How to Use Video to Increase Customer Conversions and Increase Profits
When planning and reviewing your marketing efforts for each of your online businesses, no doubt measuring your visitors and how they convert to sales is a major point of focus. Driving traffic to your websites can be time-consuming and expensive, more so if you are not achieving good conversion rates. Having an engaging web user experience is one of the best ways of ensuring a high conversion rate for your online properties.
Unlike offline businesses, with proper use of analytics, it is possible to measure exactly what level of return you get from your online marketing campaigns, even on a daily basis, should that be required. If you are not converting your visitors it will be immediately apparent and you must take corrective actions to ensure that your online marketing tactics give a higher conversion rate. Indeed visitor conversion must be your primary focus to ensure a high return on your digital marketing investment.
Online video is one of the most powerful marketing tools which, if used properly, will guarantee sginificantly higher conversion rates for your websites, and happier post conversion customers. We will look at some examples of how online video can benefit your business.
Increasing Conversion Rates with Video
Videos can be used to show shoppers how products work before they buy them. Although professionally produced videos look great, they are expensive and not really necessary to achieve customer conversions (unless you are selling particularly high end products). You can use your own staff to produce product videos. Or, even better, ask some of your happy customers to do a quick video showing how they use the product you want to promote, and even some tricks they might have of their own, to get extra mileage, or how to use it for slightly different purposes.
Assuming that they are happy customers, you might be able to ask them for a recommendation or testimonial. Long used by sucessful businesses, on and offline, testimonials are a way of reassuring a customer that they are making the correct choice in deciding to buy from you, and in buying your product. A video testimonial from a happy customer, in person, with them speaking honestly about your products and service, is a truly powerful way of driving conversions.
Some Good Examples of Using Video for Marketing Purposes
Increasing Conversion Rates (Sales!)
Equip2Clean, www.equip2clean.co.uk/ a cleaning machinery reseller. Their vzaar.com profile (http://vzaar.com/users/equip2clean) shows 35 videos uploaded, with 296045 plays across their video inventory, and also that they use videos on their eBay listings.
It is reported that Equip2Clean doubled their conversion rate from 7% to 15% using videos in this way. It is worth pointing out that Equip2Clean also make use of social networking to support their marketing efforts (twitter.com/equip2clean, www.facebook.com/pages/Equip2gardencouk)
Using Video To Reduce Return Rates
Returns of products purchased online are higher for higher ticket (priced) items. As an example, in the online apparel market, average returns are between 30% and 50%, often due to unrealised expectations from online photographs and descriptions.
Using video can provide a more accurate description of a product than photographs and textual description. Thus, when the customer receives the product they are less likely to be surprised or disappointed, and want to return the item.
Some online jewelers, for example, have acheived 40-60% reduction in returns by using video during presales.
In a busy market, adding video to the sales package will help with differentiating you from your competitors, maximising conversions and minimizing returns.
Using videos of products in use can increase confidence about the suitability, and thus both increase conversions and reduce returns.
