Treepodia – The leading Product Video solution for e-commerce

The start of a new year is always a good time to take stock of past accomplishments and plan for new ones. 2011 has been a great year for our clients and us, and we plan to work as hard as we can to ensure 2012 is even better. It’s to that purpose that we’re publishing the Treepodia Product Video Best Practice Guide, and making it accessible to the ecommerce community

Committed to Ecommerce Video

As I’ve mentioned here before, we feel very privileged and thankful for being the market leader of the Online Product Video sector. It’s a responsibility we don’t take lightly. We invest a fair amount of our time and resources in researching the technology side of things, and perhaps even more, the business impact and ROI product videos have for ecommerce vendors.

Helping Ecommerce Entrepreneurs Prosper in 2012

Over the years, and as a result of the massive amounts of data to which we’ve been given access by our clients, we’ve compiled a series of guidelines that have been proven time and again to increase conversions and sales. It’s our great pleasure to start this new year by sharing these guidelines, with the hope they help ecommerce  entrepreneurs everywhere increase their profitability and product video ROI this year.

So without further ado embedded below and available for download here is:

The Treepodia Product Video Best Practice Guide

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Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kyz/3115855390/

We're all getting lazier - Product videos are great usability...

As a technology fan and a lover of all-things-web I find the growing body of research regarding  the impact the web is having on our intelligence absolutely riveting.

What impact is the web having on our intelligence?

There’s no clear answer to the question. Some pundits claim it’s making us dumber, while others claim it’s making us smarter. There are valid arguments for both claims, but whichever side you happen to take there’s little doubt the Internet and our experiences on the web are changing they way we think, process information and behave.

…And it’s probably making us lazier

Personally I’m unsure which side I’m on insofar as the debate regarding the web’s impact on our intelligence, but I’m definitely sure the web is making us lazier, and I’m not the only one that thinks so.

…And less attentive

Another interesting behavioral trend worth noting is the evident overall decrease in people’s attention spans, as evinced by broadcasters and advertisers alike. As we’re increasingly barraged by ever growing volumes of information and options of content to choose from, we’re clearly becoming less and less patient and satisfied with whatever it is we happen to be viewing/reading/browsing RIGHT NOW.

How does this relate to ecommerce and product videos?

Seeing as this is a video and ecommerce related blog some of you might be wondering how all this relates to our regular content. I promise you all will be revealed in a moment, but first please take a second to answer the following question:

Unless this post happens to be read by a statistically anomalous group of  detail obsessed individuals, I’m pretty sure most of you like myself chose option B, and that’s just the thing – seeing as how we’re all getting slightly lazier and less prone to attend to detail, we’d much prefer ecommerce sites present us the information we need to make a buying choice in the format and medium that makes it EASIEST for us to absorb. It’s good usability on their part, which is increasingly something we EXPECT.

Conclusion

The best marketing efforts don’t satisfy themselves merely with presenting customers with excellent information regarding their offers, they go the extra mile to ensure the information is presented in the way most likely to make the best impression with their audience. In the case of online shopping that means including VIDEOS for their product offerings.

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Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jorbasa/2476381678/in/photostream

Adding product videos to an ecommerce website will inevitably increase sales, however truly maximizing the impact videos will have requires considering all the elements that compose the video. This post is dedicated to listing some of those elements and the ways they can be tweaked for better performance. Note: our expertise has been gained via our work with automatically generated product videos, created from a website’s existing product feed, so that’s the scope of recommendations we can give.

Automatically generated videos are essentially reliant on two major factors:

1. The Video Template
2. The Product Data Feed

Both factors can be tweaked and adjusted, and every adjustment will have some degree of impact on the video’s conversion rate

Tweaking The Video Template

A customized video template is “the skin” given to the information contained in the website’s feed. Creating the right video template by ensuring the look & feel of the videos match the client’s overall site style (as well as the general industry), is a critical factor in terms of success.

Product video templates should match the brand

Ideally a video template should match the brand’s guidelines and values as closely as possible, and integrate seamlessly with the website’s design. From a visual perspective all the following should be taken into consideration when creating the video template:

• Company logo
• Tagline
• Atmosphere images
• Existing video assets

Providing good design assets is all it takes to get your video template to match your brand

Well branded video templates increase buyer confidence and encourage more sales.

A video template can be tweaked and made to match the brand values not only visually, but also from the auditory aspect as well. Video templates can be customized as follows:

• What music will your soundtrack have?
• What sex is your narrator?
• What language and accent will you use?

Note that although normally the initial choices regarding video templates are made based on a vendors gut feeling of what will work for his audience, but truly leveraging a website’s video template for maximum conversions requires accurate A/B testing of different template variations.

Optimizing Your Product Video’s Data Feed

Automated product videos are generated from your website’s product catalog data feed, hence the quality of the generated videos, and the positive impact they have on customer engagement and conversion, depends heavily on the feed’s quality. A good data feed will include as many of the following as possible:

• Several different high resolution images of the product
• Descriptive statements including product specifications and classifications
• Catch phrases and marketing statements about the company
• Special offers
• Price
• Customer ratings and reviews
• Existing video footage

A few small tweaks to your website’s feed, based on the aforementioned recommendations, can quickly improve the performance and conversion rates for your automated videos.

The return on investment for ecommerce videos - Rapid or long term?

As children we’re all taught the famous fable about the race between the turtle and the hare, and the moral of the parable is:

“Slow and steady wins the race”

It’s a turn of phrase with a great message, and the potential for being an effective business model.

With product videos, however, timelines are a bit different - they yield IMMEDIATE ROI

As you can see for yourself, online retailers see an immediate increase in CVR as soon as video is added to their product pages:

Ecommerce and product video's immediate ROI

But the race, as they say, is long. What happens to these improved conversion rates later?

Treepodia auto-optimization guarantees increasing ROI over time

Our ecommerce video solution, while it often shows immediate ROI in terms of increasing your online store’s conversion rates, has greater things in store for you when you decide to stick with it for the long run. The simple fact is that the longer you use our automated video platform, the greater your increase in CVR.

A/B testing guarantees positive results over the long haul

While the statistics garnered from our 200+ clients have proven that the addition of our automated videos generally generates an increase in CVR of between 30% and over 100%, overall the CVR individual customers experience increases gradually over time thanks to the inherent learning abilities of the Treepodia system.

How is that possible you may wonder? Shouldn’t results naturally trickle off over the long haul?

You would think so, but with the combination of continuous A/B testing and the automatic promotion of more successful video versions, over time, the Treepodia platform is able to learn from past shoppers’ behaviors, isolate top performing videos, show them more often, and as such, maximize each video view for the highest conversion rate possible.

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Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/daquellamanera