Keeping online shoppers engaged (and buying) takes constant attention from retailers. How do you borrow the tactics that work in-store, like end-cap displays and piles of inviting merchandise, to attract customers in the online world? While images help, video goes much further in getting shoppers to dig deeper into product benefits, and eventually add items to their cart. In fact, our own research has shown that videos can drive immediate and significant increases in sales, so there’s a good argument for using video as much as possible on your online retail storefront.
However, videos can find a home in many more places than just product pages — which are certainly important for video, but you can gain more ROI on your video investment, and garner more sales, by placing video throughout all of your customer touch points. This means everywhere from search and online advertising, to customer email newsletters and more.
SEO Strategy
Let’s start at the beginning of the customer path: your SEO campaigns. You can upload your video sitemaps to search engines, including Google and Bing, which will help you immediately improve your videos’ rankings in searches. For instance, video appears to dominate Google’s Universal Search results, which combine listings from its vertical search engines for news, video, images, local and book search engines, among others. So by including video on several types of your webpages, including your product pages, your chances of getting onto page-one results is much higher. You’ll also drive more traffic to your webpages, as the thumbnail image that accompanies video search listings will drive more click-throughs.
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Source: Searchmetrics, “Universal Search Results in the Google SERPs – Review 2012 and Forecast 2013,” http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/universal-search-study/
By the way, don’t limit your SEO efforts to Google. Keep in mind that Bing currently has about 28% share of the web search market and also powers Yahoo and Facebook search. Unfortunately, Bing’s Webmaster Tools submission for videos doesn’t work just yet, so in the meantime, the best way to ensure your videos are indexed is to email Bing your site map at bingfeed@microsoft.com. You can actually submit the same video site map you’ve already created for Google, which will make things easy.
Syndicating Videos
There are other ways video will get the attention of shoppers before they arrive at your website. When they see videos around the web, such as on their favorite social networks, they’ll be encouraged to visit your site and learn more. If you haven’t done so already, creating a YouTube channel is a good first step — it’s considered to be the world’s second-largest search engine after Google, so it has the eyeballs you need. It also has tools that make it easy for users to share your videos. For each product video you post on YouTube, make sure to include links to the relevant product pages on your site. Also promote the link to your YouTube channel on your website, customer emails, print collateral, and catalogs.
Naturally, you’ll want to place videos on Facebook, but the up-and-coming social network that deserves special attention right now is Pinterest. According to Nielsen, in 2012 Pinterest showed the largest year-over-year increase of all the social networks in terms of both unique audience and time spent on the site. Its members love the site’s features for sharing images, but they’re also getting the hang of using their “pinboards,” or bulletin boards, for sharing videos. Create a pinboard on Pinterest for your own retail brand, and add videos as well as product pictures. (You can ask members to add your videos to their pinboards by placing “Pin it” badges near each video on your website.)
Retargeting Ads
Videos can play a role in bringing shoppers back to your site if they’ve visited previously but left without buying anything. Using videos in your retargeting campaigns will get more attention than flat product images, and once shoppers have clicked through to a video, they’re more likely to come back to your site for a fresh visit.
Post-Purchase Marketing
Once you’ve gotten a new customer on board, you can use videos to convince them to come back for more. For example, if they’ve signed up for your email newsletter, include videos that introduce them to other products they might like, or similar items by their favorite brand. Our own tests show that just by including the word “video” in the newsletter email subject line, you’ll boost open rates. In addition, once they’re reading the newsletter, adding a call to action to view a video can raise clickthrough rates by 300% or more.
Post-purchase emails also present a great opportunity to ask customers to upload their own videos that show them reviewing the product or using it. These independent reviews have a lot of influence on other customers, so make an effort to collect them.
Video is such an attention-getter that its use should not be limited to just product pages. For maximum impact, you should seek out every opportunity to place videos in front of your customers. You’ll get more bang for your investment in videos, while encouraging more sales and brand visibility.
