Video Stories can significantly improve engagement, conversions, and retention for retail apps and websites. The key is to use them the right way to provide customers with a unique experience that drives conversions and inspires users. To help you fully utilize video Stories and realize their possibilities, we'll give you some ideas for how to use them to your advantage.
Short-form Videos: The Key to Customer Engagement
While it can be challenging enough to acquire new visitors and users for platforms, it's even more difficult to retain them and maintain engagement. Retail apps and websites of all kinds are struggling to regularly connect with customers for several reasons.
One of the issues that have made it harder on apps and websites is a diminishing concentration and shorter attention spans among audiences. Other problems include the limited space to attract, a lack of personalization, and a general lack of connection with customers that keeps them from returning.
Despite these and other issues getting in the way, there is a great tool you can use to overcome them: short-form video marketing. Specifically, full-screen, interactive, and short-form video Stories appearing on your app or website can help boost engagement and retention. These invaluable tools can also help increase the average cart size for customers and keep them converting.
The fact is that short-form videos are key for engagement. Today, 73% of consumers prefer to watch short-form videos when learning about products or services. Also, 57% of today's YouTube videos are less than 60 seconds long, a significant increase from 11% in 2020. These and other stats highlight the value of short-form video content in any marketing strategy, which is why I recommend you use it.
Ultimately, short-form videos use truly inspiring content to help build relationships with users, entertain them, and streamline the sales funnel. Even if you understand these benefits, you might not know exactly how to short-form videos to their full extent. To get you started, here are some key strategies for empowering your app and website with compelling video Stories.
1. Harness the Power of Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a marketing tool that's only growing in popularity as more and more influencers come onto the scene. With the help of influencers, you can attract new customers as they hear about your offerings from a personality they know and trust. Many influencers out there have loyal followings who are likely to turn to the brands those influencers endorse, one of which could be yours.
Partnering with the right influencer will do much more than bring attention to your brand—it will give you plenty of content for use in App or Web Stories in the form of short-form videos. For instance, you can repurpose unboxing and brand endorsement videos into Stories on your websites, in your apps, or on social media. This would drive significantly more engagement, retention, and conversion for your existing audience.
Not sure how to get started with influencer marketing? The following strategies I lay out here might give you some ideas.
Create a Special Occasion With Shoppable Stories
In today's retail environment, moving people quickly toward a sale is everything. You have very little time to capture and hold people's attention and lead them to purchase, but the right tools can get them there. One way to achieve this is to use shoppable short-form videos that connect engaging content with your eCommerce platform. The effectiveness of these videos has made them a hot trend that's only gaining momentum. They give you the chance to get your message across in a quick, bite-sized format that's easy to watch, with a call-to-action that allows for an instant buy.
Using Storyly to create Shoppable Video Stories can help you get the best results from your campaigns. These videos help your customers "shop the look" from their favorite influencers with a seamless, frictionless experience. Customers can do everything from see how your latest items would look and add items to their carts to instantly complete purchases with a single tap, all within a single engaging Story.
All of this is achievable using our in-Story checkout feature. With the help of this component, you can drive more revenue with top-quality video content and a streamlined checkout experience.
Use Unboxing Videos to Increase Trust Among Audiences
With so many brands out there of varying quality, it's no surprise that people have trust issues when it comes to buying electronics and other products. Shoppers want to know they can count on your products to give them the results they want from their purchase, and you'll need to get creative to win them over.
Thankfully, you can build more reliability through your apps and websites using real videos from real people. One particular way to do so is to partner with influencers to create unboxing videos. These videos would involve influencers exploring a specific product or a package of products and brand materials. They would record this and stream it for audiences as they detail the goods they've received while informing people about your brand. This kind of hands-on experience with someone potential customers trust can help you get on their good side. Influencers can get people excited for the grand reveal and give people a great first impression of your brand and products. And best of all? These videos translate perfectly to short videos that you can repurpose for marketing.
Unboxing videos aren't limited to influencers, either. You can build even more trust with user-generated unboxing videos from your existing customers. By integrating Moments by Storyly, you can make it easy for mobile app users to create unboxing videos and other full-screen Stories. They can then share this content with other users to create a unique community within your app. This gets people more directly involved with your brand in a fun and creative way, essentially turning the average user into an influencer with real clout.
Have Influencers Answer FAQs About the Product
Another way to get influencers to drive engagement is by answering various questions your customers have. Unboxing videos can help win over new customers to an extent, but people are likely to have some questions whose answers could make or break a sale. For instance, people might want to know about specific functionalities or the overall experience they can expect. At the same time, they may want those answers from a person rather than a generic FAQ page on your website.
With Video Stories, influencers can answer certain surface-level questions that your customers might have. This gives people the chance to get an honest, helpful answer from someone they already trust, which can make your brand look even better in their eyes. At the same time, you can direct people to your customer service reps for more in-depth answers to other key questions they might have, bringing them further along the funnel.
Show Your Products in Action
The typical eCommerce experience entails looking at plain product photos and descriptions on basic web pages. You don't have to go this route, though—shake things up with video Stories that show influencers testing your products for themselves for their audiences. Videos can engage and entertain as people see how your products look and feel based on an influencer's hands-on experience.
At any point while viewing, customers can also buy the product using Storyly's In-Story Checkout feature. This feature makes it easy for people to instantly add items to their carts and complete the checkout process without ever exiting your videos.
2. Showcase Your Newest Products or Services
In many cases, eCommerce platforms have product listings built for search with intent, not discovery. This can be a real problem if you want to capture people when they're not actively demanding your offerings. You need to be able to meet people's expectations when they're simply browsing, encouraging them to take action in the process.
With the integration of Video Stories, you can announce your new product or service in videos that get your audience's attention and inspire them. To ensure these videos succeed, you can also combine them with interactive features like polls and surveys or countdowns to new releases. These videos guarantee that your announcements are at the forefront, but without impeding the user experience.
These videos are bite-sized Stories that let people know about the value your products or services bring to them. Concise and clear videos will also make it easy for people to understand exactly what they're looking at as they tap. In turn, you'll drive engagement and sales with the help of embedded CTAs that allow for instant cart additions, all while minimizing the risk of users losing track of what they were looking for before coming across your video.
3. Personalize Your Campaigns to Connect With Target Audiences
Not only is the average attention span decreasing, but so is the average consideration span once brands have gotten people's attention. People don't want to waste too much time trying to make up their minds, which is why you've got to act fast to keep them hooked. This is where short-form videos also help when connecting with users.
One way to bring people past the consideration stage to a purchase is to use personalization to build real connections. People want personalized experiences now more than ever, as one McKinsey report illustrated. According to the report, 71% of consumers expect brands to provide them with personalized interactions, with 76% getting frustrated when this doesn't happen.
Storyly can help you use personalization to your advantage through customized short video content. You can personalize Storyly Stories based on each user's unique interests and order history. The Storyly platform makes this easier than ever by giving you access to a dashboard that allows you to import, create, and manage audiences. Target all users using segmented data to reach each user type with corresponding visuals and messaging. This segmentation capability ensures your content truly speaks to every user on your platform, helping you reach the right people at the right time.
4. Combine Channels in an Omnichannel Store Experience
As people move away from physical stores and toward their online counterparts, they still want a somewhat similar experience. They engage in a lot of window shopping as they used to at their favorite retail locations and storefronts. If you want to replicate this experience for yourself and bring more people through your doors both online and off, you must create a channel-less experience through a seamless omnichannel strategy.
And while people are still visiting physical locations to buy, they're still glued to their phones as they stand in the aisles. One episode of Gartner's Hashtags podcast revealed that 79% of people use their smartphones while shopping in-store. This stat alone shows how vital it is for you to maximize engagement through all channels.
With the right tools, retailers can combine in-store and mobile experiences. With Storyly, for example, you can create videos featuring various collections, individual items, behind-the-scenes moments, and more. You can then put these videos in your app or on your website. Now things get physical when you generate QR codes that you can place in your stores, allowing mobile users to scan them, at which point a link will take them to your videos. Each product or section of your store could have a corresponding video to provide more information or expand on the in-store experience.
In the process, you keep your customers engaged and inspired, taking your in-store and online experiences to the next level.
5. Collect Zero-Party Data With Interactive Videos
While a cookie-less world might seem like a dark one for brands, it doesn't have to be. First- and zero-party data can keep you optimistic as you still have the means to gather crucial customer data. While first-party data involves data collected from automatically-submitted customer data, zero-party data is the information people willingly give to you. This data could include everything from details about how people found your business to personal preferences that guide your marketing.
Interactive videos can harness the power of zero-party data in several ways. Your videos may include features such as polls, quizzes, and emoji sliders that allow viewers to provide invaluable input during a video. You can then use this to glean some actionable insights into your users.
Interactivity can ultimately drive engagement and build a long-term connection with users. At Storyly, we've found that Story quizzes and polls alone see response rates of up to 46%, which shows how people value the ability to share their opinions and preferences. Based on the insights you gather, you can successfully guide your marketing and sales campaigns in the right direction.
See Long-Term Success With Video Stories
I can't stress enough the power of short-form videos when it comes to promoting your brand and offerings. From influencer marketing to collecting valuable data, you can use Video Stories from Storyly in many ways to drive success. With an all-in-one platform like Storyly and short-form videos backing your campaigns, you'll build trust and boost sales.
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