Tuning Website Video for Higher Conversion – Part 2

This is Part 2 of a series of posts on Tuning Video aimed at helping companies get more mileage from the videos on their website (Part 1 is available here).  Typically, sites can expect to achieve 20–200% increase in conversion through the application of the techniques across this series of posts.

As discussed last time, there are 3 stages to tuning:

1. Getting People to Launch Your Video
2. Keeping Them In Your Video
3. Driving Follow-Up Actions

This post focuses on Keeping Them In Your Video.  The key questions that I am going to answer are:

• What is the mindset of the viewer that you need to connect with?
• How should videos start to avoid the dreaded bounce?
• What video lengths and structures work well?
• What special things should you do if you are doing an interactive video?

Given the depth of the information, I will cover the first 2 questions in this installment…

What is the mindset of the viewer that you need to connect with?

I believe that most online video viewing behaviors today are strongly biased by a visitor’s prior experience with watching YouTube videos, watching short video segments in the TV news, and using a traditional remote control to channel surf.  This leads to a few important tenets:

• Engage your audience quickly or you lose them
• Keep the material easily digestible, ideally in clear segments and sound bites
• Realize that visitors will naturally “lean back” when watching your video and if you are using interactivity, you will need to make it clear that they can “lean forward” and take control

How should videos start to avoid the dreaded bounce?

When you look at engagement profiles for video, you almost always see a chunk of the audience abandon within the first 15 seconds (see example done below).  This is just like a bounce rate that you might measure on a web page in Google Analytics and represents how well you did at engaging the visitor.  To reduce this impact to an acceptable level (5% bounce in 20 secs is a good target), here are some techniques:

• Do not open with a long musical fade in.  Unless you have chosen the perfect song for your target audience, they are not likely to hang in there.
• Use branding and promotional elements very sparingly at this point in the video.  The last thing you want is for the visitor to leave because they believe that the whole video is full of sales or marketing material that will waste their time.
• Get to the main point of the video as quickly as possible and make sure it is consistent with the promise you made in the call to action that launched the video.
• Use a real person looking into the camera to start an authentic conversation with the visitor (ideally they are an authority on the subject being discussed).  They don’t need to stay on camera long, but humans react to humans so get in there and connect with your visitor.
• Focus on educating your audience, not selling to them

Let’s look at an example:

• Here is a BAD experience for the visitor:
  • You offer a call to action for the video of “Learn more about how to do Fly Fishing”
  • The video opens with a logo from a fishing rod company and a 15 sec sequence showing the product in action on a river
  • A mysterious voice-over starts at 15 secs talking about the long history of fishing and the importance of having the right equipment…
  • The bounce for this video would be enormous and conversion would be limited
• Here is a GOOD experience for the visitor:
  • You offer a call to action for the video of “Learn more about how to do Fly Fishing”
  • The video opens with an expert fly fisherman looking into the camera and immediately saying “Hello, I’m so-and-so and I’ve been fly fishing for 20 years.  We are going to talk today about how to land your first fish.  Let’s jump into it…”
  • Later in the video, the product can be featured and the “host” can plug the product but not until after the viewer has got some value

Ok, my WordPress is beating my up about length so I will stop it there.  The next installment, Part 3 covers the remaining questions and is available here.

As always, I appreciate your thoughts and feedback.  This is a rapidly evolving space and there is so much to learn and share…