Interactive video can convert customers faster by reducing the time between discovery and action.
Using a typical marketing funnel, it can take an average of seven touchpoints for a customer to convert. Interactive video significantly shortens the buyer’s journey. This is because the distance from discovery to decision and, ultimately, conversion can be completed in as quickly as a single session.
Interactive video allows viewers to engage with the content they are viewing and learn more about the featured products in real time. For example, they can watch a video about a new phone and immediately click on a product card to learn about its specifications.
It’s not just about accessing additional information, though.
Interactive video allows you to shorten the buyer’s journey by removing potential friction points that can prevent a purchase. It’s no wonder that interactive video is being used by 20% of marketers, and another 12% are in the process of implementing it.
So how do you use interactive video to overcome potential customers’ objections and get them to ‘yes’ faster? In this article, we’re going to discuss how interactive video reduces friction points in the buyer’s journey and improves your ROI.
Table of Contents
How, Exactly, Does Interactive Video Work?
How Interactivity can Reduce Friction Points in the Buyer’s Journey
Analytics To Define ROI: The Real Value of Interactive Video
How, Exactly, Does Interactive Video Work?
Let’s walk in a customer’s shoes for a moment. What is the typical journey the customer goes through to purchase a product from a non-interactive video?
Here’s what one COTU customer had to say:
“I’ll see a Nike ad for something and want to buy it. But, by the time I Google it, if it’s hard to find, I’ll give up.”
This is an example of how it can be a slow process for a customer to buy a product that they first discovered in a linear video. First, they need to find out the name of the product. Then, they need to find out where it’s sold. Once they do so, they can then learn about it, and finally, decide whether or not to purchase it. The customer can easily get lost or give up during this process.
Interactive videos can help speed up the purchasing process by placing everything the customer needs to know about a product in one place. Instead of spending time trying to find the product they saw in an ad, they can click on the interactive elements in the video and immediately access details about the product.
To continue with the previous example, let’s say a viewer is watching an interactive video about Nike’s new running shoes. They can click on a product card, while watching the video, to visit the product page immediately. Moreover, they can also learn important information about the product, such as price and color variations, all without having to navigate away from the video.
Customers love how simple the buying process becomes with interactive video. This is what the same COTU customer had to say about interactive video:
“Knowing that it’s one-click, I love this concept. I love this idea.”
When it comes to creating an interactive video with COTU, here are 4 features you can use to make your video more engaging.
Clickable Product Cards: With just one click, clickable product cards allow the viewer to easily access an external product page straight from the video. This is incredibly helpful in speeding up the buying process since the information is right at the consumer’s fingertips.
Expandable Descriptions: Expandable cards make it easier for the consumer to view more details about a product without exiting the video. If they are interested in the product, they can click on a CTA to visit the product page. The idea is to minimize clicks and help them access all the information they need to make an informed decision without disrupting their viewing experience.
Product Groups: You can also group products to showcase many of them at once in a video. This can help customers explore related products. For example, similar to the video above, an outdoor company can create a video with three product groups, one for each sport, and present related products as a set. This is an easy way for customers to explore new products and purchase multiple items at a time.
End Screen Carousels: An end screen carousel displays all of the products featured in the video at the very end. It serves as a reminder of the products they saw in the video and gives them another opportunity to make a purchase.
Interactive videos can work for your business in two ways: by facilitating single-session sales and by collecting data.
Want To See How COTU Facilitates Single-Session Sales and Collects Data?
How Interactive Video Facilitates Single-Session Sales
Imagine you’re looking at a magazine and you come across an interesting ad. In order to find more information about the product, you’ll need to either use your phone to search for the product or make a note to come back to it later.
A single-session sale means that you can see something, learn about it, and act on it, all in a single session. You don’t need to follow up with a search or remember it for the future since you can make a purchase in the same moment that you discovered the product.
This is what interactive video can facilitate. It allows buyers to start and complete the journey in a single session. They can access all the details they need about a product and gather enough information to make the purchase instantly.
For marketers, this means that they can use video beyond the awareness, interest, and consideration stage of the sales funnel. They can use COTU to create interactive videos that move the customer from interest to purchase at a faster pace.
How Interactive Video Helps with Data Collection
Let’s use the same analogy from earlier. Imagine you pick up a magazine and you find an ad featuring an interesting product. You think that the product suits your needs so you decide to search for it online and purchase it. In this case, the brand doesn’t have data on who saw the ad, how many people were interested in the product, and what action they took as a result of the ad.
Now let’s consider data collection as it pertains to linear video analytics. Marketers can typically look at the number of views, the completion rate, or the number of likes and shares. What is missing in this data set is how many people clicked on a video to find out more details about a product, how many people visited a product page from that video, and ultimately, how many people made a purchase.
This is where marketers could rely on COTU’s interactive video to understand the behaviors of their customers. How many people clicked on a product to access additional information? How many clicks turned into a sale?
Knowing this data helps you understand how people engage with your content and how your videos compare in terms of conversion. You can use this data to gain a better understanding of your audience, how they use video as part of their purchasing journey and how you can speed up the process.
“The data is all around video engagement. This gives companies the power to understand the value of the content they are placing in the media landscape through video,” says Richard Baugh, CEO at COTU.
How Interactivity can Reduce Friction Points in the Buyer’s Journey
There are many possible reasons as to why a consumer would not make a purchase. Sometimes the buyer’s journey is also longer than what a company expects.
So, how do you get potential customers to move through the sales funnel faster?
You’ll need to discover all the friction points that could delay the conversion and then work to reduce them as much as possible. Here are some prominent friction points that you can remove with interactive video.
The Inability To Find Products After a Consumer Views a Video
Imagine you are watching a video and you like the sweatshirt that someone is wearing. You can’t see the brand or the logo. If you want to buy the product, you’ll have to search for a product that you barely know anything about. Without many available details, the search will either be too time-consuming or it simply won’t lead to the desired outcome.
This is a common problem for many consumers. The buyer’s journey is delayed because they don’t have enough details about the product while watching a video. In this case, a video can be of high quality but not effective in leading to conversions.
How Interactivity Could Address the Challenge
The best way to address this challenge is to add interactive elements to your videos, thereby giving consumers access to the information they need to make a decision, all in one place.
Once a viewer comes across a product they like, they can click on an expandable product card to find more details or click the link on the card to visit the product page and make a purchase. Thus, the buyer’s journey is simplified and friction points are reduced.
Failure To Understand Customers’ Behavior
73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. However, many companies don’t have a clear idea of what their customers consider during their purchase journey. Highlighting irrelevant features or services can significantly affect conversions. Even worse, making assumptions about your customers can adversely affect sales and ROI.
Understanding your customers’ behavior in their purchasing journey can help you to improve the content you deliver and the campaigns you create. This will lead to reduced friction points and quicker conversions.
In order to get to this stage, you need to confirm what your customers want and what they like about your product.
How Interactivity Could Address the Challenge
COTU clients could use interactive video insights to understand their audience. In the automotive industry, for example, companies could create interactive videos to discover what their customers want from their new cars. Are reclining leather seats important to them? Are they interested in Bluetooth connectivity? Do they want to know the size of the tires?
You can learn more about customer preferences by using interactive elements in your videos. For example, you can see which products got the most clicks to see what accessories were most important to them. Similarly, you can explain the car’s features on expandable cards and see which cards got the most engagement.
The more you learn about consumer preferences, the easier it becomes to create the right content and reduce friction points in the buyer’s journey.
You can also use interactive elements to A/B test the success of your interactive video on different platforms. Based on which platform gets more engagement and conversions, you can decide to invest more money in one platform compared to the other. With COTU, you no longer need to rely on guesswork since you have the data to make informed decisions and the ability to calculate the expected ROI.
Difficulty in Accessing Crucial Information
When a potential customer sees a product they like, they want to access important information about it as quickly as possible so they can decide whether they will purchase it or continue with their search.
Imagine watching a video from a furniture brand promoting a new sofa. The video grabs the viewer’s attention, but there’s no way for them to find more details about the dimensions or the available colors to decide if the product suits their needs.
If they want to buy it, they’ll have to continue their research after the video. They’ll have to visit the product page just to see if it’s available in the size or the color they want. Many times customers give up halfway because they lose the desire or don’t have the time to dig around for all the details they need.
What if you could provide these details as part of a video?
How Interactivity Could Address the Challenge
According to a survey, 43% of consumers like interactive videos because they allow them to choose the information they wish to access. So, maybe they see a product in the video and they want to learn more about it, visit its product page, and then make a purchase.
With an interactive shoppable video, they don’t need to leave the video to find out what that product is or to access the information they need to know about it before they decide to buy it.
Furthermore, they’re only one click away from the product page. Thus, interactive video is an effective way to help customers discover new products and access crucial information about them in one place.
Lack of Customization in Marketing
80% of consumers prefer to purchase from a business offering personalized experiences. Yet, many companies fail at creating content that resonates with their audience. If you create a video that doesn’t feel relevant to your viewers, its completion rate and engagement will be affected.
Lack of need-product fit can be a big friction point in the buyer’s journey. If a customer feels that your product is not relevant to their pain points or their needs, your chances of getting them to convert are reduced.
How Interactivity Could Address the Challenge
In order to create content that suits your audience’s needs, you need to confirm what they want to see, which is possible when using an interactive video. You can A/B test the number of products you are promoting, their placement, the use of product tags, and the interactive features you’re using.
For example, an apparel brand can find out through A/B testing that the audience of a specific blog wants to see several product tags in a video or that they prefer a circle over a square. Maybe that particular audience tends to engage a lot more with the carousel cards that promote the products at the end of the video.
Meanwhile, the audience at a second website prefers videos that focus on one product per video and tend to engage more with the products being introduced along the timeline than in the video or at the end screen.
By looking at your interactive videos’ performance on each blog, you can better tailor your videos to the audience on each website. It’s not just a win for the company, though. Customers also appreciate watching videos that address their needs and behavior, enabling them to engage for longer durations and purchase more frequently.
Misalignment Between Branding and Marketing
A friction point in the buyer’s journey can sometimes start internally within the company.
In some cases, branding and marketing don’t align, and their “goals can be at odds, where the creative team is focusing on the branding side of the video and the marketing team wants to push more products to help move people down the funnel,” as explained by Donna Chan, User Researcher at COTU.
If you want to move customers down the sales funnel, you need to be able to get branding and marketing to agree on how to provide a seamless experience for the customer. A starting point is to create videos that serve different purposes at the same time.
How Interactivity Could Address the Challenge
An interactive video allows you to focus on multiple objectives at once. You can create a video to promote your brand but you can still add shoppable elements to drive the funnel and help customers buy the highlighted products with just one click.
Aligning branding and marketing helps a company work towards common goals that are easier to measure while consumers enjoy watching a video that can be both creative and practical in selling a product.
For example, a sports company can create a video to promote its brand and the overall experience it provides. It can be a very creative video that viewers will enjoy. They can add several product cards in the video to speed up the buyer’s journey and help consumers find everything they need in one place.
Not everyone will be ready to buy the products, but you’re still giving viewers the freedom to decide how they want to engage with the video.
Most importantly, interactive video analytics can help the company understand how consumers feel about the video, which products they like more, and which interactive elements are more popular.
Losing the Customer Mid-Funnel
Imagine you launch a video featuring shoes for all occasions. During the video, a viewer comes across a pair of hiking boots they like. They wonder if the shoes are available in their size or their desired color. They also want to know what materials are used in its construction.
Now if it’s a linear video, here are a few ways you can lose a potential customer before the sale is concluded:
- The viewer may intend to look for the website but gets caught up in a more pressing task and doesn’t initiate the search.
- After watching the video, they use their phone to visit the website but get distracted by another ad.
- They successfully reach your website and search for the pair of hiking boots they like. The page has many similar products so they need to spend more time to find the ones they like, but lose their patience after a while.
Customers don’t want to waste time when interacting with a brand. Spending too much time before they are able to buy a product is a common friction point that affects conversions. Ideally, you want customers to find what they need as quickly as possible.
How Interactivity Could Address the Challenge
Let’s say you want to create a video to promote shoes for all occasions. You can create an interactive video with individual product cards for each featured pair of shoes so that customers can learn more about the ones they’re interested in quickly.
You can also add an end screen carousel to promote the products once again, motivate customers to visit the product page, and increase the overall chances of a purchase. If a customer is ready to buy a product, they are only one click away from the product page, thanks to all the relevant CTAs in the video.
At the same time, you can also collect a wealth of data that can help you discover the most popular products and how consumers interact with them. What are the products that were purchased right away? Which products engaged customers but didn’t result in a sale? And, which products couldn’t capture their attention at all?
Analytics To Define ROI: The Real Value of Interactive Video
When it comes to interactive videos and how they can reduce the friction points in the buyer’s journey, the real value is in the data you can access, thanks to all the interactive elements in the video.
An interactive video not only simplifies the customer journey but also helps marketers learn more about their audience to deliver the content they’ll enjoy.
Tools like COTU allow you to look beyond the views or the shares a video gets. For example, COTU allows you to dive deeper into the video data to understand the ROI for all of your interactive videos and campaigns.
The real value lies in understanding in-video engagement, when and where customers click, how different interactive elements boost engagement, and how this information can be used to inform future video marketing campaigns.
You can also compare the results of different videos in a campaign to analyze how various interactive features impacted engagement and conversions.
By learning how your audience engages, you can make adjustments to convert customers faster and see a greater ROI on video marketing spend.
What makes an interactive video stand out isn’t just the hands-on experience, but the insight it provides to “better understand your brand, your client, your sales strategy and the success of your video marketing campaigns,” explains Baugh.
If you want to understand the ROI of your video marketing campaigns, analytics are the key.
Here’s how to create an interactive video using COTU in just a few steps.
Step 1: Upload Your Video
The first step is to upload your video to the COTU dashboard to add the interactive elements. Make sure that your video is finalized to avoid having to re-upload it for any other edits.
Step 2: Upload Products
Fill in the details about the products you want to feature in your video. You can add the information individually or, eventually, batch upload them directly from your Shopify store using an API.
Baugh said, “We’ll have a Shopify integration so you can easily import any products that you have in Shopify over to COTU and add them to your video quickly.”
Step 3: Add Products to the Video
Now it’s time to overlay the product cards on the video. Just drag and drop the desired products along the video timeline to ensure a seamless customer experience.
Step 4: Preview and Publish
Right before publishing the video, you can use the preview link to share the video with stakeholders to get the final sign-off. When you’re ready you can publish the video and share it through a dedicated link, QR code, or embed code.
Read More: How To Make an Interactive Video That Increases Engagement and Drives Leads
Interactive videos can help you remove many friction points from the buyer’s journey. It’s all about understanding your customers, helping them decide, and allowing them to make a purchase faster. If they’re not ready to buy the product yet, you can still deliver high-quality content, get them to engage with the video, and provide useful information as part of the experience.
Ready to create interactive videos to improve your conversion rate? Schedule a demo with COTU to find new ways to engage customers, drive sales, and collect meaningful data to understand your success.