The Sales Video that Converts: How Leadpages Got 158% More Conversions and 163% More Revenue Per View from the Same Sales Video

Tim: When it comes to sales videos does higher production value equal a higher conversation rate? Is there ever a time when higher production value could negatively impact conversion? At LeadPages our head project educator Jeff Wenberg, along with the rest of our content team conducted a test around this exact thing on our sales page and got some very interesting results. In this episode, we’ll discuss those results and Jeff will share with us a few things you can do to improve your video quality quickly and cheaply. It’s helpful for a variety of reasons so let’s jump in. I’m Tim Page, the conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.

What’s up Jeff, welcome to ConversionCast.

Jeff: Hey Tim, thanks for having me.

Tim: Oh man thanks for being here. We are from the early days of LeadPages some of the early team members and you were what marketing team member #1?

Jeff: I was the second higher after Clay.

Tim: [Laughs]

Jeff: [Laughs]

Tim: That’s awesome. Oh man I love to hear that. Well that means that you’ve got some really awesome stuff to share and you’ve seen kind of the progression of our content marketing in the way that we’ve done things and that’s why I’m pumped about this. So can we start off first off by just sharing the results from what we’re going to talk about today? What’s the data behind what we’re going to talk about?

Jeff: Yeah. So we’ll be talking about the new sales video that we recently published and the conversion rates for the new video were 158% higher over the old one and 163% more revenue per view was generated.

Tim: Wow. That’s ridiculous and that’s just changing the video. That’s based on solely not that any other kind of testing that we were doing on the page?

Jeff: Yup, that’s correct.

Tim: Oh man I love that. Okay. So before we dive into that, can you just tell people a little bit about how you got into doing what you’re doing and what your role is here at LeadPages?

Jeff: Yeah. So I get into like videos and voice-overs by actually getting fired for the first time.

Tim: [Laughs]

Jeff: And was just at a dead-end job and got fired as I mentioned. The story is a little too long to get into but basically it forced me into starting my own business just because I was like oh well I could at least make voice overs and videos that look and sound as good as what I’m seeing out there. So I started doing that and then eventually became an affiliate for LeadPages and Clay reached out because he saw that I was actually in St. Paul, which is where he – or he was in Minnesota but you know right around the same area as I was like when he first started LeadPages. Then he reached out to see if I could help with some video stuff and then from there I just started doing more and more work and then eventually came on full time and you know, here we are two years later.

Tim: That’s awesome and you’ve had the opportunity to see well let’s see 140 other people come on the team since you’ve been here. That’s got to be pretty awesome.

Jeff: Yeah it is, it is awesome. The amount of growth that we’ve seen since I’ve been here is just crazy. And we’ve done, we’ve just calculated it the other day and since I started making videos at LeadPages me and the team had produced about 350.

Tim: Wow.

Jeff: Yeah.

Tim: It’s awesome. Oh I love that. Alright, so that being said we’re talking about the sales video. So can you talk about what changed from the old video to the new one that made it work as well as it did?

Jeff: Yeah so I think it was a couple of different things. First it would be kind of the overall quality of the video was like dramatically better and then second just a little bit of the messaging had changed from our old video to our new video. I think that really it comes down to the fact that the quality of our videos kind of matched the state of our company at the time and because of where we were that resonated with our audience at that time and moving forward you know we’ve grown as a company. Our old video didn’t really resonate with our audience as much because you know, our audience had become a little more sophisticated as we had as a company as well.

So once we updated it, we updated the language in it to kind of match where we were at as a company and the audience that we were serving.

Tim: Yeah I love that and I want to talk about that for a second too. But when you say the quality increased I mean what do you mean by it? Is it your overall sound quality, production, value the video itself, the screenshots, the animation, just everything all together came together to produce kind of a better overall experience for the watcher?

Jeff: Yeah. So how the first one kind of was set up was more screen capture, voice over and animation. So there wasn’t any like face to camera footage of me on camera.

Tim: Interesting.

Jeff: It was very like you know, work from home, solopreneur based and that’s kind of like the market we were serving at that time.

Tim: Sure.

Jeff: And then when we redid the new video it’s very – there was a lot of face to camera, a lot of effort went into the production so not just –there was more than just screen capture, voice over. There was like me on camera, there was footage we shot around the office. There are stock footage that we purchase to use in there. Screen capture again but you know, just kind of done as highly polished as possible.

Tim: Uh-hum. So it was focused on the right market kind of the video, the sales video reflects that size of company and the market that we’re going after. So we still cater to solopreneurs and that kind of thing but we also have gone to such a big extent of getting big corporations and that kind of thing are now using LeadPages.

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So we have to tailor to that market as well.

Jeff: Uh-hum. Yeah.

Tim: I love that.

Jeff: Absolutely.

Tim: And you know that’s really interesting. I wonder if somebody could glean from this that then if they you know, if somebody does really focus on say a market that doesn’t require some sophistication, I wonder if then they could may be experiment with seeing if a higher quality of video something with a ton of production value versus something that’s may be kind of like the old videos with Clay sitting around the staircase. I wonder if they would get a better conversion rate from a video that was kind of less polished and may be a little more just kind of whatever and I guess “personal” as opposed to the kind of polished video that we have now. Do you have any insight into that?

Jeff: Yeah I think it all comes down to testing out what works for your market because if you’re talking to people that they’re more the solopreneur crowd or just kind of getting going in business and then you come out guns blazing with this video that costs like 10 grand to make and it’s just like you know super polished, talking like high level business, it might not resonate with people that you’re serving because they’re not thinking in that headspace yet.

Tim: Right.

Jeff: Whereas if you just you know spend a little bit of time putting it together polishing it as much as you can at that time, the people that you’re talking to with this video will probably resonate with a little bit lower quality like less like high production value and more like personal engaging so that it’s like oh I can connect with this person because they’re like me only a little bit ahead of where I want to be.

Tim: Right.

Jeff: Does that make sense?

Tim: It totally does. It reminds me of the split test that we had. We had a few customers send in earlier on in LeadPages where they split tested photos of them on webinar registration pages.

Jeff: Yes.

Tim: And one version of the photos were just kind of hanging out you know, may be in some kind of very natural pose where they were pointing to something or whatever. And then the other images were very buttoned up and polished and supped photos. The very relaxed personal photos out converted the other ones I think by about 30%. So yeah

Jeff: Yeah I do remember that split test and that was hilarious that you know —

Tim: Yeah.

Jeff: — conventional knowledge was like oh buttoned up shirt and real like professional and then the informal one [[0:08:13]] [indiscernible]  out.

Tim: Yeah it’s really amazing and it just continues to speak to the importance of testing this kind of stuff. I think our hypothesis would have been that this you know, new more polished and more focused video would perform better and it did in this case. But it may not always be the case and I think a lot of people go into video marketing or you know, their website or all these different things thinking oh the more professional, the more polished the better but that may not always be the case. We just found it to be the case for us.

Now I would love it if may be you could share just a couple of tips for somebody who wants to you know, may be up level their video game a little bit. Are there – not their video game but you know what I mean. Are there any things that they can be doing to improve their video quality?

Jeff: Yes. So I want to just address one thing here when we’re talking about videos that aren’t quite as polished or like they don’t have as high production quality. That doesn’t mean they’re crappy videos. It just means you know you’re not going out and renting like a hugely expensive DSLR camera and —

Tim: Right.

Jeff: –you know, like you’re not going out and blowing a ton of money on stuff that you don’t need. You‘re using what you have but you’re making what you have look as good as possible.

Tim: That makes sense. Yes. It’s not junk.

Jeff: Yes.

Tim: It’s not you riding in your car with the window down and the wind is blowing–

Jeff: Yeah.

Tim: –and you’re taking up horrible video with your iPhone.

Jeff: Exactly. So speaking of that, that kind of leads me into like the first thing that I generally tell everybody when they’re getting started with videos is make sure that the audio sounds awesome.

Tim: Uh-hum.

Jeff: I’ve found that basically if the audio sounds good, people will forgive a lot of “video mistakes.”

Tim: Yeah.

Jeff: Whereas you could be in your car filming on your iPhone. If your audio is good and you’re providing valuable content, that’s fine.

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Tim: Yeah totally.

Jeff: It’s just a lot of times people when they do that they don’t think about that audio. They just record it off of their video camera or their phone and then you know it just doesn’t sound as good. whereas you can get like a $20 lapel mic that’s wired and you can wire it into your camera or your phone and it will capture the sound and it will be real crisp and clear and it will sound great and it won’t be all echoey from like the room river and all that kind of stuff. So that’s the first thing that I always recommend people do is focus on their audio.

Tim: Uh-hum.

Jeff: Which is a bit counter intuitive.

Tim: No, but it totally makes sense and it’s you know there are a lot of people out there that are like my wife who half the time they’re watching a video and they’re just listening to it.

Jeff: Yeah.

Tim: You know, she doesn’t watch TV shows. She listens to TV shows because she’s the playing the game on her iPad or watching our son or whatever. I think even though some people I would say more people are actually watching the video there definitely is something to be said for you know, hearing something that sounds legit and being able to actually make out all the words as opposed to just hearing every other word and hearing you know all the mic rustling and all that kind of stuff.

Jeff: Yeah exactly totally. Yeah.

Tim: Totally.

Jeff: And the second thing that I would recommend is actually scripting out your videos at least to start. Because what typically a lot of people do is they just you know go free style or they improv. And what happens when you do that is like you’ll get on a roll and then you’ll say some awesome stuff and then you’ll mess up and you won’t be able  to save the take and then you can’t remember what you said.

Tim: Oh.

Jeff: So it’s a little bit like put in the time out front to script it out and it will save you a lot of time when you’re actually filming it. Because then it’s like if you mess up you can just go back and be like okay this is right where I was. I know what I need to say so let’s just start right here and then you can keep moving forward and it actually saves you time in editing so that’s —

Tim: Absolutely.

Jeff: Those are the two things I would recommend for anybody getting started with video or wanting to use more video with their businesses and then the third is just kind of use the lighting you have available. If it’s possible you know sit in front of window like sit facing a window so then the natural light comes in and shines on your voice. If you don’t have a window see if you can rig up some lights of some sort and a lot of times you can just get lights from like a Home Depot or any kind of hardware store and just clip them on to some stands and face them at you and just experiment with the lighting so your video isn’t really dark.

Tim: Nice.

Jeff: And these are all very, very cheap techniques that actually provide really good results and a lot of them I use when I was first getting started with video and I even used a lot of them in the very first few months of video that we made here at LeadPages.

Tim: That’s great. I love that. Well listen I think people will really get a lot of value out of this. How can people stay in touch with you if they want to see the latest things you’ve been doing at LeadPages or just kind of hear your fun rants.

Jeff: Yeah. So you can follow me on Twitter and I’m @JeffWenberg or if you want to see videos or anything that we’re releasing that’s all at blog.leadpages.net.

Tim: Awesome. Thanks so much Jeff.

Jeff: Hey, thank you Tim.

Tim: Oh there you have it, plenty of awesome takeaways from that episode. Jeff is the man. So excited that he came on the show. Now listen if you want to join me for a free live training, you can I can hang out, interact. I will help you grow your email list even if you don’t to spend every last waking minute of your life on marketing. It’s really easy to join. I’ll be doing it this Thursday at 3 p.m. eastern. It’s a live webinar Four Steps to Quickly Grow Your Email List without Spending all of Your Time on Marketing.

All you have to do to join is take one of two steps. The first option is you could text LeadPagesLive to 33444, again LeadPagesLIve all one word to 33444. You’re going to want to do that if you’re in the US. If you’re outside of the US, it’s still really easy. All you need to do is go to LeadPagesWebinar.com that’s LeadPagesWebinar.com and register for the webinar. Last week’s webinar was one of the highest attended webinars that we have ever done at LeadPages so we want to see you there this week Thursday 3 p.m. eastern, text LeadPagesLive to 33444 or go to LeadPageswebinar.com and register. I will see you there and we will see you next week on ConversionCast.