5 Key Factors that Affect the Engagement of eCommerce Videos

ECommerce videos come in various shapes and sizes, but more often than not consist of demonstrations or how-to guides to generate sales for specific products, or marketing videos to promote an eCommerce website. Regardless of the form, they take, however, if you want your eCommerce videos to have an impact and successfully achieve their goals – you need them to be engaging.

Although the engagement of eCommerce videos is a difficult metric to peg down and is influenced by numerous factors, there are five in particular that have a profound effect on it:

1. Video duration

Viewers prefer shorter videos and tend to not have the attention span to sit through a longer video. Whether it is a product demonstration or marketing videos, if you keep your video’s duration about a minute long at most it is more likely to attract and retain viewers.

Because duration is important, you will want to be direct and focus on delivering the message in a simple and effective manner. It may require a bit of trial and error to find the optimum duration for different types of eCommerce videos but be keeping them as short as possible is a good start.

2. Hook

Most viewers will decide within anything from 5 to 8 seconds whether or not they want to keep watching a video. Because of that, the hook that you use right at the start of your eCommerce video will have a big part to play in their decision, and you won’t want to beat around the bush before getting to it.

Typically, you will want your hook to let viewers know how watching the video could benefit them – whether it is that they’ll find out what they want to know about a product, see how to perform an action they’ll find useful, or something else of that nature.

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3. Visuals

Generally, videos are more engaging than most other forms of content because they are able to visually convey information. Some videos accomplish that much better than others, which is why you should always consider how you can ‘show’ your message instead of just ‘telling’ viewers about it using a voiceover.

In eCommerce videos that is particularly important to engagement. For example, you could ‘show’ the features of a product with close-ups, or better yet by actually letting viewers see how they can be used.

On top of that, you should keep in mind that more viewers nowadays watch videos on mute. As such you may want to add subtitles to your eCommerce video or use captions to ensure that its message can be delivered entirely visually.

4. Emotional reaction

Some of the most engaging videos are the ones that strike an emotional chord with viewers and make them feel sad, happy, amused, or inspired. For eCommerce videos, it is important to make that part and parcel of your marketing strategy and use storytelling and other methods to provoke emotional reactions that will keep viewers engaged.

That is a lot harder to accomplish in certain types of eCommerce videos like product demonstrations, however, it is still possible to promote a certain emotional vibe. In particular you should focus on your use of color in your video, the music that you choose, and most importantly let your passion show as it can be infectious.

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5. Mobile-friendly

As you’re probably aware, more and more users are now browsing the internet and shopping on eCommerce platforms using mobile devices – and you need to make sure your video caters to that fact. If your video is mobile-friendly that it is much more likely to engage more viewers as it will offer them a good viewing experience.

One of the first steps you should take is to make sure that your eCommerce website and video are both responsive so that they are optimized and display well on mobile devices. Additionally, your eCommerce video itself should account for the fact that it may be watched on smaller screens, and so you should avoid making any important elements too small that they may be difficult to see.

Final Thoughts

Each of these five factors will influence the engagement of your eCommerce videos, so you should definitely take them into account.

If you’re looking for an easy way to come up with demonstrations or how-to guides as eCommerce videos, you should try Movavi Screen Recorder. It is user-friendly and will let you quickly record video footage from your screen while customizing the capture area, audio source, frame rate, and other recording parameters.

Be sure to keep the factors listed above in mind when recording your video, and you should notice a marked difference in its engagement.