Turning Your Conversion Funnel into a Floodgate

Last year, I wrote about a split test we did that was featured in a Marketing Sherpa report on product videos and optin status. The test of click to play vs autoplay vs no video on an e-commerce site for it's top 10 best selling products revealed a huge benefit to click to play.

I presented the raw numbers for the first time at StomperLive8 and the first ten minutes are online on youtube. I talk about how split testing negates the variation inherent in time of day, day of week, and more unique temporal influences. Next up is the the video case study illustrating the need to look deeper than a single "overall evaluation criteria" (OEC) to understand the results of testing.

The video leaves off with this graphic, which shows from product page view to add to cart in the back two bars and from add to cart to "cart complete" (aka checkout initiated) in the front bar. Checkout is an actual sale.

Looking at the raw numbers makes the graphic's meaning more clear:

Click to play reduced a baseline of cart abandonment from 37% to 5! While it was a huge win, it also decreased add to cart slightly. The premise is that the shoppers were better educated by the video and that opt-IN or click-to-play for the video made the best use of shoppers time.

You can think of it as a force model.

Helping your customers better understand your products is a good thing, especially if you have great unique products as this business did. In addition, customers will appreciate being able to get the critical details on your products and will be more likely to browse further if they decide the current product is not quite right.

The full set of keynotes from the StomperLive8 show are available for sale including a wide range of topics in e-commerce, marketing, and internet success.