With Christmas fast approaching, more retailers are moving their sales online and it is their ability to make their products stand out that determines how many sales that product will get.

Why does video increase customer engagement and sales?   

When customers can see and understand exactly how your product benefits them - in a matter of minutes - then they're much more likely to be convinced that this is what they want and need search no further.

• Figures show that video will often increase sales from 6% to 30%
• A product video encourages shoppers to add that product to their shopping cart
• Conversion rates of 25% are not unusual for certain products.

Showing the product being used
People prefer to see their intended purchase in action before buying on line. A video can show how the product is used, demonstrate its key features and benefits. This video from the Wilderness range of Kayaks, is a good example of a how a simple video can be watchable and informative.To view: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGnLSSVEyzc&NR=1

Complex products
What questions do you think your customers might ask about your product? Answer this with a video to remove doubts and risk in buying the products. The association of the product with another successful, strongly branded product, in action, can strengthen peoples willingness to buy. View this video from Camelbak: http://www.camelbak.com/Sports-Recreation/Videos/Lab-2-Antidote.aspx

User generated content
When you customers make comments or positive reviews or even create their own video testimonials championing your products then other people will share these. 
Companies shy away from video believing it to be costly and with a low return. The facts say otherwise.

Video and SEO 
Step 1 in marketing a product video is to optimise the content for search engine indexing. This includes adding meta-tags, encouraging backlinks and sharing, recording comments and reviews, recording incoming links.

Embedding your video
This helps from an SEO perspective and makes for a better user experience than say a pop-up. It is also important to embed your video on your website - not just on YouTube. Putting your video on YouTube is easy but you will lose any SEO authority you might gain.

Load Quickly
Any video should load quickly to stop viewers getting bored.  Product videos that can be viewed instantly, on demand, are what are required. Anything over about 3 minutes in length will take time to load.

With all your efforts honed to driving traffic to your website, once visitors arrive a well placed, short, informative video can do more to guide them to your shopping cart than almost any other marketing tool.

People watch videos. People are convinced to buy after watching a video. Videos engage.

If you want to learn more about how your products can benefit from marketing a short video, then email me at sem@e-xanthos.co.uk or call me on 08450740068.

Source: Graham Charlton, Ecommerce Product videos - best practice. EConsultancy. 24/08/2011

Your competitors have optimised their websites; run email and Adword promotions; created Facebook and Twitter followers; and so on.

But they may well have missed out on a marketing opportunity that allows you to seriously put the boot into them.

A video has a 50x better chance of a 1st page ranking.

You can’t gain customers if they can’t find you and SEO is the normal way to achieve this. However, it is increasingly obvious that Google is rewarding sites that include video as they comply with Google's continuing obsession with providing ever more relevant content to online visitors.

Surveys in the USA show that in an index of searchable keywords:
1.  an optimised video has a 11,000:1 chance of appearing on the first results page. 
2. an optimised text based page has a 500,000:1 chance of appearing on the first page of results.

Any web page containing a video is 50x more likely to appear on the first page of results than a given text page.

Video is also easily shared
Social marketing is all about sharing and we know that a video thumbnail on your Facebook page will grab more attention than a static web page, resulting in more “Likes”.

It engages the attention better, and gets clicked more often. A video on Twitter gets even more clicks than other forms of social media.

A video can also be networked across multiple business related sites and plays equally well on mobile networks, on TV, in-store screens and is an inexpensive way to maintain or build brand awareness.

Increasing customer loyalty
Video newsletters have 3x the open rates of text based ones as video allows people to identify more strongly with new products, building trust and credibility and making for a faster sales process.

Importance to online selling
Personalisation is becoming the name of the game in ecommerce and is critically important to conversion rates and average order price.

Nothing does this better than video as visitors can engage more quickly with a product’s features while creating a satisfying shopping experience for users.

Video marketing is cheaper than you might think requiring relatively little human intervention compared to some other marketing forms.

Online video production can increase a business’s competitive advantage. It can be the difference between increasing or losing your customers.