nuanced insights and a deeper understanding of the emotional response of the speaker.
- A source of engaging content to use across your website and social media marketing channels.
Our simple collector system and video editing software give you everything you need to leverage short-form video or long-form content.
Sign up for Vocal Video today to build your first free video collector and start getting actionable video form responses from your audience.