A few months back I wrote a post about my quasi-research study on putting video on a website. You can read that here.
To piggyback on that post, there was recent article in MediaPost that highlighted some research conducted during the holiday season. To synthesize the findings:
Online video e-commerce company Invodo said that its online retail partners saw a 9 times increase in video views on their sites at the start of the just-completed holiday shopping season.
The jump is likely due to increased sharing, as well as growing usage and interest in video to help make shopping decisions.
Facebook and email each comprised about 43% of sharing of product videos via social networks on Cyber Monday.
Retailers reported that customers who watch a product video are more than twice as likely to add that product to their cart.
Forrester has said that video on a site greatly improves the search results. “Any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index.”
comScore has reported that shoppers who watch video spend more time on a site (not surprisingly since it takes time to watch a video), but are also 64% more likely to buy compared to others. That’s a promising stat as it shows videos are converting browsers into buyers. Read more
“Wow. That’s pretty damn impressive,” I thought to myself. Product video as a marketing tool is getting a lot of love from digital marketing writers and bloggers. At lot of that love may be because online video – in the form of product review and demos – has gained traction on large e-Commerce sites; companies like Overstock, Amazon, HSN, Nike and Target have all incorporated video as a part of their e-Commerce sales strategy. If you haven’t seen anything like this yet, here’s an example from Zappos:
And another from one of our clients, Theodora & Callum:
One reason that product videos are being adopted so quickly among marketers has to do with the technology – many consumers have the fast connections and computers required to display videos without stalling, or buffering, and also that video production has become quicker and easier. But the most compelling reason for high adoption rates, for me at least, is the proof from research reports like the one from MediaPost’s article indicating that videos increase conversion over the same product pages that have only static images.
Where does your e-Commerce website stand on the video as a product demo? Are you finding success with it? Let me know in the box below.
When PAPYRUS wanted to redesign their custom printing website, they didn’t want some templated “custom” site straight out of a box with limited functionality and features. They wanted a completely revolutionary way to create and buy greeting cards and invitations online. They also knew exactly where to turn to make this happen.
Their previous custom site used old technology and wasn’t integrated into their main site, which is reason enough for a complete redesign. Factor in outdated CMS, incompatible data feeds, and limited features that couldn’t be changed and you’ve got an e-Commerce UX nightmare.
We knew this was going to be a big job when PAPYRUS first approached us with it, but we had no idea how big it was going to end up becoming. The card customizer, the crux of custom printing, needed to start with a base card or invitation and then allow the visitor to change the wording, the fonts, the ink color and the location of the content. It also needed to allow the visitor to add different motifs and monograms if they wanted and choose different printing techniques, envelope liner colors, and order quantities. While all this is going on, the user needs to be able to navigate the creative process without getting lost. Oh, and one last thing – it needed to work on an iPad.
From a technical perspective, there were several relatively major hurdles to overcome to make the site work properly and efficiently. This site had to organize products in the Magento e-Commerce platform without having to sift through 100’s of thousands of potential SKUs (which slows down processing times), it needed to factor in a complex pricing structure due to different card features that could be customized, and it needed to be updated quickly and easily if new styles or effects became available.
After considering the technical part, we looked at the user experience and identified programs that would make this card customizer function the way PAPYRUS wanted it. When we talked about cross-browser compatibility, type-fonts on cards that weren’t standard in the web world, and iPad usability it became clear that JavaScript was the answer.
The result represents the future of custom card design by blurring the line between the virtual and physical world. Half customization tool, half online store, PAPYRUS Custom Printing invites anyone to be a designer.
This role is for a Web Developer to work with our Interactive team to build and maintain client websites using the Magento e-commerce and Wordpress platforms. We recognize that any web developer with the right skills and experience is capable of learning Wordpress or Magento, but we want someone who already has experience with these platforms and likes to build solutions on them.
Job Description
Qualified candidates will have experience in PHP, HTML, CSS, and Javascript stack and be able to take user requirements and turn them into workable web applications. You will be part of a nimble team working in an aggressive, fast-paced environment. You’ll help with requirements gathering and participate on product design. The Magento-Wordpress Developer will be taking tasks from our project/maintenance queue and working with the guidance of our technical leadership. These tasks will range from front-end work, to platform configuration, to back-end code development. You will work in a local development environment where you and the senior developer can review code before it is pushed to our staging site for QA review.
Specifically, you will be responsible for the following tasks (but not limited to):
Full life-cycle website development
Custom module maintenance and development
Participate in requirements gathering and product design
Deployment of new sites
Improve existing sites
Essential Experience:
Magento Commerce development experience (1+ years)
Wordpress development experience (1+ years)
PHP Development Experience (3+ Years)
Expertise in HTML, CSS, AJAX and cross-browser layout issues (3 + Years)
Comprehensive Javascript Knowledge (3+ Years)
Relational database experience (3+ Years)
Bachelors degree in computer science or related field
Some professional software engineering experience, internship or otherwise
Good communication skills, particularly with non-engineering colleagues
Strong time management skills – ability to prioritize and meet deadlines
Experience with Client scripting frameworks (JQuery / dojo / YUI)
It’s funny how this time of year has a tendency to conjure up memories of Holidays past, especially ones of the WORST gifts we’ve ever received. This year is no exception. Happy Holidays and Enjoy!
As we near the close of 2011 (really?!… already?!) we, the digital marketing set, start to look forward to 2012 and make plans for improving what we set out doing this year. Reviewing year end campaign performances, battling for increases in budgets and strategizing new plans are just a few of the things that take up a good portion of our days. Part of those strategy conversations revolve around social media, as they most inevitably would.
But I’m not writing here to talk about how or why a business should engage with social media – there are many articles that speak to those points, from use in a marketing plan for fashion designers (read here – hi Macala, great post), to how social media affects SEO (read here) and even how to lay out a strategy for it (read here). What I’m writing about here comes in to play when we start to talk about success metrics for social media.
Generally speaking, there are certain key performance indices (“KPIs”) that social media folks like to measure, number of likes or followers and number of re-tweets or shares with friends. These metrics, to me, are fairly superficial and surface-level. They mean virtually nothing as a metric on their own.
Here’s why.
I don’t think these current engagement KPIs go deep enough to properly measure what they set out to do. (great article on measuring social media ROI) Think for a minute about how engaged you have to be to like a picture. Not really all that engaged; you look at it, say to yourself i like that, and then click a button. Then you move on. To click a picture and like it shows engagement, but it’s on the lower end of the engagement spectrum. Low effort, low quality. What does the opposite end of that same spectrum look like? High effort, high quality?
Which brings me to my point – doesn’t it mean more to a brand when someone contributes (such as a wall post or a sincere blog post comment) on their own accord and actually have to think, write, re-think and well, generally be present and engaged with what they are doing? So why then, do we measure these trivial engagement facors? Wouldn’t User Voice be the single greatest KPI a brand could ask for?
Measuring quality can be difficult. To properly measure engagement is to measure a level of feeling, of emotion. But, how does a brand do that? The more someone relates to a brand (their feelings about that brand), the more one could/would do to be part of that brand – the more effort a customer or user would put into their engagement. So wouldn’t it suffice that to better measure the amount of feeling or emotion one has for a brand be to analyze the level of effort for the engagement? In other words, how much effort did the engagement take?
Take for instance the team over at UserVoice. They have created a platform that is social and easily integrated into a website (full disclosure: SD is redesigning the website for OceanElders that incorporates the technology) and probably requires one of the highest levels of engagement from a user from all the social mediums I’ve come across to date. In the case of the SD website redesign, visitors to the site engage in ocean awareness and protection conversations, pitching their thoughts and concerns to a community of like-minded individuals whom they’ve never met. They aren’t clicking a button after looking at a picture of a fish, they aren’t just sharing what someone else posted to their friends – they are involved in the conversation. They are the conversation. They are engaged.
Think about how impactful, how benefical, this would be to your brand – to have someone talking on your behalf at that level. I for one will be considering this when I strategize my client’s 2012 plans and success metrics. Perhaps you might too?
Am I wrong on this? Let me know your thoughts below.
