Client: Paintball-Online.com?
Vendor: Treepodia?
Objective: To improve customers’ online shopping experience by enhancing product descriptions.?
Paintball-Online.com, a Vancouver, WA-based retailer of paintball equipment and gear, has more than 5,000 products on its website and in its retail location. It wanted a non-text format to quickly describe its products in an appealing manner to customers, so it explored the option of producing online product videos. ?
“People don’t want to read five paragraphs to learn about a product,” says Brian Mitchell, director of marketing for Paintball-Online.com. “Listening to a video for 30 seconds tends to be an easier [and more enjoyable] way of doing it.”?
The company tends to have two types of buyers: the avid paintball enthusiast who knows exactly what he or she wants and the paintball gift-giver who doesn’t know anything about the retailer’s products. Mitchell says his company needed a way to teach the gift-giving consumer about the products through an online channel without spending a ton of money producing in-house product videos. ?
STRATEGY: Mitchell says Paintball-Online.com looked into several other companies that provided a similar service to Treepodia, but they were too expensive. One of the services Mitchell looked into would have cost the retailer $10,000 per month. In about three weeks, Treepodia spun Paintball-Online.com’s static product content into automated product videos. Similar to e-commerce providers that create dynamic websites, the service used video templates to easily incorporate voice-over, background music, scripting, creative and images into the retailer’s simple product videos. ?
“Our production capability is practically overnight,” says Melody King, VP of sales and marketing at Treepodia. “The entire customer process takes one-to-three weeks.” Paintball-Online.com now features videos on its site for the more than 5,000 products in its inventory. ?
RESULTS: According to a test run by Treepodia, 2.58% of consumers in a control group who did not view videos bought products. Consumers in the control group that watched the product videos made purchases 3.26% of the time. Average time-on-page dramatically jumps when comparing pages with and without videos. Pages featuring product videos are viewed for two minutes whereas pages with no video content are viewed on average for only 35 seconds. Each video generates roughly 190 to 250 visits per day from organic searches. ?
“Treepodia guaranteed us the program would pay for itself each month,” Mitchell says. “They said if revenue generated from the videos wasn’t four times what we’re paying, then the month is free.”
