Converting website visitors into customers is tough, but video can make it easier!
This article is the third in a four-part series.
Converting website visitors into customers is tough – we get it! It’s so tough that only 22% of businesses are actually satisfied with their conversion rates.
And I’m willing to bet that those 22% of businesses have one important thing in common: they use video!
So far in this blog series, I’ve proven that VIDEO GETS RESULTS when it comes to increasing brand awareness and increasing traffic. In this article, I’m going to prove that the same can be said for increasing conversion rates.
Let’s jump in!
How to Increase Conversion Rates with Video
In part two of this series, we learnt how to increase traffic. But what good is increased traffic if none of that traffic converts?
Increasing conversions is imperative for increasing sales — and that, of course, is imperative to keeping afloat in the treacherous business world! Video can help you do this in lots of different ways:
1. It’s Almost Like A Try Before You Buy
If there’s one big concern shared among online shoppers it’s that the product they are buying won’t look like the product images when it arrives.
A photo can only do so much to secure peace of mind in a consumer. After all, there are lots of different filters and editing options for photographs these days — so, how do we know that what we are seeing on screen is identical to what the product looks like in the flesh?
By filming a product video, you can show your product from all angles and prove that you have nothing to hide – instilling further trust in potential buyers. Viewing a video is the closest an online shopper can get to actually trying their product out before they buy it, and this will encourage them to convert.
The same can be said if you’re selling a service that requires users to sign up with their email address. An explainer video that shows the service at work will give users more confidence to hand over their email address and start using your service.
2. Customers Can Gain A Deeper Understanding Of Your Product
An explainer video can pack all of the critical information that potential leads need to know about your product or service into just one minute. This is the perfect way to appeal to people who are busy – aka. everybody!
There are other ways to explain your products to people, such as a sales call, or a text description on your website, but none of these convert as well as video. A recent study found that, where both text and video are available on the same web page, a huge 69% of users would prefer to watch the video to learn about a product or service.
It’s important for customers to have a deep understanding of your product or service. This way, there will be no surprises for them when they purchase from you, and your customer satisfaction will skyrocket. Customer satisfaction is one of the most important components of running a successful business. After all, there’s no better marketing than when happy customers tell their friends about you.
3. It Humanizes Your Brand
The sad truth about branding is that, no matter how hard you try, customers will always trust a person more than a brand. The only way to possibly counteract this is to humanize your brand — and videos can help you do this!
One way to humanize your brand through video is to tap into emotions. Us humans like things that we can emotionally connect to — whether that be through humour, like this video:
Or by tugging at the heart-strings, like this one:
Another way to humanize your brand through video is to literally put humans in them! We’ve already established that people trust other people, so if you want to instil trust in your potential and current customers then a good way to do this is to choose a representative of your brand to make consistent vlog-style videos. Moz is a brand that has done this for many years, with their CEO Rand Fishkin posting regular ‘Whiteboard Fridays’ videos, like this one:
4. It Clearly Shows The Benefits
With so much competition for customers online, you need a quick, engaging way to show people why they should give you their email address and convert into a lead.
Enter: Video.
By creating videos that focus around the benefits of your product, service, or company, you can show people exactly why they should choose to do business with you. Think of videos almost like an elevator pitch for your brand — you have a couple of seconds to WOW customers, so make them count!
Videos are also good for increasing the conversion rates of brands with complicated products or services on offer. If you’re finding that people don’t really ‘get’ your product, or don’t understand how to get the best from your service, then video can help.
Types of Video for Increasing Conversion Rates
There are many different types of videos you can create to showcase your business, it all depends on what you want to achieve. For the purposes of increasing conversion rates, here are 3 types of videos you can use:
Product Video
Selling products online is difficult. You’re competing – on price, quality, and trust – with a world full of online stores. In order to increase conversions, you need to stand out.
One surefire way to stand out is to create product videos. By creating videos of your products you can ensure that you get conversions, not your competitors.
Let’s say, for example, you are searching for a fridge freezer. You find a lot of sites that have great product images of fridge freezers, but then you find ao.com.
Click to view.
The ao website features in-depth videos that show their products in action and encourage website visitors to convert.
Landing Page Video
The whole purpose of a landing page is to convert visitors into leads, and a video can give you the best chance of doing that. People react better to visuals, and some studies suggest that consumers prefer to digest information through video, rather than through text. One study even found that using video on a landing page can increase conversions by up to 86%.
Here is a great example of a landing page with a video:
Gated Video
Just as you create gated written content, like eBooks and white papers, you can also create gated videos. Gated videos need to be engaging, entertaining, and worth the value of an email address.
At Wyzowl, we created a series of knowledge videos and added turnstiles to these that would ask viewers to enter their email address to see the exclusive blooper content. The turnstile looks like this:
We created these in Wistia – and it’s super easy! You simply open the customise panel and select ‘timeline actions’. From there, you can choose to add an email gate to your video, and personalise it as you like. The last step is to connect the turnstile to your email marketing provider and wait for the conversions to come rolling in!
The Results
Increasing your conversion rate is one of those things that is definitely easier said than done. And tracking your results is very important for knowing what works for your brand and what doesn’t, so you can tweak your efforts in the future.
In this section of the article, let’s take a look at a couple of case studies that show how other brands have achieved excellent results from video marketing campaigns that revolved around increasing conversion rates.
Billabong
Billabong is an international surf company and clothing retailer. Their strategy for increasing conversion rates was to encourage website visitors to create a personalised wallpaper from their surfing videos and imagery.
They created a landing page: IsurfBecause.com, which showcased all of the assets. As an added incentive, creating a wallpaper automatically entered users into a prize draw to win free Billabong merchandise.
The only catch?
The user had to supply an email address in order to receive their wallpaper and be updated on the contest.
The results were extremely successful. The landing page, IsurfBecause.com, received more than 1 million page views; and the company acquired 25,000 names for their email list!
Dollar Shave Club
It’s tough to break into any market, but it’s even tougher to make an impact in a market that’s already dominated by big names. But Dollar Shave Club smashed it.
How?
With video, of course!
Upon launching their brand, Dollar Shave Club released a video that went viral very quickly. Here it is, in case you’re among the 0.001% of the population that hasn’t seen it:
The video helped the brand to gather 25,000 subscribers in just one week! With the first 12,000 or so converting in just 48 hours!
Final Thoughts
As noted in the introduction, many businesses struggle to increase their conversion rates and this may be caused by a reluctance to put marketing spend into conversions. Studies have found that, for every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent on converting them.
Videos aren’t exactly the ‘cheapest‘ marketing technique around, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t cost-effective. If you use and promote your videos in the correct way, then they’ll earn back every cent that is spent on them – and more!
Join us next time for the final article in this 4-part series when we’ll be talking about how to increase product understanding with video.