Your website is your best sales agent. It does not call in sick. It does not experience burnout. It’s accessible from everywhere anytime. It won’t bug you for a pay raise. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you should know how information online can shape and ultimately determine whether a customer will purchase something or not.
As your top sales agent, it is just fitting that you equip your site with the necessary tools for it to increase conversion rates – whether it’s generating more leads or bringing in more profit. One of these arsenals that should be in your marketing toolbox is video.
According to recent statistics culled by conversion experts from last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, videos were able to generate up to 113% more sales depending on the product category. To put it in another way, videos are the closest encounter your customers can have to your products or services. So in a way, it’s bridging the gap between them and your offerings. When this is successful, magic happens. This is called conversions.
Welcome Your Visitors with the “Real Deal”
The quintessential success story, conversion experts use to demonstrate the power of videos when placed in a site’s homepage is Dropbox. The file hosting service provide invested a hefty $50,000 into an explainer video and in return, they acquired 5 million new customers and a whopping $24 million dollars in extra revenue.
Putting videos on a site’s homepage can work magic if done correctly. There are case studies showing how sign-ups can increase by 100% and sales by more than 200%, when implementing this strategy. If you want to verify this, you can do a split test between a traditional version of your homepage and one that has a video on it.
Your Products in Moving Picture
If you have the financial resources, a growing trend among online retailers is to put explainer videos on their product pages. This marketing move has done wonders on their conversion rates. According to the yearly Mystery Shopping Study spearheaded by E-tailing group, there’s an 18% jump in the number of retailers that use videos on their product pages.
Why? Here’s an example why… An online party supplies company experienced a 43.1% hike in their sales when they started putting videos on their product pages. And this is only one of many who benefited from this tactic.
Minimize Return Rates through Accurate Product Presentation
To some extent, there’s a bigger risk when consumers buy online because they cannot inspect the merchandise physically. Oftentimes, a good product photo and extensive product description is not enough. Many online-only retailers experience high return rates because the buyer was expecting something different than what was delivered in the mail.
This is a gap that explainer videos can fill. They present products or services in a more precise and “experiential” manner. This can significantly diminish return rates which means bigger margins and higher profits.
Social Proof Amplified Ten Folds
Trust and credibility are vital elements in conversions and the easiest way to establish these is through customer testimonials. Word of mouth is arguably the most ancient form of marketing and recommendations from fellow consumers are powerful conversion precursors.
Veer away from the traditional quoted text inside a thought bubble – way of presenting customer testimonials – and step into the new era of trust marketing by capturing happy customers or clients in videos. Video testimonials display emotion very effectively, making them more compelling and highly converting. And probably also because video testimonials are very difficult to pull out of thin air as opposed to the traditional “photo of consumer with testimonial quote on the side” presentation which is fairly easy to fabricate.
According to VideoGenie CEO and Founder Justin Nassiri, an average consumer spends 100 seconds viewing video testimonials which, in an era of humans having shorter attention than goldfishes, is pretty good.
Lights, Camera, Convert!
Conversion optimization or persuading site visitors to respond positively to your call-to-actions, is now the holy grail of online marketing. Competition is tight and if you want to get ahead in the game and make your site a more hardworking and effective sales tool, it’s a wise business decision to explore how explainer videos can bring in the online profits you’ve always dreamed of.