Tag Archives: Constant Contact

Effective call-to-action with e-commerce video

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e-commerce-shopping-cart

Recently there’s been a lot of talk online about how video can help e-commerce and adding interactivity to video is a natural progression to keep the viewer engaged. There was a great blog post written on effective trigger design for interactive video commerce which answers the question – how should video interactivity be applied to e-commerce video? It’s always been part of my approach on each project, what is the end goal? Are you a non-profit looking for donations, a company selling products looking for a purchase or maybe you are looking for viewers to contact you for more information and become more engaged with your brand? There are three steps (according to the Video Commerce Consortium blog post) to creating an effective trigger or call-to-action, I’m going to elaborate on each:

1. The trigger must be noticeable. This sounds self explanatory, but you’d be surprised to realize that most consumers are passive viewers of online video content, they aren’t used to interacting with it. It also needs to be blatantly obvious to the viewer that interaction is possible.

2. The trigger must be associated with the targeted behavior. When you are creating a call-to-action, think carefully about the wording and design because they can have a huge impact on the viewers expectations. Don’t have a button that says “Product information” really be a link directly to add an item to a shopping cart. As an example, we have a customer who sells generally to engineers who will want to see product specifications before they consider purchasing so we incorporated a “Download Specifications PDF” right into the video. Carefully design the call-to-actions within your video experience to meet your viewers expectations.

3. The trigger must occur when the user is both motivated and able to perform the target behavior. The great thing about online video is we can be more subtle with a call-to-action. As the Video Commerce Consortium blog post points out “clicking a mouse is still easier than picking up the phone”. But scripting the video so the ask is part of the story is key, when are your customers most motivated to buy? Is it after a particular product or feature where a button can pop up so they can click that for more information about that feature?

Not sure where your video is peaking curiousity or if there is a falloff in viewership before they get to your call-to-action? Using a video measurement service like Visible Measures can precisely calculate video engagement by capturing every event that occurs within an Internet video player – each play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, share, embed, and more.

Not sure how to build those call-to-actions within your video? I recommend Flimp which has a great WYSIWYG interface to create landing pages and e-mail integration with Constant Contact as well as a few other major email service providers. I also suggest Permission TV which offers an outstanding video platform allowing you to build those call-to-action links right into the video player creating more interactive experiences to everyone who visits your site. Both offer outstanding analytics so you can track and analyze your video’s performance.

Ultimately a call-to-action is useless unless the video itself is engaging and can easily be found. If your video is buried on your website, who’s going to see it? What if the content is so boring no one ever gets to the call-to-action?

What you need to do is to think of the call-to-action within your video and the trigger button or action as one seamless process, not separate parts. That is the future of online video, it’s all part of the viewer experience.

That’s what I think anyway, what about you?

 

 

Using Videos in your Email Marketing Campaign

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As many of my blog readers and customers know, I am a big proponent of utilizing email marketing as part of your mix to distribute an online video created to market or promote your business, service or product. It is a great tool to touch base with your existing customer base and if that video is done creatively, is a simple and easy way for your customers to pass your message on to friends.

I have been giving regular seminars with Zak Barron of Constant Contact about how best to integrate email marketing with online video. One of the statistics I use is one I got from the Email Standards Project where their research showed that a “…screen grab was clicked on more than 5 times as often as the text link.” Of course being a video production company I latched onto these stats and used them to my benefit. I’ve seen these statistics used as part of Email Marketing Reports and also in a discussion I had on the Constant Contact User Community Forum…but then I wondered…what would my own research find? We already knew from our own monthly newsletters that we were getting really high click-throughs compared to industry standards and most were going to the new video that we sent out every month. Most of those click-throughs on our e-newsletters were also clicking on the screen-grab JPEG image (see “screen-grab sample image above) which “looks” like it will play but actually links to the video on our website rather than using the text link to that same video. Here were our cumulative statistics for our open rate and for our click through rates for 12 e-newsletters which amounts to several thousand emails going out:

Cumulative Open Rate: 48%

Cumulative Click Through Rate: 44%

So then on two occasions we decided NOT to include a video with a screen-grab link in our e-newsletter and instead sent out informative articles, upcoming events or blog posts. All good content…just no video. Our statistics for these two e-newsletters were:

Cumulative Open Rate: 47%

Cumulative Click Through Rate: 16%

It wasn’t a full 5x as often but including video in our campaigns was a very significant 175% increase in click-throughs when video content was included. Another really interesting fact is that our open rate remained virtually the same which basically means there is a 64% decrease in the number of click-throughs on our e-newsletter when we do not include video.

I hope you find these statistics as interesting and useful as I did. Now my head hurts from all that math so I’m going to have to get back to doing something creative but with these statistics in mind…have you included video in your email marketing campaign? What have your results been? Please share your own results by commenting below or pinging this blog post.