If you are not making use of video within your ecommerce marketing strategy, you may be missing out on the chance to boost sales, drive reputation, and increase your overall brand image. Video is a channel that has seen continued growth, year after year. Smart ecommerce brands are using video in a way that helps to finalise purchases, drive trust, boost conversion, and even bring back shoppers who have abandoned carts.
Just how much can video help your ecommerce marketing strategy? Done right, video has plenty of impact on your traffic as well as your sales. Have a look at these statistics to see the power that video can add to your campaigns.
- Four times as many consumers prefer to watch a product video than read a description. (Animoto, 2015)
- Nearly 50% of shoppers look for product videos before they even visit a store. (Google Insights, 2016)
- 46% of shoppers said they have made a purchase after watching brand videos on social media. (Bright Cove, 2016)
- 74% of shoppers said that they have purchased a product or service after watching a product video. (Wyzowl, 2017)
While there is no doubt that video is a great tool to add to your current ecommerce marketing strategy, it does not mean that putting up any old YouTube video will do your brand any good. In fact, treating video as an afterthought or using poorly made videos can end up doing far more harm than you realise. To ensure that you get the most from your video marketing efforts, we have put together a guide on how to use video within your broader ecommerce strategy.
How to Use Video in Your Ecommerce Marketing Strategy
How do you go about ensuring that your videos add value to your ecommerce marketing strategy? For starters, it helps to use video selectively rather than simply putting out video at every chance you get. Contact Zut Media in Manchester to guide you through these video production strategies for your business to grow. Some of the ways that video can add the most value include the following:
Product descriptions
Adding video to your product pages is, without a doubt, one of the best ways to get the full benefit that video has to offer. One of the challenges that ecommerce offers compared to traditional brick and mortar stores is that customers need to rely on written descriptions and images alone. In a traditional store, customers can feel the product, get an idea of its size, and learn more about the product’s benefits. In an online store, they are limited to product descriptions and images.
Rather than simply adding a dull video showing the product, you can get strategic and focus on your top selling products for starters. You could create short, simple videos that show the product from various angles and give a quick overview of its primary highlights. You could zoom in to show harder to see details and promote the product as a salesperson would in a retail store. Combined with well-written product descriptions and high-quality images, this helps to create a lasting impression of the product. This, in turn, helps to increase the chance of making the sale, as the statistics above show.
Abandoned cart emails
Abandoned carts may seem like a lost opportunity to make a sale. If they are handled correctly, they can be a very useful tool to bring back a potentially lost sale before it is gone for good. We’ve written about abandoned cart emails before. With the right approach, you can bring back an unsure customer before they are gone for good. Video is a helpful way to increase the chance of bringing back your customer.
That does not mean using video in every single email within your sequence. Instead, it means using a well-planned, well-made video in your primary email – the one designed to lure customers back to your store. For instance, you could use a video that highlights how easy it is to use your store, one that shows your trust factor, one that reminds customers why they might have been looking at the products in question in the first place or even a video that makes use of a special discount you offer if the purchase is completed within a specific time frame.
Sales and other offers
On the topic of special discounts, you can also use video to promote sales and other offers within your ecommerce marketing strategy. These could be for set times of the year – Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, Easter, New Year, Ramadan, Holi, customer birthdays or anniversaries, Valentine’s Day or any other designated day. You could also have summer, autumn, winter, and spring sales, promoted by engaging videos.
The best way to get the most from these videos is to keep them short, simple, and highly relevant. Focus on the offer and keep it down to a few seconds for maximum impact. You can share these videos on your home page, category pages as well as your social media pages.
Customer testimonials and reviews
You can also make use of testimonials and reviews from happy customers by asking selected customers if they would be happy to record a live testimonial rather than a written one. Keep these simple and short, too. These are very effective if your store sells high-value products that may have a longer or more extensive deliberating process. Testimonials, in general, help to build trust. Reading a testimonial is helpful – watching a real-life customer talk about the products is even more so.
To get the most from these videos, find the testimonials that have been the most positive and see if your customer would be happy to record a live version. Another option that many brands use is influencer marketing. With this approach, you would use well-known social media influencers or bloggers to record a short video, in return for free products or money. Although this has been shown to be effective, it has also faced criticism for being less authentic than genuine reviews from real customers who have purchased your products.
How-to videos
How-to videos are very similar to product videos, except they have a slightly different focus. Rather than promoting your product, you are teaching people how to use your product. These are created and shared as part of a broader effort to grow your brand reputation and build awareness for your wider industry rather than promote your specific products. For example, if you sell organic skincare, you might focus your video marketing on skincare tips and advice relating to skincare and organic ingredients.
Some ideas of how-to videos using our skincare brand example above could include product demonstrations on how to do skin scrubs, how to choose a moisturiser, how to make natural skin masks at home, how to choose products for specific skin types, and any other topic that relates to the broader topic of skincare. These videos can be shared on your blog, on specific product pages (category pages, for example), and on social media. This is a great way to build your YouTube following, too.
Make video part of your ecommerce marketing strategy
When you put some thought into your video approach and take the time to create powerful videos that are high-quality, free of background noise, and not done on the go with your smartphone, you will see just how much value video can add to your growth. As part of your ecommerce marketing strategy, video is a tool that definitely can’t be overlooked.
