What would an 85% increase in your conversion rate do for your business? Let’s take a look at an example:

Let’s be conservative. Suppose you have 10,000 visitors to your site per month. Also suppose that 3% of them convert to leads, so you end up with 300 leads per month. Now suppose that you have a lead to deal conversion rate of 10%. That means from those 10,000 visitors, you’re getting 30 new customers per month. Okay, so let’s say that the average deal size is $6500. You’re making $195,000 in revenue per month.

Let’s increase the conversion rate by 85%. That means your conversion rate is now 5.5% rather than 3%. So you end up with 550 new leads per month from the same 10,000 visitors. Even if your lead-to-deal conversion rate is still at 10%, you now have 55 customers instead of 30. With the same average deal size you’re bringing in $357,500 per month. That’s a $162,000 difference. Is that enough ROI to justify spending a little on some product videos?

In this scenario, suppose it cost $10,000 to get your demo videos created and optimized within a demo automation system like CONSENSUS™, that’s still a $152,000 ROI, and that’s not counting any increase you will get by using your demo inside your sales process which should increase your lead-to-deal conversion rate.

“Well,” you might say, “that would make sense and sounds almost as incredible as having Thanksgiving Dinner at my grandmother’s house, but where are you getting this 85% number?”

At CONSENSUS, we’re in love with business automation and a data-driven approach to business. We are specialists in automating the product demo process, and we have begun gathering stats from our own system and working on our own studies, but we’re new enough that we don’t have enough data to publish yet, so stay tuned on that. But here are a few stats we’ve gathered from other sites and studies that we find relevant and promising to the demo automation category.

• Customers are 85% more likely to purchase after watching product video when compared to a control group (Internet Retailer 2010)
• One company (Stacks and Stacks) reported that customers were 144% more likely to purchase after watching a product video compared to those that did not (Internet Retailer 2011)
• Another company (OnlineShoes) reported that shoppers who view a product video are 45% more likely to purchase than those not viewing product videos (Internet Retailer 2010)
• Work.com increased conversion rates by 20% with a product video (VentureBeat 2013)

How have product demo videos affected your sales and marketing efforts?