We love videos. Videos are engaging, interactive, and use multiple senses to teach and persuade us. And since the average buyer is just like the average person, buyers want videos too! They want a sales process that is easy understand and quick to complete. They want to set the pace, learn on their own time, and only talk to someone in person when they feel ready to do so.

On the other hand, sellers want more prospects and higher quality engagements. Plus, they’d love to know what’s going on behind the scenes: what’s driving a buyer’s decision? What questions does the buyer have? How can sellers best help?

The Traditional Solution

Traditionally, these two needs between the buyers and the sellers meet in the demo. Buyers peruse a website, enter their information on a form, and are contacted by a salesperson (hopefully) quickly. During that conversation, the buyer and seller can get on the same page and work out what’s going to happen moving forward. The problem? Buyers are more demanding than ever, and this more traditional method hasn’t caught up to the experience buyers want. The solution? One great step forward is to incorporate chatbots into your website. This speeds up the connection time between buyer and seller while allowing buyers to move at their own pace.

And how can you make chatbots even better? By using video.

Videos can give buyers immediate answers to their questions, any hour of the day, any day of the year. With the right implementation, video can even give salespeople buyer analytics to help with the final sale. The option of a video demo gives a potential buyer more control over the learning process, allowing them to learn without reading or talking to someone. All the signs point to video as an effective addition to chatbots. So what does the science have to say?

The Experiment

ChatFunnels decided to put these theories to the test by conducting an experiment. As website visitors interacted with a client’s bot, they were eventually offered the choice between a video demo and a personalized demo. Here are the results:

• 78% people preferred the video demo.
• They preferred it so much that they engaged with the video for 10+ minutes and even used the search function to ask multiple questions!
• Out of the people who opted for the video demo, 25% self-qualified and booked a meeting with a sales rep.
• Interestingly, when another version of this bot was tested that required site visitors to provide an email before seeing the video demo, 50% gave their email!

The power of immediate information that’s safe and controlled for the visitor is readily apparent in these experiment results. People want information and they want to be catered to at every level. Since the technology to do so exists, what are we waiting for? Let’s give the people what they want!

Before You Get Started

A few words of caution as you begin to incorporate video into your chatbots:

1. Make sure you’re imbedding the video, whether it be through YouTube, Vimeo, etc., into your personal website. You don’t want to send people away from your website just to watch a video! Keep them close by imbedding the video or using a demo video software service like Omedym.
2. Make sure you set expectations in the bot. When you offer the choice between a video and a live demo, be sure to let the site visitor know that the video will be a self-guided video where nothing is expected of them! They’ll be a lot more likely to view the video when they know what to expect.
3. Don’t forget to set up another bot or live chat option on the page with the videos! That way, if a potential customer becomes more interested, they can chat in or one of your sales reps can try to reengage them as they display more interest.

And remember, you can use video for many other purposes and in several different situations. Maybe a sales rep could send the demo video to someone they’re chatting with if that person starts to become uninterested and unresponsive. The presence of a video is a low risk way (for both the rep and the visitor) to build up more interest! You can even experiment with including different types of videos—not just demo videos—in the bot you build.

Whatever your use case, the data is clear: video takes chatbots to the next level in a big way!