How To Optimize Your Store For Conversions With Video
This article was written and contributed by Haydn Fleming, Marketing at VideoWise, a YOTTAA Partner.
eCommerce businesses are fighting for traffic more than ever as most businesses have now turned to online sales. For online stores of any scale, optimizing for the highest conversion rate possible is essential. Using video on your online store will help your brand stand out and improve your shopper experience.
Today I’m going to be sharing some of my best tips for increasing your conversion rate with video, without hurting your page speed.
1. Use custom thumbnails designed to generate clicks
The thumbnail is one of the most important parts of using video content. Consumers are on the hunt for relevant information about the products they are looking for. An enticing video thumbnail can convince a consumer that the video will answer their questions.
At the same time, a plain thumbnail can lead to your video being ignored altogether, or even diminish the quality of the page.
Thumbnails should tell the customer exactly what to expect, the more you do this visually the better, but in some cases using text is the best way to communicate your message.
Here’s a great example from Axel Glade, featuring videos from YouTube sourced by the VideoWise app.
Image taken from Axel Glade.
On top of all that, one of the biggest benefits of a quality thumbnail image, is that it can be used to improve your page speed with a technique called lite-embedding. Videos generally load slower than most other items on a page, and can increase your page load times if used carelessly.
Lite-embedding allows your page to only load the thumbnail at first, and only loads the video when a customer actually clicks on it. This can save you a lot of precious page speed when scaled to your entire site.
Shoppers need your site to be fast. Learn how YOTTAA can speed up your online store.
2. Master the first 15 seconds to keep customers engaged
Capturing viewers attention in the first 15 seconds is important, because that’s when viewers are most likely to stop watching. If you are seeing a low watch time, and your video is being exited early, it’s likely you’re not living up to the customer’s expectations.
Video content is an opportunity for businesses to engage their users in a more meaningful and impactful way. Take advantage of the first 15 seconds by making it exciting. Good music, engaging visuals, and on-brand copy are all great ways to make your videos more engaging. The point is to get the viewer excited to see more, peak their curiosity.
The longer a customer engages with your video content, the more likely they are to make a purchase. Treat every second of watch-time as a boost to your conversion rate.
3. Build trust with influencer-generated content and user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) can offer some of the highest performing video content you have.
Often, as consumers we tend to believe each others’ opinion on a product, rather than that of the company who sells it.
Influencer-generated content is somewhere in-between since it’s usually paid for. Fans of the influencer may be swayed to purchase by their respect/interest in the individual.
Videos like these create a feeling of authenticity in your brand. You’re not just a logo that sells a product— you’re a group of people with purpose, solving a problem. Video content of your customers and industry influencers are a great way to communicate that to your audience.
4. Use shoppable videos to increase viewer conversion rates
Visitors are much more likely to purchase after having viewed a video because they understand the product better.
By prompting them within the video to make a purchase, you can speed up the process of getting them down the funnel and through checkout.
Here’s an example of a shoppable video that boosts conversions, from VideoWise.
Again, like mentioned in the previous section, video can impact your pages performance/optimization. When you implement video shopping, you must be careful not to adversely affect your page speeds.
Systems like VideoWise can help by automatically optimizing for page speed, but if you decide to do it manually, make sure to take advantage of lite-embedding.
Shoppers need your site to be fast. Learn what else may be impacting your site performance today!
5. Design with a ‘mobile-first’ mindset
Over 68% of all website visits in 2020 came from mobile devices, and this number has increased year over year.
There’s no question that a massive amount of your traffic is viewing your site from a mobile perspective, so it’s important that your mobile experience is just as good, if not better, than your desktop experience.
A great way to optimize video content for mobile is to use a custom video player like we’ve featured in this article. This allows you to display videos in a vertical format which is more natural for mobile devices. And it allows you to have more control over how the video loads, which can help with page speed problems.
By formatting video content to match visitors’ devices, they are more likely to engage and make a purchase.
Watch and earn
These have been my top strategies for using videos to improve your eCommerce sales. If you follow these strategies you can expect record high conversion rates across your store, all with less impact to site speed.