Using Video to Drive Traffic and Conversions: a Merchant Interview

The following post comes out of an email interview I did with Lars Hundley, owner of cleanairgardening.com and several other successful Yahoo! stores. I met Lars at the Internet Retailer conference and he showed me how he has incorporated video into his sites and we talked about how it has helped.

Lars demonstrates the Big Round Compost bin. Highlights: 0:02–The Clean Air Gardening jingle, 0:12–Lars demonstrates how much the bin can hold, 2:08–Video cross-sell merchandising–very smart.

Tell me a bit about your store(s) and how long you have been with Yahoo!?

We’ve been with Yahoo! since 1999. I started out in 1998 by building the web site myself with an HTML editor. But I wasn’t a programmer, so I couldn’t figure out how to get a secure shopping cart to work. I could only take orders over the phone. I switched to Yahoo! and my sales have grown either exponentially or by double digits every year since.

We were one of the early online stores to sell manual reel mowers and compost bins online, and we couldn’t have done it without an easy to use platform like Yahoo! We’re coming up on our 10th year in business, and our 9th year with Yahoo! That’s a pretty long time in Internet years, isn’t it?

At the show we discussed using video on your site. How did you go about producing the videos and incorporating them into your site?

I started out by simply shooting them with my little $200 Canon digital camera that also had a video feature. I would just have someone push the button and hold the camera while I demonstrated a product, and then we would upload the video file to the “Files” part of the store, so that people could click on a link and download the video to watch it.

But then I realized that I could upload them to Yahoo! Video for free and embed the video right on the product page, so that people could click on the video and play it while they were still on the site.

Since then, I have gotten slightly more advanced with my setup, although it’s still pretty straightforward. I bought a real video camera for around $300, and I shoot with that now instead of the digital camera. Then I import the video into my Mac and edit it after I shoot. I add an introduction title screen with our company name on it, using Apple iMovie. Then I take the finished video and upload it to Yahoo! Video. (You can see my Yahoo! Studio space here: http://video.yahoo.com/video/profile?sid=86695)

Are there specific products you think are demonstrated better with video?

Yes and no. In an ideal world, I’d love to shoot a video for every single product that we sell! I think it’s helpful to customers to see almost any product in action, or watch a real live person tell them about the product.

But in the real world, it takes time to shoot the video and edit it and upload it. So I concentrate on products that are more expensive, and products that are complicated or uncommon and that might otherwise result in someone calling on the phone to ask a lot of questions. By creating an informative video, I can answer all of those questions upfront, which saves time for us, and for people who want to learn about the product and get a better idea of how it works.

I’m sure most other Yahoo! merchants out there have some kind of a product that ends up being a constant source of email and phone questions. That’s the kind of product that is perfect for shooting a video, because customers obviously want to know more about it.

What has been the impact in terms of traffic? Did you post the videos to other sites as well or just on your own site?

It’s hard to measure exactly how much new site traffic we’re getting directly as a result of the videos, but traffic is up in general by 35 percent compared to last year.

And yes, we also uploaded our product videos to YouTube and Google Video, and people are watching them there too, even when we don’t embed them on our site. They are actually finding them directly on those sites and watching them on their own. Who would have thought?

We’ve gotten tens of thousands of video views if you add them all up at all the places we have them uploaded, so people are obviously interested watching them. And I see comments all the time with the incoming orders where customers mention that they bought from us because of the informative product videos. So it has definitely paid off with better conversion rates and happier, better informed customers.

By the way, one quick tip to other Yahoo! merchants who want to do this. I always mention our company name in the videos, and I start out with an introduction screen that says Clean Air Gardening. That way I don’t have to worry about competitors embedding my videos on their sites. I’m thrilled if people start embedding it other places.

Are you reaching a whole new audience, more deeply engaging with your current audience, or both?

I’d say that we are primarily engaging our current site visitors better. We’re getting better informed customers too, which has resulted in lower returns. We do get a decent number of people who watch the videos on the other video sites without visiting our site first, but that isn’t a major part of our overall video views.

After seeing the success we’ve had with simple product videos, we plan to make more strictly educational videos so that we can bring in a wider audience of people interested in environmentally friendly lawn and garden issues. I think that these educational videos will certainly bring in a new audience of people who are just looking for good information. Hopefully, some of those viewers will buy something, but even if they don’t, we’re getting our name out there for free, and using our expertise to teach others.

Have you seen any impact on conversion or are you just driving more traffic to your site which converts at the same rate?

We have been working on a lot of things to increase our conversion rates in the past year in addition to adding video, so it’s hard to know exactly what is responsible for the increase. But in general, our conversion rate is up 12 ½ percent over last year’s conversion rate. Judging by the number of people who email about our videos or mention them during checkout, I would say that the videos have played a substantial role in that increase.

It has helped show our customers that we aren’t just another faceless web site selling the same stuff as every other site.

We’re real people who actually care about and understand the products that we sell, and the videos help demonstrate that.

What was the biggest obstacle to using video on your site?

The biggest obstacle is simply taking the time to make and upload the videos! Even though I know first hand how valuable they are, I still have a list of 50 more products right now that I still need to shoot. Just like other Yahoo! Store owners, I get caught up in running orders and answering emails, and then another day has gone by with no new videos. Everything else is pretty easy, but you still have to take the time to do it.

Thanks Lars for sharing your experiences with video. No doubt other merchants may be inspired to tackle video on their sites after reading this post.

One final thought: Ideas such as this, and video is certainly not the only one, will help your site stand out from and gain an advantage on your competition. Certainly you have to get the basics down before tackling a project like this, but the most successful merchants I have spoken with have one trait in common: they are creative risk-takers. They are willing to try new ideas such as this and while many “viral marketing” ideas will not yield big results, it only takes one that does to push your business to the next level. Try to carve out some time each week to step back from the basic operations of your business and answer the question “what if we did…”

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business