With videos appearing in the 70% of the top 100 search results, companies cannot afford to ignore this channel. So concludes Kissmetrics, which gathered a number of case studies and statistics—including the one above—to make the case that well-done product videos almost inevitably lead to increased sales.
It points to housewares e-tailer StacksAndStacks.com, which has said that visitors were 144% more likely to make a purchase after seeing a product video than those who did not. Also, Advance Auto Parts has found that including instructional and how-to videos both on its site and Facebook leads visitors to stay on the site twice as long and visit twice as many pages versus those who don't see video.
The Salesforce.com Example
Another example is provided by Salesforce.com, one of the winners of Beagle Research's Short Tale awards last year. This award ranks corporate clips developed by CRM vendors. Beagle Research rated 150 different clips, in such categories as best customer testimonial, best animation, and so on. The winner was Salesforce.com's video explaining, of all things, how to best use its video library of sales clips.
This particular clip has been so effective for Salesforce.com that it likened it to the equivalent of having an extra 46 hyper-effective telephone sales agents, Denis Pombriant, Beagle Research founder told CRM Buyer.
Online Video Drives Retailers' Success
Another measure of videos’ success with consumers can be seen in analysis from Liveclicker released in December 2011. It reported that the average retailer saw the number of year-over-year video views increase by 61% in November 2011. As of Cyber Monday, the average e-commerce video generated $2,026 in revenue, with an average of $3.74 per play.
Sub-30 second videos demonstrated the highest conversion rates, with 4.54% of viewers making a purchase immediately after watching. Following this group, videos between 30 seconds and 2 minutes in length recorded an average conversion rate of 3.58%. Videos longer than 2 minutes achieved an average conversion rate of 2.91%.
