How to Use Video to Increase Ecommerce Conversion Rates

Launching up your online store on Shopify or other Shopify alternatives? It can be stressful if you’ve launched your online store and are already driving traffic to it but are not making as many sales as you expected. 

In other words, your site is doing a poor job of converting your site visitors into customers. So, how do you get more of your site visitors to buy what you are selling on your ecommerce store?

Not to worry, there are several things you can do to boost your ecommerce conversion rates. 

One of the most effective and relatively inexpensive ways of doing this is to introduce video. You may interest clients who have just entered your marketing funnel but still need more information to help them purchase confidently. This can be supported by a short video featuring the product, your brand's USP, or even by building an e-commerce website that uses video content on the landing page.

Videos are very effective at driving conversions. Don’t believe it? Here’s an image showing the impact of video on ecommerce conversions:

Source: The Good

We’ve made a list of how you can start using video to increase your ecommerce conversion rates below: 

1. Use Video To Increase Visitor Engagement

Visitor engagement has a huge influence on conversions. The more engaged your site visitors are, the more likely they are to stick on your site long enough to understand what you have to offer, and how your products can help them.

Disengaged visitors, on the other hand, will leave your site much faster, reducing your chances of converting them into a customer.

When it comes to visitor engagement, no other form of content beats video. The great thing about video is that it combines multiple formats of passing information – video footage, voice overs, text, images, and so on.

Think about it this way – assume you are looking for information about a product, and you come across two pages that contain the information you are looking for. There’s a slight difference between the pages, however.

One page contains paragraphs of text describing the product, while the second page contains a two minute video of the product demo. Which of the two would you choose? In such situations, most people will avoid the text description and opt for video.

Video allows you to share information much quicker, and makes it easier to explain complex information about your products.

It’s good to note, however, that even video is not infallible. Internet users tend to have very short attention spans, and therefore, the longer you make your videos, the more likely your visitors are to abandon the video midway.

To maximum effectiveness, you should keep your videos short and put all the most important information near the beginning.

2. Use Video To Effectively Communicate Product Features

One of the disadvantages of online shops over conventional brick and mortar shops is the fact that customers cannot physically interact with a product before making the purchase.

To make up for this, most online shops share product images and detailed product descriptions to give customers a good idea of what they are purchasing.

However, despite the popular saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, pictures can be very limiting, and especially so when it comes to pictures of products. Even after viewing a picture of a product, a potential customer might still have questions about the product.

• Does the product really look like that, or has the photo been manipulated with filters and edits?

• How does the product look from a different angle?

• What is the exact size of the product?

• Will the product really work as I expect?

These questions cannot be answered effectively using pictures. However, they can be answered more effectively using video.

For instance, if you show a video of someone using the product, this can quickly answer most questions a customer might have about the product and its features.

There are two kinds of videos that are great for communicating product features:

• Product Videos: These are the simplest kind of videos. A product video is a video that shows what the product looks like from different angles and goes over the features and benefits of the product.

• Explainer Videos: These are simplistic videos whose aim is to explain, in the simplest way possible, how a product works. In most cases, they will use storytelling to show how the product solves the customers’ problem.

Using videos to showcase the features and benefits of your products can have a massive impact on conversions. According to Invesp, 73% of customers report that they have a higher likelihood of purchasing a product after viewing a video about the product. This would work equally well—from a clothing business to a sourcing services business.

Source: Invesp

3. Use Video To Improve Consumer Trust

One of the major conversion killers in ecommerce is lack of customer trust. The customer is purchasing a product they have not seen from someone they have not met. Therefore, it is not surprising that they might have their doubts. Actually, 81% of online shoppers have some fear when buying from an unfamiliar website.

• Will this ecommerce store actually deliver?

• Will I get the exact thing I believe I am buying?

• How is the quality of products from this ecommerce site?

If a potential customer doesn’t trust you, you can forget about converting them into a customer. Here’s the good news, however. Simply having videos on your ecommerce site can help boost customer trust. Moreover, you can add WP plugins like sticky video, sticky header, or basically any other element on your website for an additional information about your product which will improve your customers trust and get their attentions for it's creativeness.

According to an infographic by Invesp, 58% of online shoppers believe that ecommerce sites with product videos can be trusted, and 44% say they’d make more purchases from sites with product videos.

Source: Invesp

Product videos boost customer trust by providing the customer with more information that they can use to make their decision. 

After viewing a product video, a customer has a better idea of what the product looks like and how it works, and therefore, they are more likely to trust you, because you are not hiding anything. You’re going out of your way to be transparent about your products.

Apart from product videos, there are other kinds of videos that you can use to build customer trust. One of the most effective is testimonial videos.

Customer reviews and testimonials videos work for one main reason. They provide an unbiased opinion of a product by someone who has used the product and who has nothing to gain from the sale of the product. 

By showing testimonial videos from your past customers, you are showing potential customers that your product worked for previous customers, and therefore, there is no reason it shouldn’t work for them either. This does wonders when it comes to creating trust.

You can also cultivate customer trust by using videos to show the human side of your brand. You can do this by sharing behind the scene videos, a video from the CEO sharing your brand story, videos introducing your staff to customers, and so on. 

Such videos create an emotional connection between customers and your brand and can help boost trust and conversions.

4. Use Videos To Capture Leads

One of the best ways to boost conversions is to have a well-optimized sales funnel to move site visitors from one-time visitors to repeat customers. However, it is impossible to move prospects along your sales funnel without capturing their information first.

So, what has video got to do with lead generation? 

Well, it is possible to capture lead information directly within your videos. Today, most video hosting platforms allow you to embed lead capture forms inside videos.

So, why are in-video lead capture forms more effective than ordinary lead capture forms? Remember, we saw that video is more engaging and entertaining than other forms of content. Because your visitors are more engaged, they are more likely to provide you with the information you are asking for.

For the most effective results, you should consider having the form pop up within the first 10-20% of your video. In other words, you should have a highly captivating introduction to hook your audience’s attention, and then have your lead capture form pop up.

Since your audience is already hooked and is eager to see the rest of the video, they are more likely to share their details. This is not just speculation.

According to Wistia analysis of their Turnstiles feature, which allows marketers to place lead capture forms within videos, videos that have a lead capture form appearing within the first 10-20% tend to have higher sign-up rates.

Source: WordStream

5. Use Video To Deal With Customer Concerns

Sometimes, a potential customer could be on the verge of making a purchase, but then one small thing could be holding them back from whipping out their credit card to complete the purchase.

Maybe there’s something about your product they don’t understand, maybe they have an unanswered question, or perhaps they want to know something about your store’s policies.

In such instances, your customer service team can do a great deal in helping the potential customer get over the doubts or concerns keeping them from making the purchase. 

There’s only one problem – most potential customers will not contact your customer service team at this point, which means they will leave your site with their questions unanswered, and that will be a lost sale for you.

There are two ways to prevent this from happening. The first one is to use online chatbots, and the second and most effective is to use video.

There are two kinds of video that you can use to answer your customer's questions and quell any doubts or objections they have about your products:

FAQ Videos

These are videos that address some of the most common questions asked by your customers. FAQ videos are more effective than a text-based FAQ page because they allow you to answer the customers’ questions in greater detail.

FAQ videos also rely on the personal connection of video to help potential customers overcome any doubts and objections they might have had about your products.

Aside from boosting conversions, FAQ videos enhance your site’s customer experience and save time for your customer service team, since they don’t have to keep responding to the same questions over and over.

How-To Videos

How-to videos are videos that teach your audience how to accomplish a specific task using your product. How-to videos quell potential customers’ hesitations by showing your product doing something the potential customer was not sure it could do.

For instance, let’s say you’re selling a power bank that is powerful enough to jumpstart a vehicle with a dead battery. However, you realize that a lot of potential customers do not believe that the power bank is powerful enough to do that.

In this case, you can record a video showing potential customers how to jumpstart a vehicle using your power bank. Seeing you (or someone else) do it will dissolve their doubts and help convert them into a customer.

6. Use Video To Boost Mobile Conversions

Mobile is a great driver of ecommerce. Actually, estimates by Statista projected that by 2021, 72.9% of all ecommerce orders would be made from a mobile device.

Source: Statista

So, as an online store owner, how do you get more mobile users to make purchases from your online store? Once again, video comes to the rescue.

Mobile devices account for 51% of all videos consumed on the internet. Therefore, by adding video to your marketing arsenal, you are likely to attract more mobile users, who we have seen have a higher chance of converting compared to desktop users.

Aside from adding the videos to your ecommerce site, you can also use them for other marketing avenues, such as email marketing and social media marketing. Adding videos to your ecommerce site will also boost your ecommerce SEO, since search engines are now giving preference to video content.

The key here is to make sure your videos are well optimized for mobile devices. You can optimize your video for mobile by:

• Keeping the video short

• Using a great video thumbnail

• Making your video audio independent. It should be able to still pass the message without audio, since a high number of mobile users watch videos on mute, especially when they’re in public places. A good way to do this is to include readable captions.

• Using vertical video, i.e. make sure that your videos have an aspect ratio that is optimized for vertical viewing.

Ready To Boost Your Ecommerce Conversion Rates Using Video?

Demand for video content is growing at a rapid rate, and if you want to improve and boost your ecommerce conversions, you need to include video as part of your digital marketing arsenal.

Before you start shooting your videos, however, take the time to define and understand your target audience. This will help you come up with a proper video marketing strategy and will also determine the kind of videos that will resonate with your audience.