On average, only 2.86% of e-commerce website visits convert into a purchase, leaving marketers to figure out how to increase sales with digital shopping. For years, the dominant factor ‘contributing’ to this phenomenon has been potential consumers being deterred by the extra shipping and tax costs. The latter is unavoidable from the sellers’ perspective, at least in the foreseeable future. After all, an e-commerce store does not dictate VAT rates, and is often beholden to third party shipping and delivery companies which call the shots regarding prices.
However, there are other reasons why the overwhelming majority of e-commerce site visitors never attain consumer status. Lengthy account creation processes, along with a refusal to fork over credit card information are the second and third most common elements that see shoppers abandon virtual stores. Unlike with taxes and shipping fees, e-commerce stores can do something about these issues and increase sales.
The solution:
Heavily-incorporating video throughout the digital shopping and buying process can make the difference between another abandoned cart and a successful conversion. Here are a few cool ways of having video become the centerpiece of your e-commerce site or page:
Build trust with video customer testimonials
To get potential buyers to feel comfortable handing over his or her credit card info, they need to trust you, your brand and your store. Actual customers vouching for your site and products can be a game changer in that regard.
An overwhelming percentage of buyers trust customer input, even when they aren’t familiar with the satisfied former customer. Prominently displaying customer testimonials on your site can make all the difference. and is one of the key elements e-commerce customers wish they’d see more of.
If you consider video dominating text-based content in terms of visitor engagement, featuring video customer testimonials can exponentially amplify their trust-building effect. Obviously, sending a camera crew to interview your satisfied customers would be ideal. However, there are more affordable, simpler methods to increase sales and enhance digital shopping that are just as likely to do the trick.
Customers can install webcam extensions and record themselves via laptop. Alternatively, they can even just record themselves via mobile. You can always jazz up the recordings in post-production.
Take a page out of the Disney playbook
E-commerce sites vary in terms of their payment process. Some break it down, allocating a separate webpage for related tasks. Here are a few examples:
- An initial page for name and phone number submission
- Another page for credit card-related information
- More pages to close out the digital shopping experience
Others sites prefer a more condensed approach, opting for a series of forms appearing succinctly on a single page. Both approaches are often perceived by site visitors as minor nuisances (hopefully) or a major pain. In a lot of ways, they are both similar to waiting on line for an awesome ride at an amusement park. Local, run-of-the-mill parks will have its visitors waiting in long lines, often under a blaring summer sun.
Disneyworld, on the other hand, puts as much thought into providing an amazing experience while waiting for a ride as it does for when the visitor actually gets onboard a coaster.
It’s on us to create a stimulating, engaging digital shopping environment that will keep our soon-to-be customers from jumping ship. This is the single highest-leverage moment of an online shopping experience. Shoppers have become increasingly sensitive to time-consuming buffering and information processing, and are more likely to bounce now than during any other phase.
Video enables you to extend that winning Disney approach
Using sticky video players (sometimes referred to as floating video players) you can see to it that videos showcasing the selected product or service accompany your customers throughout the purchase process. You’ve likely seen this technology in action when scrolling down a page, or even navigating between different queries using YouTube’s mobile app.
This technology should be applied to your checkout pages as well to increase sales
The process of setting this in motion is extremely straightforward if your checkout forms are on one page. If you spread them over a number of webpages, you’ll need to involve your development team. Using frames called Ajax, they can arrange for your video to remain in motion as your customer moves between the different checkout webpages. This too, should be a piece of cake for someone with moderate technical acumen.
Use a good video hosting and management platform
Embedding YouTube videos within a website is a common practice for many companies. Whether or not it’s the right move is questionable. For our purposes, it most definitely is not.
It’s hard enough to get someone to land on your website. And when a conversion (i.e. completed purchase) has a 1/40 odds of success, you aren’t in a position to be taking any risks of your potential customers bouncing out of your store. Onsite YouTube videos are designed to entice viewers to click on them; and, by proxy to send visitors to the video giant’s site itself.
A clickable icon, along with recommended content and ads (very often featuring and promoting your direct competitors) are all strategically placed to lure your visitors away.
With a good video hosting platform, such as Cincopa, none of these problems exist.
You dictate exactly how and which videos visitors are met with. Most importantly, they will remain on your site, with you preventing any ‘bouncing backdoors’. With robust, extensive analytical features, you can see exactly how each buyer interacts with specific videos, and measure the videos’ overall success through viewing aggregating features such as video heatmaps. That way, you can tweak or replace testimonials or product promos that fail to resonate with your buyers.
Video’s value add to e-commerce sites is significant, often the difference between a successful conversion and just another abandoned cart.