Picture this: You’re looking for a new electric bike online, and you find what seems to be the perfect one for a fraction of the cost of the competition, but it’s from a brand you don’t know. Besides looking up reviews, how else can you learn more about the product and brand before making your purchase? It’s not a quiz, but if you picked answer A: watch a product video to see the e-bike in action and get a better sense of its features, ding ding ding! You’re correct!
Whether you’re a new entrepreneur starting an ecommerce business for the first time, or a thriving ecommerce juggernaut launching a line of new products, you’re going to want a product video to help attract new customers to your product, give them enough confidence in your brand, and convince them to choose you over the competition. Here’s why.
What’s a Product Video?
A product video is a video that highlights your product’s features and shows it in action. Product videos help entrepreneurs easily showcase what a product can do, but what’s more, it’s actually the preferred way for your potential customers to learn more about your product, especially if there isn’t a showroom available for them to check it out in person.
That’s because online consumers have been proven to engage more with video content, and product videos in particular are known to better explain products to consumers, boost consumer confidence in your brand, and increase sales conversion rates. Just by watching a high quality product video featuring your product and its value on your website, web visitors are 73 percent more likely to buy your product!
Consumers Engage More with Video
Our eyes are naturally drawn to moving light and images, which is why video has been a captivating medium for decades. Product videos in particular are proven to capture your ecommerce customers’ attention and deliver more information than any other medium available.
That’s because consumers end up staying longer on websites with videos. According to Good Vidio, product videos on an ecommerce page contribute to an increase of pages viewed per session by 127 percent, and ecommerce companies that include product videos on their website end up seeing a lift in session duration by 340%. That increase in time spent on a site is because consumers are actually watching, resulting in two-thirds of shoppers who click on your product video watching it at least 80 percent of the way through.
This isn’t just because consumers would rather watch than read – it’s because people absorb information better through video, which is why 71 percent of consumers say product videos explain the product better.
Product Videos Boost Consumer Confidence in Ecommerce Companies
If you’ve just launched a new ecommerce company, adding a product video to your marketing strategy is a great way to increase consumer confidence in your brand and product. Even if you’re a known brand with name recognition, creating a video for a new product can help your customers familiarize themselves with your new line.
Consumers know that words and pictures can be deceiving, and are more likely to trust a company willing to show their product off, in action and from all angles, with a product video. In particular, 58 percent of online shoppers think ecommerce companies with product videos can be trusted, and 45 percent of consumers said they would revisit an ecommerce company’s site just for having product videos on their page. Consumers even said they would think 12 times more highly of companies with a product video than without. Not only that, 57 percent of consumers are more confident (and less surprised by) the products they ordered after watching a product video, therefore less likely to return the product.
While trust and confidence are critical ingredients for building brand loyalty with your customers, also interesting is consumers’ relationship to the type of product video you offer. According to Google’s statistics, 68 percent of consumers prefer product videos from “people like me” while 45 percent prefer product videos from experts. This is where it’s important to not only be familiar with your product – but with your customer too.
Product Videos Dramatically Improve Conversion Rates
Most important of all, having a product video is statistically proven to increase sales conversions. According to the professionals over at MarketingProfs, 92.6 percent of online consumers consider attractive visual content as one of the most influential factors in determining whether or not they will make purchases online, and 73 percent say they’re more likely to buy a product after watching videos that explain how it works.
Just by having a product video on a single product page leads to 37 percent more add-to-cart conversions than pages without. And get this: 44 percent of consumers say they would purchase more products from an ecommerce company that features product videos.
Bonus – Product videos bring more traffic to your ecommerce company.
Product videos are fantastic for converting web visitors into customers, but that’s not all they are good for – product videos can actually increase traffic and raise SEO for your ecommerce company.
According to Buffer, ecommerce companies with product video content on their pages see an increase of 157 percent in organic traffic from search engines, with the video generating three times as many monthly visitors to a website as other content. Plus, whether its on your website or shared through a social network, consumers are 46 percent more likely to seek more information about your product after seeing a product video about it.
Looking at it from a broad perspective, the search engine Google gets roughly 3.5 billion searches a day, totalling over 1.2 trillion searches a year worldwide – and out of all of those, videos appear in over 14 percent. Just by having your product videos out there, your product has a 14 percent higher chance of showing up in millions of searches a day.
If all of that wasn’t enough, the fact remains: having a high quality product video makes you look impressive, that you care about quality, and that you put the work in to make your product stand out. Product videos quite literally bring your products to life – and nothing is more captivating to a potential buyer than being able to visualize what it would be like to use/own your product.
Ultimately, product videos have the potential to take your ecommerce company to the next level. Once customers are convinced to buy from you after watching your video, you can use a company like Easyship to facilitate shipping worldwide. You’ll continue to engage with your customers and, in turn, turn them into loyal brand ambassadors who’ll come back for whatever you invent next!