Shoppable videos are becoming popular nowadays. For ecommerce businesses, knowing how to create shoppable videos and using them to generate more orders is the key to long-term business success.
Most marketers are incorporating video content into their marketing campaigns to improve customer engagement, acquisition, and engagement.
Related: Video Marketing Guide For Small Business Owners
It is estimated that the number of online shoppers globally will be over 2 billion by 2020. With over 24 million e-commerce sites, only the best sites with quality content can lure customers into buying.
Shoppable video content makes it easier for customers to get information about the products and services that they want to buy.
It is increasing in demand because of its ability to bridge the gap between browsing and buying. Shoppable videos provide a smooth shopping experience and encourage shoppers to buy immediately.
So, what is shoppable video content, and what makes it the best for advertising and improving sales? How do you make a shoppable video for your e-commerce site?
Let’s learn!
What is a Shoppable Video?
A shoppable video is a type of marketing strategy that provides a direct message to customers and gives them a platform to buy goods and services directly while viewing the content.
It is a type of video content that interacts with some page-level shopping elements to convert video viewers to customers.
A shoppable video can either redirect the viewer to the e-commerce site where they can buy products or enable them to buy while viewing the video.
Shoppable videos have links that direct the viewer to an online shop where they can purchase whatever is being advertised on the video. The links may also contain the payment gateways where the shopper quickly pays for the products in their cart.
The links are hidden or embedded in the video so that when customers click on the video content, they redirect to the vendors’ online store where they make the purchase.
Shoppable video helps viewers or potential customers to make informed decisions to buy a product or service. They help to improve the customer conversion rate by allowing them to add the products they are viewing to the cart immediately. Most customers prefer watching videos to reading web pages.
How To Create Shoppable Videos?
Here are the steps to create shoppable videos for your business:
Include Enticing Images in the Video
A picture is worth a thousand words, and that explains why you should look forward to including enticing images on your marketing videos. You can easily lure or capture your customers’ attention by using enticing images in your video content.
Whichever images you choose, you must always ensure they center on showing more details about your product and what makes them appealing to your customers.
Let the images you are including on the video showcase more detail of the product or service you are offering.
Remember, the objective of shoppable videos is to provide more information to the target customers and, if possible, entice them into buying your products.
Use HD clear images that reveal all necessary information the customer may be looking for in the product. To improve your customers’ shopping experience, you can create an online catalog on the video or embed a link on the video that redirects the customers to your online catalog.
With this catalog, customers can find out more about the other products you are offering and get to choose which ones to buy based on their preferences.
When choosing the images to represent your products on the videos, you want to ensure they can reflect what the audience is looking forward to viewing. The rule of the thumb here is to provide videos that your target audience is eager to view.
The images should be able to entice the viewers to know more about the product and, if possible, buy one. That is the reason you are creating the video in the first place.
Meny, a Danish online supermarket, gives a good example of how you can use enticing images to lure your customers. The vendor has come up with a more interactive way of showcasing its products to customers and enticing them into buying.
The company uses a beautiful background, price stickers, and segmented sections to make their images more appealing to the customer.
With quality images and price tags, as shown in the image above, customers can add products to their carts faster. This increases the customer conversion rate.
Make your Video Captivating
Many online shoppers prefer watching videos before deciding to buy a product or not.
At least 96% of online shoppers are likely to refer to a video to make a purchase decision.
A shoppable video gives you the chance to market your product to target customers in your own way and in a language they understand most.
For instance, you can use storytelling techniques to come up with a more captivating and engaging video for your audience.
Create a story that the audience can relate to and use it for marketing your product to the audience.
A shoppable video should act as a tool of inspiration to customers. You want to give the customers a reason to shop for your products. The only sure way to do that is by using captivating videos.
If you want to create the best shoppable videos, then you should not limit yourself to a couple of traditional methods of video editing.
Combine different techniques to come up with more captivating videos for your target audience. Make the video inspirational and captivating while including links to your catalog.
Create a Seamless Customer Journey
When coming up with shoppable video content, you must have your customers’ shopping experience in mind.
The customer journey is what makes your shoppable content more inspirational and captivating to the audience. Therefore, when coming up with these videos, you must ensure they make the customer journey more seamless.
Try to wear your customers’ shoes and focus on how they are likely to feel once they watch your video. What decisions are they going to make? Will the video captivate them and lure them to buying your products?
Make the customer checkout process simple and short. Studies have shown that having a long and complicated checkout process is one of the reasons why customers are likely to abandon their carts.
Related: Customer Retention Rate Optimization
While making your videos inspirational, the customers should know that there is only one step ahead of them- and that is to place their orders for the products they are viewing. The ordering process would be fast and convenient.
When the customer opts to buy after watching your video, they should be easily redirected to your online catalog. Remember, the scope of creating a shoppable video is to minimize the time that customers take to browse or search for more information about the products you are offering.
Always optimize your customer checkout experience if you intend to increase the conversion rate from every shoppable video that you create.
Create Shoppable and Interactive Videos with Wideo
Wideo is one of the most useful tools that you can employ to create interactive and shoppable videos for your e-commerce platform. It is affordable and simple to use.
You don’t need any special video editing skills to come up with captivating content for marketing. Also, you can easily measure the success of the videos you create with this tool.
Related: List of Video Marketing Tools
For instance, it enables you to collect information about the length of videos customers watch, the number of views, and successfully clicked links.
With this information, you can easily plan to create videos that target your customers based on their viewing and shopping behavior.
Wideo gives you the option to add a call to action buttons on all your videos so that customers can easily click on your videos and shop straight away. You can also add an email registry and sign-up forms on your videos.
The tool provides several video templates that you can use to create your unique shoppable videos for your customer. With its detailed analytics, you can easily track the success of your videos and know if they are helping you to increase your customer conversion rate or not.
The tool also gives you an option to export your videos to YouTube and increase its exposure to customers.
5 Popular Examples of Shoppable Videos
Using shoppable videos is a perfect way of convincing the audience that they can rely on your products to solve their problems.
Therefore you have to be selective in your choice of the best shoppable video.
Here are some of the best examples of shoppable videos:
Intermarché Video Advert
Intermarché, one of the biggest e-commerce platforms in France, came up with a simple and engaging shoppable video that helped them increase their customer base. The company made the video look engaging by including an image of a rabbit selling carrots in a supermarket.
The video plays for about 20 seconds and targets marketing canned carrots to customers. The company makes the video even more interesting and entertaining to the audience by using some funky music in the background. It has a CTA at the top, enticing the viewers into buying the products.
In this shoppable video, we learn that you don’t have to complicate your videos to make them interesting to the audience. You should always target coming up with short and creative videos to improve engagement.
Here is the shoppable video.
Scotch & Soda Shoppable Video
Scotch & Soda gives us another amazing example of shoppable video content with the power to convert more viewers into potential customers.
The shoppable video is made in the form of lookbooks to showcase the quality of the product to potential buyers. Lookbooks is a great technique of making your products livelier and creating a more positive impression of the products to your target audience.
Scotch & Soda applied the lookbooks technique in coming up with a shoppable video to market their products more simply and creatively. The video features customer experience to create inspiration and capture the viewers’ attention.
It seeks to create a more captivating story that explains the nature and origin of the products from this company, making customers want to buy more from the fashion store.
The design of the shoppable video is more engaging and seeks to retain viewers on the site for the longest time hence increasing customer conversion rate.
The content of the video brings out the company’s brand as unique, authentic, and quality. This makes it easier for customers to make impulse buying. Below is the video.
All Saints Shoppable Video
All Saints is a perfects example of how you can use User Generated Content (UGC) to come up with quality shoppable video. The merit of this type of video is that it features some of your customers, creating the impression that they have endorsed it. Customers can easily relate to the video and end up buying from your online store.
UGC is one of the most used marketing strategies that incorporate personality into products and makes it more convincing for the target audience. It uses social media as a main source of content.
Since most customers use social media platforms to follow celebrities and learn more about their lives, UGC majors on this to capture content from their customers and use them for creating a shoppable video.
All Saints made this type of shoppable video to create a social media like experience where the customers can scroll down the video to learn more about the products and go ahead to buy.
The company includes satisfied customers’ images on the video to endorse their products and entice viewers into making a purchase decision.
Estée Lauder Example of Shoppable Video
Estée Lauder, one of the leading companies in the beauty and skincare products industry, also came up with a great shoppable video that targets informing their customers about their products in a more captivating way.
The company chose an interesting topic “how to create the best beauty routine” to make customers more interested in their marketing video. The first shots in the video begin with an interesting GIF that captures the viewers’ attention with a ‘tell me more “phrase.
The video educates viewers on how they can prepare their skin before they go to bed. It reminds viewers about some secrets of having pretty skin.
By showing the customers how they can prepare their skin before retiring to bed, the company gets a platform to showcase its products and entice viewers into buying some of their skincare products.
In the Estée Lauder interactive video, we learn three things. That most viewers like watching videos with the ‘how-to’ subject because most of them want to learn something new. You should always try to educate your audience if you intend to capture their attention and retain them.
For every product that you include on the video, ensure you link it to your catalog. Lastly, make the video, short, simple, and focused on promoting your brand to the audience in a more inspiring way.
Bravo TV’s Shoppable Video
The era of T-Commerce is almost here with us, and Bravo TV is already making it a reality. Bravo TV launched “The Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce” to push their T-Commerce project. T-Commerce is a marketing strategy that enables viewers to shop for products and services on the TV.
Once you see a product that catches your eye, you can hover on the screen; click on as many products as you want then proceed to purchase.
This is a perfect way that companies have been using to market their products. The customer can see how the product they want looks like in real life. For example, in this video, customers are likely to buy a dress that one of their favorite celebrities featured on the series is wearing.
Here is the shoppable video from Bravo TV showing how T-commerce in action.
What Are The Benefits of Shoppable Videos?
Conversion rates of ecommerce sites are between 3-4%. Shoppable videos are one of the best ways to increase the conversion rates for your products.
Related: Best B2B Ecommerce Platforms and Top Ecommerce Platforms in India
Most shoppers prefer watching videos to reading web pages because they are entertaining and straight to the point. Unlike web pages, shoppable videos are more entertaining to the audience and can easily capture their attention.
The various benefits of shoppable videos are:
Enhanced Shopping Experience
Shoppable videos have a direct connection with the products or services you are offering. As the customer views the video, they can learn more about the product, discover more, and end up adding more products to their cart. It provides a simplified buying funnel for the customer.
Improve Customer Conversion Rate
Most customers are likely to buy your products once you educate them fully about the use and value of the product, and that is what a shoppable video does. Shoppable video targets persuading the customer to buy the product.
Inspirational shoppable videos can often encourage even the most difficult shoppers to make impulse buying when they were not willing to shop.
Helps in Gauging Performance
Using shoppable video, you can collect information on the number of views and click through on embedded links. You can easily figure out all the social platforms that your marketing strategy is doing well. This way, you can capitalize on marketing techniques that work well for your business.
Improves Customer Engagement
Having a shoppable video on your online store’s landing page can increase customer engagement by at least 80%.
Also, the more customers remain on your website, the more they are likely to view your catalog and shop for many products.
Shoppable videos entertain the customers, inform them more about the product, and engage them with the product and the purchase process.
Best Practices For Creating Creative Shoppable Videos
- When creating a shoppable video for your e-commerce platform, you must ensure you are creative. For instance, if you opt for a storytelling technique, you must come up with a unique storyline that relates to the products and your customer. Being creative helps you to come up with entertaining videos that increase your customers’ engagement and conversion rate.
- Don’t overburden your audience with many options on the video. You should not exceed three options on the video. Focus on a few items to avoid overloading the audience.
- Make it a bit long and straight to the point. You should let the video shots run at least three seconds and more to ensure the audience gets the message.
- Inform the audience that the video is interactive at the beginning. You can use narration or a voiceover to address your audience directly. This is a perfect way to engage your customers in the content so that you get timely feedback.
- Include links within the first three shots. This helps you convert those viewers who are not willing to watch the entire video to potential customers. If you have informed the audience that your video is interactive, then you should include your shoppable links within the first few seconds of the video and let them interact freely on your online store.
Final Thoughts
Today, millions of e-commerce platforms are facing stiff competition in the market to grab customers’ attention. Therefore, marketers have realized that creating interactive and engaging shoppable video content is the most convenient and effective way to capture customers’ attention and make them buy.
At least 91% of customers prefer interactive visual content that they can access anytime. Shoppable videos help shoppers to learn more about a product and decide whether they should buy or not.
When creating video content for your e-commerce store, you must ensure it is engaging, informative, and captivating. This way, you can convert more viewers to potential customers.
