A|wear’s Video Marketing Success
Internet Retailing recently released a story explaining how the Fashion Brand A|wear dramatically boosted its conversion rates – the proportion of visitors who go to the site and take some action beyond just browsing its content. Barbara Wills, a designer at A|wear reflected on its achievement in an interview, saying, “When women are clothes shopping, visuals are everything, and not just colour and shape, but how it hangs and how it moves. This makes video and engaging content key to online sales for a company like ours.”
Wills then said, “We have already seen a big boost in conversions since we launched Video Merchandising, and experienced a spike in traffic to the A|wear TV section of the site when this storytelling content has been embedded in email campaigns.”
A|wear, after making video marketing into an integral part of its marketing strategy, saw its conversion rates grow by nearly a third.
Retail brands like A|wear make video marketing look easy. They have offerings that lend themselves to the video format. But it’s not just glossy retail brands that are seeing video marketing boost their conversion rates. Businesses, regardless or industry or niche, can use video to augment their conversion optimization efforts.
The Impact of Video Marketing on Conversion Rates
While we’re on the subject of conversion rate optimization…
A number of researchers have substantiated on the story reported on by Internet Retailing. Their data strongly suggests that the company’s video marketing coup could easily be replicated. Internet Retailer conducted research on the impact of product videos on consumers’ purchasing behaviors and found that website visitors who watch a video are 85 percent more likely to make a purchase than website visitors who don’t. When researching the e-retailer and producer of home storage and organizational products, StacksandStacks.com, Internet Retailer found that website visitors who viewed a product video on the company’s website were 144 percent more likely to add a product to their carts than consumers who skipped the site’s extensive video library.
That a company that sells home storage equipment can generate that kind of engagement should dispel your reservations about the efficacy of video marketing.
Cathy McManus, StacksandStacks’ marketing director, reflected on the finding, saying, “Customers contact us and say, ‘I didn’t know how the heck it was going to be constructed, but the video made it look so simple. Sometimes it is hard to express what customers want to know about a product in copy without boring them half to death. Video is one way to do it without expressing it in words.”
Comscore found similar results during its research into the effectiveness of video marketing. The digital world’s favored analytics source found that website visitors who watch videos stay two minutes longer on a website, and are more than 60 percent more likely to make a purchase than site visitors who don’t.
The Value of Explainer Videos
The data is fairly conclusive: video marketing engages viewers and makes them more likely to go beyond simply browsing a site and indifferently perusing its products. But the data being generated by digital marketing researchers can be looked at from a more detailed perspective. There are, in fact, specific kinds of videos that are most likely to boost conversion rates. The humble explainer video – one of the staples of any video marketer’s repertoire – appears to be the format that most inspires website visitors to become shoppers.
Rypple, a social performance management platform, recently added explainer videos to its homepage content. It immediately saw its conversion rates explode by 20 percent. Almost a third of people visiting the site watched the explainer videos posted on its homepage and, of those who watched the videos in their entirety, half became buyers.
Rypple’s experience isn’t at all extraordinary. Internet Retailer found that more than half of consumers self-report that product videos make them more confident in their online purchase decision.
Conclusion
Video marketing can clearly transform casual website visitors into committed buyers. By giving them the information they crave, videos make them confident in their purchasing decisions. Those businesses that haven’t started to produce their own video marketing materials need to start doing so, if they want to encounter the same success as A|wear, Rypple, and a fast-growing host of other forward-looking brands.