Lights, Camera, Sales: 10 Great Examples of Ecommerce Video Marketing

Product videos are effective, often under-utilised ways to showcase your product. When it comes to creating them, it's often a balance between meeting customer expectations, trying to address their needs and exercising your creative muscles.

But it's worthwhile. 55% of consumers use videos for their purchase decisions, and visitors who watch product videos are 73% more likely to buy from you, compared with those that don't.

It's safe to say that product videos engage your customers and make you stand out from the competition, particularly during the purchasing process. So, in this guide, we'll show how you can use ecommerce product videos to boost sales and bring in new customers.

What we cover:

• What is ecommerce video marketing?
• The types of ecommerce marketing
• Top examples from real life video marketing campaigns
• The metrics you should track to measure value

What is ecommerce video marketing?

Ecommerce video marketing sells your product or service to customers. There are a few common characteristics the best product videos share: they're short, they tell a story, they address customer pain points, and they speak to the core benefit of the product itself.

Product videos differ greatly between industry and product type. A video for a pair of hiking boots isn't going to look the same as a new smartphone, or luxury car. All these products require different presentation and, the customer base has different needs.

Types of ecommerce marketing videos

There are also different types of product videos that will effect your ecommerce business differently. They influence sales and customer purchasing choices in their own unique way. When developing your video marketing strategy for your ecommerce site, you'll want to consider which types of videos will be the most effective for your business.

1. Explainer videos

This type of video content helps customers connect with your products by explaining features, functionality or the story behind your product. These are great for lead generation, as they give sales and marketing teams resources to point potential customers to.

Many businesses consider explainer videos to offer the best return on investment in terms of video marketing. Dropbox being one of them, having increased their conversion rate by 10% after introducing these types of videos.

2. Message from the CEO

One of the best methods to personalize a brand and build a strong connection with your audience and customers is to include your company leader in a video. It's an opportunity to express gratitude to customers, elaborate on the brand story and bring people closer to the business.

CEO messages are often not product related. They might be a special thank you, or a round-up at the end of the year. However, in the tech world, CEOs and founders are often the ones responsible for showcasing their product. This is something other businesses can adopt.

3. Product Demo

A product demo/detail video delves further into your product's characteristics and benefits. They help generate interest in your product by giving an overview of it in action. You'll often see these released alongside a new product or feature.

As we touched on above, product demos can also be run by the business owner or CEO. Customers often feel as if high-level executives are "above" taking part in these types of initiatives, so seeing a CEO give a product demo has more weight to it than any ol' marketing employee.

4. Tutorials

Some products benefit from video tutorials showing potential buyers the features and functionality they can expect. This is particularly true of software, with most software companies investing in a range of videos to display their product's value.

Let's take a look at Paperform's V3 Product Overview linked below. The tutorial begins with a sizzle reel showcasing some of the unique use cases of the product. It then transitions into a guided walkthrough, showing the potential of the product (and how you can achieve this potential yourself).

It would be tough to demonstrate these characteristics using merely static graphics and text. A short video, on the other hand, can swiftly and efficiently give a product description and explain how to utilize it. Plus, people are much more likely to watch a short video than read through an entire 3,000+ word article.

5. Animated Product Overviews

An animated explainer video can be used in a variety of ways to add value to a company. The most common types of animated product explainers are Q&As, employee bios, competitor comparisons and pricing videos.

However, animated videos can really cover anything — they could be brand videos, explainer videos, product reviews, or even animated expert interviews. Animation is unique, fun and engaging—plus you can outsource it to a freelancer for a decent price.

Just be wary: you need to make sure this fits your company's image. An animated explainer mightn't make sense if the rest of your content is centred around people, or you work in an industry where "fun" is frowned upon.

6. Video Testimonials

People who have never heard of your company will be skeptical at first, no matter how unique your product or service is. Before you can increase your ecommerce sales, you must gain their trust. You can spend a lot of time generating marketing and brand awareness content, but the single most precious form of marketing is word-of-mouth from delighted customers.

Video testimonials give you absolute commercial value by showing potential clients real feedback from existing, real life customers. A happy customer is your best salesperson, and a video testimonial ensures that they are completely delighted.

7. Event Videos

Does your business run a yearly event, conference or webinar? You can easily make event videos to share a look behind the scenes with your customers. This also doubles as a way to showcase your workplace culture, and give more insight into your brand ethos. Plus, once you've shot your event videos, you can share them on your product page or landing page to increase sales for the next event.

8. Social Media Videos

High-quality social media videos can be a great addition to your content marketing strategy. You can create new video content for your social media pages, or share some of the other types listed on the platforms as is. To streamline the video creation process, consider using an AI video generator to quickly produce engaging visuals. No matter what social media platform you choose, a fun and informative video about your product can help catch the eyes of your target audience as they scroll through their feed.

9. Expert Interview Videos

The time of your customers is precious. They have kids to play with, work to finish, Netflix shows to binge! So, one way you can draw them to your product is actually by not talking about your product.

Instead, you could interview an expert in your field about a topic that's super relevant to your business. So a software company might interview a web developer, or chat to a privacy expert.

How does this sell your product? Because if you can provide your audience with value before they make a purchase, they'll trust you! Then they'll be more likely to buy from you when they need the product or service you provide. Neat, huh?

10 great examples of ecommerce video marketing in action

We can write about product videos all day, but the best way is to show some great examples in action. From Amazon and Google to PlayStation and Peloton, check out the videos below to inspire your own creations.

Google — Year in Search 2021

Believe it or not, Google is an ecommerce brand. Actually, they're pretty much an everything brand. With their annual "Year in Search" videos they manage to show the impact of their product, while also sharing their brand message (in this case, how they help people connect to the people and resources they need).

Apple Watch Series 7 | 911 | Apple

What sells better than anything else? Emotion. Apple are the masters of linking their products to particular ideas and emotions. In this case, they link the Apple Watch Series 7 to the idea of safety, by sharing stories about how their product has been instrumental saving lives.

Levi’s® SecondHand with Emma Chamberlain for 501®

The only thing better than a video testimonial is a video testimonial from one of the world's biggest influencers. In this video ad, Levi's recruit YouTuber Emma Chamberlain to share her love for Levi's, shot on location in the mall she went to as a child to lend extra authenticity.

NIKELAND on Roblox - Where Sport Has No Rules | Nike

Most businesses or online stores don't have the money to create their own virtual experience. But Nike does. They took the idea of an animated video to the next level, by creating one to announce the Nikeland experience inside Roblox, a popular video game.

Figma — Welcome to FigJam

Software companies are always releasing new products, and the best way to give customers a quick overview of changes and updates is through a tutorial or demo. This video from Figma, introducing FigJam, a collaborative whiteboard product, is a great example of how to do this effectively.

The Koala Mattress | Explore the Range | Koala AU

We all know that stock standard product overviews can be a bit on the boring side. Aussie mattress brand Koala recognised this, and decided to have fun with their online video by adding a humorous voiceover poking fun at the jargon companies use to make their products seem more special than they really are.

Peloton | Nothing Like Working Out From Home

Over the last few years, Peleton have managed to do the unthinkable: make an exercise bike seem like a cool accessory. Of course, most of this comes down to their brilliant marketing, which positions Peleton as an essential part of your household (and life). This video showcases the product by showing the many ways it fits in to your life.

PlayStation — Play Like Never Before | PS5

This is a classic product overview from the team at PlayStation, showing the benefits and features of the new video game console through some stunning animation. This is a masterclass in showing how features work in a creative, rather than literal, way.

Carhartt — The Tech Brief | Product Talk with Hank the Foreman

Carhartt is another company that realises the power of humour. Rather than taking a dull approach to their product overview, they decided to have fun with it. What results is much more interesting than if they had just taken a picture of a pair of underpants.

Amazon — Introducing Amazon Astro – Household Robot for Home Monitoring, with Alexa

Product videos should tell your brand story in some capacity. Amazon took this idea to the next level by creating an actual story to announce their Amazon Astro Home Monitoring device. It's like if Wall-E was made by the bad guys (it's really good though).

How to measure the success of your ecommerce video marketing

Once you've put all this time, effort and cold hard cash into a video marketing project you're going to want to know if it was a success or not (or your boss will).

Here are the metrics you'll want to monitor to make sure you are getting a solid return on investment. (Most of these will be available from your video host of choice.)

1. Play rate: The number of total times your video was played divided by the number of views that it generated. (Out of everyone who saw the first few seconds of your video, how many stuck around to watch?)
2. Click-through-rate: This measure the percentage of people who actually clicked on the video when they saw it in their feed. This can be influenced by the thumbnail and title too.
3. Engagement: A combination of shares, likes, comments and reaction. Basically: are people who watch the video interacting with it in some way?
4. Watch time: How long are viewers hanging around to watch your video? If you've made a 15 minute min-documentary but only have an average watch time of 2 minutes, it's a sign that there's something turning people off.
5. Return on investment: Was it worthwhile from a monetary standpoint? You can calculate this by dividing the amount of sales your video generated by how much it cost to make.

Over to you

We’ve seen the types of ecommerce videos out there and how you can use them to boost sales for your ecommerce store. From CEO messages to explainer videos, there are many options to choose from.

Which one you go with, however, depends on the type of business you own and which videos your customers will relate to the most. Just do your research and follow these tips. You’ll see those sales soaring in no time.

This was a guest post by Sam Molony from Mailshake, which is a leading sales engagement and automation software that helps people get more conversations, qualify more leads, and close more deals than ever before.