More Traffic Doesn’t Always Mean More Conversions: One Proven Way To Improve Conversion On Your Website

Disappointing Website Conversions

After implementing a costly social media strategy, including Facebook ads and investing a lot of time and money into gaining traction with all their new Likes and followers, the management of the company still aren’t happy.

Although the marketing guys have shown increased website traffic and a few more membership registrations and newsletter subscriptions the social media campaign has not brought sky rocketing sales. And the new traffic they are getting to their site has even a lower conversion rate than that of the existing traffic!

Management want to know, how can they improve the conversion rate on the website?

They are considering getting a video produced for their homepage and have spent some time conducting research..

Wouldn’t you rather watch a video?

Taking into account that video now appears in 70% of the top 100 search results listings, and that viewers are anywhere from 64-85% more likely to buy after watching a product video (Source: KISS Metrics Blog). – this is one marketing force you can’t afford to ignore

People vastly prefer watching online video than consuming the same content in a readable format. It spans nearly every industry and demographic. Think about it, when was the last time you chose reading an article over viewing the video the article was talking about?

Statistics show that 17% of people spend less than 4 seconds on a website, but they are willing to spend 2.7 minutes watching a web video online (Source: Statistic Brain Blog).

The Dropbox case study

Adding a well produced video to your homepage, on average, will improve conversion across your website. Take the example of Dropbox, the Internet based cloud storage service. CommonCraft made Dropbox a video that appeared on their homepage. The results were so dramatic the company wrote to CommonCraft the below;

“Overall I’m positive the existence of the video increases conversions by a hefty margin, and probably gets us several thousand signups a day that we wouldn’t have otherwise”.

“The video is definitely considered a core part if not the core part of our strategy for introducing people to Dropbox … I’ve personally heard from plenty of friends who said that the video helped less tech-savvy people like their parents understand the basic concept of Dropbox much, much better.”

Some tips from the wise

This success story example is one of many. Still, increasing conversions is about more than just putting up a video up on your website. Your video has to be strategic, engaging and have a strong call to action.

Some suggestions to help marketers get there are:

• Hire a professional company to work with you on an idea, and shoot your product videos. Trying to do it yourself or do it cheap could potentially end up costing you customers instead of generating them!
• Demonstrate your product or service from several angles. Consider doing this with animation and adding a touch of humour
• Look for ways to involve your brand evangelists in the making of the video. There’s nothing like a strong video testimonial to put confidence in to your customer

And if you’re now curious to see the Dropbox video they raved about so much, we’ve put it below.

http://youtu.be/OFb0NaeRmdg

Marketing.com.au would like to thank Damian for sharing his insights on improving website conversions.