Adding interactive videos to your e-commerce website can help increase conversion rates by 20%

Why your brand needs videos outside of social platforms

With the introduction of App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14.5, online brands now have a dramatically different relationship with social platforms. With this iOS update, app publishers’ understanding of which social ads are driving purchases has become extremely difficult and expensive. This iOS update has made it extremely difficult and expensive for app publishers to understand which social ads are driving purchases. As website traffic is also becoming a scarce resource, it's important to start thinking critically about creating engaging on-site and off-site experiences if you want to convert precious site visitors to purchasers. By adding short-form, vertical (portrait orientation) video to e-commerce websites, you can replicate the engagement of platforms like TikTok and Instagram while boosting your conversion rates. Mux and Viddy have partnered to make streaming high quality video on your Shopify e-commerce storefront both easy and profitable 🤑.

Why video works

Let's think about one of today's most common buyer journeys:

1. Customer discovers a product from a paid video ad on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook.
2. Customer is redirected to your DTC brand's Shopify store.
3. Customer lands on your e-commerce storefront which is dominated by images and text.

The problem? 84% of Gen Z and 81% of millennials consume short-form video, which highlights the fatal disconnect in the medium of content consumption — visitors are coming from engaging, swipe-able, interactive, videos and to static text and images: a suboptimal and foreign experience for these e-commerce shoppers.

To better engage your users and keep their attention, your e-commerce/Shopify brand needs to leverage vertical video on your storefront experience.

Videos are a much more effective way to do the following:

• Build consumer trust
• Educate customers on products
• Increase brand equity

These are critical components to convert a visitor to a buyer and ultimately retain them as a repeat purchaser. When visitors are better educated on products and their expectations are properly set upfront via video they become higher-quality customers and deliver higher lifetime value.

How your brand can use short-form video to drive higher engagement and conversion rates

Why add short-form videos to your site?

When you add short-form videos to your direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand's website, you will enjoy longer average user sessions and higher conversion rates. Brands using Viddy, a platform to embed short-form videos onto e-commerce websites, see up to a 76% improvement in average session duration and an 18% improvement in conversion (typically purchases). After all, online store visitors have much stronger purchase intent than social media users who are primarily seeking entertainment. DTC brands' websites present one of the largest opportunities to capitalize on short-form video to increase purchase and engagement rates.

So what kind of videos are best to use for e-commerce sites?

Given that most DTC consumers come from short-form video social ads, the following guidelines are a good start for on-site video:

• Short-form: 30 to 60 seconds
• Vertical video: 9:16 aspect ratio to match that of social app platforms
• Types of video content:
  • User-generated content (UGC) reviews: authentic video testimonial of the product, explaining its benefits, showing it in use, demonstrating how it works, comparing it to alternatives, etc.
  • About the brand: the founder origin story, brand identity, values the brand cares about (such as sustainability), etc.
  • Announcements: new product launches, influencer partnerships, special sales, etc.
  • Visual difference: before-and-after videos for health and beauty, fit pics for apparel, staged furniture, etc.
  • Product education: how it works, how to use it, what it's made of, how to take care of it, etc.

Where can you get video content?

Having a hard time coming up with content? Sources of vertical video content can include re-use of ad footage, existing social posts, UGC, purchasing from video production agencies, and content creation in collaboration with influencer partnerships.

How can you get videos on your brand’s site?

Viddy is a platform that enables your e-commerce brand to easily embed interactive, app-like, video experiences on your website or storefront. These video experiences:

• have a negligible impact on site speed,
• are designed to support vertical video formats, and
• feature interactive and shoppable elements within their video player to drive key user actions in an e-commerce setting.

In contrast, the more familiar approach of using YouTube or Vimeo embeds leads to video experiences that:

• don't engage users well,
• aren't optimized for vertical video formats, and
• don't provide rich video analytics (clicks in the video, how far a user watched in the video, etc.) integrated into existing analytics suites, such as Google Analytics, Segment, or Amplitude.

How to add interactive videos through Viddy

Adding a shoppable, interactive video experience with Viddy is an easy process that takes fewer than five minutes, with a potentially big payoff: Brands who use Viddy's Carousel saw up to 18% improvements in conversion rate for overall traffic! Take a look at the steps below for integrating the Viddy Carousel on your Shopify e-commerce site (not on Shopify? Viddy also supports custom HTML embeds that will work on the platform of your choice):

Step 1: Upload video and set shoppable overlay

Use Viddy’s CMS to upload, manage, and configure shoppable overlays (buttons, calls to action, overlay text, etc.) for all of your video assets.

Step 2: Create playlist of videos

Create a drag-and-drop playlist which is an ordered list of videos that users can swipe through on Viddy’s fullscreen player.

Step 3: Install Viddy’s Shopify app and add Carousel Section

After installing Viddy’s Shopify app, you can choose the Viddy Carousel Shopify section and select which playlist you want to feature in it. Contact the Viddy team here to try their Shopify app.

Step 4: Voila!

Refresh your site and enjoy the new interactive video experience that’s sure to keep your visitors nice and engaged 🙂.

Other video experiences that Viddy powers and how to use them

Stories

This video experience allows you to add Instragram-like stories to your storefront, but with full control over what the stories are called and which videos will be populated in each story. Use Stories to

• showcase UGC reviews,
• announce new product launches,
• explain product specs,
• feature sponsorships with influencers,
• showcase founder stories, and
• answer FAQs.

Brands who use Viddy's Stories saw up to 22% improvements in conversion rate for social traffic!

Floating Player

Viddy's Floating Player is a picture-in-picture player that is draggable on the screen and allows the user to browse your e-commerce site while watching and listening to video simultaneously. Clicking on the video expands to fullscreen, allowing the user to swipe through multiple videos. Employ the Floating Player on e-commerce pages that have a single focus (e.g. product pages).

See how Viddy's Floating Player increased Mad Rabbit's average session duration by 76%!

Fullscreen Expanded Player

All of Viddy's experiences are expandable into fullscreen mode with the ability to add custom buttons and overlay text, which make the videos shoppable. These custom buttons could be "Add To Cart" buttons, or they could link to the next step in the funnel (a product page, sign up page, a quiz page, how it works page, etc).

Video Landing Page (VLP)

Viddy's VLP feature allows you to redirect visitors to a video-first landing page, bringing continuity to the user journey from the social video ads they came from. These VLPs can feature a brand banner, a specific product, reviews, and two custom calls to action (typically buttons). VLPs load significantly faster than a typical e-commerce website and work well for paid social ad traffic as well as retargeting emails and SMS campaigns.

How Viddy uses Mux

Building and maintaining interactive video experiences for the web is difficult; Viddy and Mux make it easy. Browsers and device OS's change their standards often, which leads to significant maintenance costs. However, Viddy uses Mux Video to power highly performant, cross-platform video experiences. Mux's video streaming API enables Viddy to stream premium video content and scale to hundreds of millions of visitors instantly and automatically.

In the e-commerce industry, site load speed and performance are carefully monitored, as slow load speeds can lead to a poor user experience where users don't buy. In fact, Google mentions that "for every second delay in mobile page load, conversions can fall by up to 20%." Viddy uses Mux's adaptive bitrate streaming to help get the perfect balance of quality and buffering for an optimal user experience that feels snappy like a social app.

Finally, Viddy leverages Mux Data to monitor video performance, find suboptimal video experiences by segmenting viewers by device or browser, and to understand the impact of A/B tests on video watch time using Mux's Experiment Name data fields. Quite simply, Mux Data enables Viddy to ensure viewers enjoy the highest quality streaming video experiences which contribute to successful conversions.

Final thoughts

Social media apps keep users highly engaged via their interactive video formats with swiping, scrolling, and autoplaying videos. They have capitalized on the consumer behavior shift towards consuming more short-form video. E-commerce, on the other hand, has been lagging with this video-first consumption shift, with e-commerce and Shopify sites seeing both shorter engagement (time on site) and lower conversion rates. These declines are further exacerbated by iOS 14.5 as ad attribution continues to become less reliable. The brands that are emerging as winners of this new era are those that focus on on-site optimization with streaming video.

Don’t just take our word for it; in true A/B tests with several 8-figure DTC brands, Viddy achieved:

• Double-digit increases in core e-commerce metrics
• A lift in overall conversion rates by up to 18%
• Up to 76% increased time on site
• 31% reduced bounce rates.

If you'd like to learn more about Viddy, visit their landing page on mux.com, or contact the team here and let them know you came from Mux.