The Power of Using Video on Your Ecommerce Store

Videos help to drive website traffic and help new customers find out about your brand and product.  They also have been proven to increases your search engine rankings.  Videos can also be used in email and social media marketing to promote content or new products.  In ecommerce, it is important to make sure that your website is unique to all others selling similar products.  Using video can help you to stand out from the crowd.

There are several ways to successfully integrate video into your online store:

Overview Videos

Use a video to welcome new guests to your online store and show them what makes your ecommerce store unique.  Sweet Spud uses a video on their homepage in order to quickly engage visitors and to welcome customers.

‘‘A welcoming and inviting presence right on our homepage.’’ – Everett Brothers, VP of Marketing at Sweet Spud.

Product Demo Videos

Product videos are an easy way to explain how your product works.  They also make your product pages more unique for search engine rankings, improving search results.

In fact, Zappos found that the use of product demo videos increased their sales by anywhere from 6% to 30%.

Testimonial Videos

Having a message from a customer to another customer right on your website will help shoppers trust your brand and product.  Testimonials can also come directly from the brand by sharing employee stories. Zappos has integrated this employee testimonial video in order to evoke trust in their brand:

Expert Videos

Another route is to create videos that help shoppers learn an answer to their question.  Subsequently, shoppers trust the brand giving the information and may choose to buy from that store.  Direct Fix makes these videos about fixing electronics and posts them on YouTube as tutorials.  Shoppers looking on YouTube for how to fix their iPhone can easily be directed to the DirectFix ecommerce store.

The Big Impact of Video on Sales

1,000 people participated in Animoto’s survey on the impact of video on ecommerce sales.  Here were the results:

• 96% of consumers find video content to be helpful when making purchasing decisions online.
• 93% of respondents said that they used video content in comparison shopping.
• 87% found business videos helpful for research into the products or services of the brand.
• 58% considered the businesses that produce video content to be more trustworthy than those that did not.
• 93% of consumers use videos for post-purchase instructions and/or guidelines.
• 71% said that video content leaves a positive impression of a company.
• 77% of consumers feel that brands that use video are more engaged with their customers than those that don’t.

What these statistics show is that the majority of consumers use videos to inform and guide them in their purchasing decisions online.

Video Viewing by Industry

Different industries demand different approaches.  Respondents to the survey said that video is most wanted in the electronic (57%), restaurant (39%), travel (34%), and exercise/fitness (33%) industries.  In addition, 42% of consumers want more descriptive content, such as 360 degree videos of products.

Most Shared Video Content

Getting a video to become viral, or rapidly shared across social networks, is what most businesses dream of.  Lets take a look at what makes up a video that is worth sharing.

• 80% of consumers would love to share what they’ve watched if there was a ‘share’ option.
• 89% would share the video if they felt it was educational.
• 86% would share if there was some incentive for sharing, such as a discount.

What’s even more intriguing about these numbers is how many consumers watch videos on a daily basis.

• 94% watch a video at least once a week from their desktop computer.
• 76% of smartphone owners watch videos at least once a week on their mobile devices.

Animoto’s survey confirmed that the ideal length for videos are less than 5 minutes.  However, the shorter the video, the better.  Consumers have short attention spans.

As online videos rapidly gain popularity in ecommerce, it is important you’re your online business to get on board with video content.  Gain more market share and gain the ecommerce edge with videos for your store.

Invodo and LiveClicker are two businesses that develop and create all kinds of ecommerce videos. Videos can start in the 5 figure range. Or, make your first business video today without the cost, time, and effort of traditional professional video production with Animoto.

You can view this infographic in full here.