Want to add a Call To Action at the end of your video? Need a sweet email collector to capture leads? Then check out our lead generation tools, friend!

To add one of these interactive tools, navigate to the video you’d like to add it to and select Customize. In the Customize panel you’ll see options for Annotation Links, Calls to Actions, and Turnstile.

There are lots of ways to customize your video’s timeline, but the biggest players are Turnstile email gate, Calls to Action, and Annotation links.

Before we dive into those, let’s first walk through how you can set these tools up.

Any one of these tools added to your video will appear as a waypoint below your video timeline. All tools can be placed at any time within a video. To change when these show up, you can simply adjust the time stamps in the Customize menu or drag the waypoints to the exact frame you want it to appear.

An Annotation Link is a great way to notify your viewers without interrupting the video.

The Annotation link, when added, will appear in the upper right corner of the video, and it can stick around for as long as you’d like. You can adjust the time by updating the time stamps or dragging the waypoint below the video timeline. To make your annotation links longer or shorter, adjust the length bar by clicking and dragging. Learn more on the Annotation Links page.

Calls To Action and Turnstile will work properly on pretty much every mobile device (all the environments we’ve tested at least …  which is a bunch). This is because even when playback is handled by the native player on a device, we can pull out of fullscreen to show the overlay (and CTAs/Turnstiles will pause playback naturally).

Annotation links are a bit different, because they appear over the video mid-playback. They’ll work properly on any device where the Wistia player controls are able to function (via our Tiny Vulcan mobile player), which includes many Android devices and iOS10+. Earlier iOS versions do not support custom inline video players, so playback on those devices will go through the native player, thus annotations will not work.

On newer iOS versions (iOS10+), the native iOS video player takes over in landscape mode and fullscreen. In those modes Annotation links cannot appear because playback is not being handled by the Wistia player, and also because nothing can be displayed in front of the native iOS player when it’s in fullscreen mode.

A Call to Action is a clickable message, image, or HTML script that appears anywhere in your video, and it lets your viewers know what you want them to do next. You can learn more on our Calls to Action Page.

There are three types of Calls to Action:

You can build a custom HTML Call to Action that takes on-page or inline styles. Where possible, use on-page styles (i.e. including them in a <style> tag in the head of your page), because they may be stripped out during the customization process.

It’s also important to note — Wistia will strip out javascript from your custom CTA, so make sure to stick to HTML (and some basic CSS).

Turnstile is an easy email collector for your video content. It’s great for lead generation, and connects with a bunch of great email providers to make tracking new leads super simple.

You can place a Turnstile at any point in your video by adjusting the time stamp or dragging the waypoint to the exact frame you’d like it to appear. Neato!

Emails captured with Turnstile email collector can be piped directly to an email provider list, which makes it easy to follow-up with them.

To get started, click the Setup an Email Provider link under the Turnstile option. Choose your provider and fill in the necessary details, and click that shiny Connect button. Then you’re smooth sailing. ⛵️

If you choose not to integrate Turnstile with an email provider, you can check out Turnstile entries on the Audience page in your account.

To remove any of these tools from your video, you’ll first need to navigate to the Customize panel. You’ll then need to open the settings area for the tool you’d like to delete. Here, you can disable a Turnstile, Annotation Link, or Call to Action.

Afterwards, just be sure to save your settings! You can find the Save button at the top of the Customize panel.

There’s no need to re-embed your video — it will update out the in wild automatically.

Yes, kind of …  You’ll only be able to add one Turnstile, and one Call to Action to your video. You can add as many Annotation links as you’d like. The other big thing to keep in mind — these cannot overlap, so they’ll have to be presented one at a time. But this video timeline is totally acceptable, if that’s what you’re into:

The logic behind disabling the Skip option is due mostly to the nature of a Call to Action. Since it can appear anywhere in the video it’s sort of fruitless for it to not be skippable, since it blocks the rest of the content from being visible. There’s really no point in having anything after a CTA if someone can’t skip it. The viewer is sort of just stuck there.

For this reason, we’ve made it so that the viewer will always be able to skip a Call to Action. The button will become a Rewatch button if the CTA is placed at the end of the video.

When you move a Turnstile to the end of the video, the Play button will automatically become a Submit button. It is indeed possible to further customize or change the language of the Play/Submit button in Wistia.

Not with Turnstile out of the box. But our friends at FormKeep have put together a nifty custom Call to Action that allows you to add custom fields. Check out their guide here.