A Simple Way To Increase Your Landing Page Conversion Rate Using A Free Video Player
Generating traffic to your web site is only one part of the equation. The other part is to convert that traffic into sales, leads, signups… In other words, if your traffic doesn’t convert it’s useless.
There are tons of techniques and strategies to increase your landing page conversion rate. In this post I would like to tackle on one of them: The use of short videos to increase the effectiveness of your landing pages.
And because there are already thousands of articles and blog posts on how videos can improve your landing pages and why this is so and what you should do… I will keep the generics short and focus mainly on the following parts:
- Where you can get a good, free and easy-to-use video player.
- And what exactly needs to be done to display videos on your web pages – as quickly and painless as possible.
I decided to write this blog post, because when I created my first video landing page, I had several problems that made me lose quite a bit of time and that caused me some headaches:
- I struggled finding a good, free video player that I could use for commercial websites.
- Most of the “free” players are only free if you used on non-commercial sites. However, if you are collecting leads, recommending affiliate products, displaying AdSense… you have a commercial site and you need to get a $49, $97… license ! That’s not what we want.
- When I found the right player, I was a bit overwhelmed with all the instructions and information that were presented. I didn’t really know, where to get started, what’s essential and what’s not.
Ok, but before we jump in here are a few general tips:
- Keep the video relatively short: 2 – 5 minutes should be enough for a simple newsletter signup landing page. For a sales page, this can be longer and will depend on the product and service you are selling.
- Don’t be too “corporate”. Be personal, friendly, relaxed, natural, likeable and trustworthy … - be yourself.
- Still, the goal of the video is to sell something – even if it’s only a signup. Speak directly to your visitor. This is all about him/her and not about you. Primarily, your visitor is interested only in one thing: WIIFM – What’s In It For Me? So, talk benefits. Tell them what they get. Let them know how you can solve their problems, ease their pain, make them more money, buy them more time… you get the idea.
- Keep your landing page relatively simple. The video needs to be above the fold. The signup form should either be next to the video or directly underneath.
Ok, now let’s have a look how you can get your video on your landing page. We’ll make this really quick, easy and painless.
So, here are the steps:
- Go to: http://flowplayer.org/download/index.html download the free video player ( click the “Download Now” button) and unzip the downloaded file.
- You only need the following files: flowplayer-3.1.5.swf, flowplayer.controls-3.1.5.swf and flowplayer-3.1.4.min.js
- Copy these 3 files in the folder where your video landing page is located. Later on you can change the location of those files – this is just to show you a quick and easy implementation of the video player.
- Click Here for some sample HTML code that shows the easiest possible implementation of the video player. Simply copy and paste the code sections in your own landing page.
That’s all to get a nice, free and powerful video player on your landing page.
If you are having any problems getting the player to work, you can also check out the minimal installation instructions on the flowplayer site: http://flowplayer.org/demos/installation/index.html
But there is actually lots of other cool stuff you can do with this video player. Here are some ideas:
- Download page for a different controlbar plugin: http://flowplayer.org/plugins/flash/controlbar.html (click the Download button). There are also some configuration examples you can copy/paste and play around with.
- How to change the skin of your video player: http://flowplayer.org/demos/skinning/index.html
This example uses one of the controlbar plugins (flowplayer.controls-tube-3.1.5.swf) you can download from the link above. To make this work, do the following:
* Replace ” flowplayer(”player”, “flowplayer-3.1.5.swf”);” from the code example I gave you above with the code listed underneath of: “Flowplayer configuration”.
* In the new code, replace “tube” with “player” and delete “/swf/” from the 2 places where it appears.
* Copy the file ” flowplayer.controls-tube-3.1.5.swf” in the folder where your video landing page is located.
- 2 examples for different player skins: http://flowplayer.org/demos/skinning/skin-examples.html
- A wizard to change the style of your controlbar: http://flowplayer.org/documentation/skinning/controlbar.html?skin=default
- How to use an initial splash image: http://flowplayer.org/demos/installation/splash-image.html
You can find much more stuff on the flowplayer website, but I think this should be sufficient to help you increase the conversion rate of your landing pages.
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These are great tips. Video is a great way to inject more creativity & engagement into post-click marketing.
Sure, you can get it for free. But you still have to spend time programming (or, in my case, learning to program) HTML code. Or you have to pass it off to your web designer, which means any time you want to make a change, you have to do it through someone else.
More and more marketers are learning that in an on-demand work environment, this process is far too time-consuming. Marketers need the ability to create, edit, and distribute video landing pages (VLPs) on the fly and without an intermediary programmer.
I won’t clog up this post with blatant self-promotion, but I will say that there are much more streamlined alternatives out there. Do a Google search for “Video Landing Pages” and check a few of them out.
Thanks for your comment Matt.
It’s true, my solution requires a minimum amount of html code editing. But on the other hand, all that needs to be done is to copy/paste the code sample (which is only 3 lines of code anyway) I provided in the blog post and to simply replace the link to the video with the location where your own video is stored.
I think, it can’t get much easier and even someone with zero coding experience can easily do it. And on top of that, this solution is absolutely free - even for commercial web sites!
All great tips its all about generating targeted traffic to your landing page the more visitors the more signups the earlier you retire lol. Great post thanks!