As e-commerce grows, companies are being challenged to be seen in the saturated market while holding the attention of potential customers. With studies showing an average attention span of eight seconds, retailers must find a way to break through the noise. By providing e-commerce merchants with shoppable search results through video, the future of the digital marketplace is here. E-commerce is swiftly leaving brick-and-mortar retail in the dust, while B-to-B e-commerce sales are projected to outgrow B-to-C sales by 2020. However, there are some aspects that are lost in the current era of online shopping, particularly when it comes to video integration. While more merchants are finding the value in moving from static images to video experiences, they lack the technology to keep shoppers on their sites to view these videos — losing out on a huge conversion potential. The creation and use of shoppable video search results solves just that. With shoppable video results, merchants can now offer consumers the ability to access and watch video results from search functions within their own online store, instead of forcing consumers to head off their commerce site to YouTube. This is why industry innovation, such as the recently announced partnership between Creatable, the leading provider of cloud-based video technologies, and SLI Systems, a global provider of e-commerce search-based technologies, will continue to grow to enable online shoppers to find relevant videos through an intelligent and integrated video search solution delivered to retail web and mobile commerce experiences. The ability to provide video search results within an online store offers merchants a real opportunity to obtain the kind of extended engagement and retention rates that are more commonly found on media sites such as YouTube. Serving product offerings while consumers watch videos directly converts newly founded engagement into an entirely open revenue channel which is why brands such as Ted Baker, Diesel, Bed, Bath & Beyond, and Burberry are now using video and shoppable search results. With the introduction of shoppable video search results, retailers and consumers alike will see three key implications:
1. Brand Loyalty
With current studies revealing that humans now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish, retailers must compete to attract and retain customer engagement. The first step to this is having video content on your site. It not only allows customers to see real use cases of relevant products, but it enables merchants to share ad added value and expertise that they couldn’t before. With shoppable video results, the second factor to retaining engagement and brand loyalty is through mitigating the frustrations often presented through website popups and redirects. When overall customer experience increases, so does loyalty, sales and conversion.
2. Increased Conversion
On average, merchants using shoppable video search results see an increase of 30 percent in conversion rates. Given these numbers, it is vital to expose shoppers to video, when applicable, to maintain customer retention. By implementing shoppable videos, merchants provide customers with the tools needed to further process and solidify their decision to purchase, while increasing time spent on the site and the end sale. Videos throughout an e-commerce site are proven to increase conversion rate significantly, with the lift growing from top of funnel experiences (expected 20-50 percent) to product page bottom of funnel experiences (up to a 500 percent lift is expected). Where the content is fueled by an engine that is able to dynamically optimize for top converting content, such as the Creatable Video Commerce Cloud, we see results in the upper part of these ranges.
3. Jump in Sales
Videos help shoppers make buying decisions that lead to increased sales. Shoppable video search results propel the average order values by 40 percent. Without having to navigate off the e-commerce site, where that short attention span gets distracted by a site full of click-bait videos, merchants can make sure that their customers are watching those videos hosted on their site, where the chance of a purchase is far more likely. Increased average order values also result from a more educated and informed shopper who has engaged with directly related content. Moreover, during this engaging experience, the consumer has the opportunity to consider upsell and cross-sell offers that are intelligently served by the Creatable matching engine, generating the optimal order value extracted from each video experience.
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