Elevate Your BFCM eCommerce Strategy With Interactive Video

In 2022, the biggest retail holidays of the year saw record-breaking sales worth $9.12 billion in the US alone. 

That’s just a glimpse of the massive impact that Black Friday – Cyber Monday can create for eCommerce businesses worldwide.  

But in a sea of discounts and deals in the peak BFCM season, the million-dollar question is: How do you stand out and captivate buyers? 

The short answer: interactive videos. 

Interactive videos create an immersive shopping experience by bringing your product to life and engaging viewers in real-time. These shoppable videos also give buyers a frictionless option to place an order quickly and conveniently. 

If you’re gearing for the biggest sale of the real, you need to include shoppable videos in your BFCM eCommerce strategy. Let’s learn how. 

6 video marketing strategies to ace your BFCM game

We’ve detailed six tried-and-tested ways to embrace the power of interactive video and entice buyers in the BFCM season.

1. 1. Grow your subscriber list with video quizzes

2. 2. Bring your social channels’ video content to your online store

3. 3. Create a sense of urgency and FOMO

4. 4. Send back-in-stock shoppable video alerts via email

5. 5. Create a seamlessly interactive video experience

6. 6. Fine-tune your video strategy throughout the season

Let’s break them down in detail and discover actionable tips to implement each tactic. 

1. Grow your subscriber list with video quizzes

Building your email list is the best place to prepare for a hit BFCM season. With a list of engaged subscribers, you can create buzz around your brand and drive sales with discount offers. 

This is where interactive video content can truly shine and set your brand apart. 

Videos are more engaging than static, textual content. Adding interactive elements to a video—like a multiple-choice question or poll- can make the content even more exciting and hold viewers' attention for long. 

The result? People would want to hear more from you and willingly subscribe to your email list. 

Here are some crucial tips for converting high-intent browsers into long-term subscribers with video quizzes:

• Strategic placement: Visibility is key for maximizing the ROI of interactive videos. Place them strategically on your homepage and/or landing pages where they will most likely be seen. You can also introduce these video quizzes in a pop-up when visitors visit your store website.

• Mobile responsiveness: To impress and engage visitors with video quizzes, optimizing them for mobile and other devices is important. Create and test the functionality of these videos to avoid creating friction for website visitors. 

• Different formats: Experiment with different types of video quizzes. For example, you can add multiple polls in a video or add a spin-the-wheel option at the end of a video. You can also ask viewers to match the given options in a pair or select one of the multiple choices as the answer.

• Special discounts: A surefire way to increase sign-ups with video quizzes is the promise of value exchange. Make a compelling video about new launches or a sale and add special offers after a quiz. If viewers answer the questions correctly, they can win exciting rewards.  

• Motivating CTA: The final element of a good video quiz is the call to action. Encourage viewers to sign up for your email newsletter with a strong CTA that resonates with them. Instead of the hard sell, you can give them a sneak peek of what they're signing up for and gently nudge them to subscribe.

The bottom line: interactive video quizzes can capture people’s attention, engage them with an irresistible offer, and turn them into email subscribers.

If you're wondering how to embed quiz videos on your website, you don't have to look any further. Videowise is a powerful eCommerce video platform with advanced capabilities to embed interactive videos anywhere on your site without impacting the page speed.

You can create a brand-aligned video player widget and integrate your quiz questions to engage viewers. 

2. Bring your social channels’ video content to your online store

During the BFCM season, shoppers have too many options and little time to make purchase decisions. If you want to convince them to buy from your online store, you have to make the buying process quick, seamless, and omnichannel. 

Give shoppers the convenience of watching a video on your website and placing an order directly from the video. Sounds too good to be true, right? It’s possible!

With Videowise, you can embed shoppable videos anywhere on your website and let shoppers buy any product in a single click. You can choose from different video widget options like these:

The widget is fully responsive across all screen sizes, and you can add your custom branding. The best part? These embedded videos won't affect your page speed at all. So, as soon as potential customers land on your site, they can see your products in action, understand their use cases, and place an order.

That’s the formula that Apolla used to sell out their entire stock with a 9.94% video conversion rate. The brand shortened the path to purchase by:

• Syncing TikTok videos to their website

• Making these videos shoppable with a 1-click checkout

This allowed them to add customer reviews and influencer content to their online store and instantly win their shoppers’ trust. 

3. Create a sense of urgency and FOMO

A sense of urgency or the fear of missing out (FOMO) pushes shoppers to buy now rather than pushing their purchases for later. People who believe they might miss out on a limited-time offer are more eager to buy the product. 

This is a powerful psychological factor to reduce cart abandonment—especially during the peak sale season—and make products more desirable, leading to quicker buying decisions.  

You can build urgency for your products with these best practices:

• Create time-sensitive offers: Plan your limited-time offers and promote these deals with countdown videos, flash sale videos, and other such content. Embed these shoppable videos on your eCommerce store, share them via email and socials, and publicize QR codes for offline activation. 

• Add alerts for limited stock: A simple alert for limited stock can entice shoppers to place an order quickly. It gives them the feeling that they’ll miss the opportunity to buy a product at this price if they don’t buy it now. For example, this example shows a real-time count of the number of items left in stock—pushing viewers to buy before it runs out.

• Offer exclusive access: A great way to build urgency among shoppers is to give them exclusive deals. Think of early bird discounts and member-only offers where a select group of people can access a deal before everyone else. With interactive videos, you can generate more enthusiasm around these deals and skyrocket your conversions.

• Host polls and surveys: Before starting a big sale, use interactive videos to engage shoppers and ask them to vote on different products/styles. You can also use quizzes to build some excitement. Once the sale is live, winners get special discounts.  

Create interactive videos to build urgency around your products and offers throughout October and November. Then, they'll be more excited to buy from you than other brands during BFCM.

4. Send back-in-stock shoppable video alerts via email

There’s nothing more frustrating than waiting to order a product for a long time and watching it out of stock on the day of the sale. 

You can turn this frustration into joy as a seller by creating compelling back-in-stock email alerts with shoppable videos. 

Most brands sharing discount offers via email push people to visit their website, check out the product, and place an order—what a hassle! With shoppable videos, you can enable shoppers to buy a product instantly from the email itself. It’s as easy as watching the video and clicking the ‘buy now’ button. 

Follow these steps to prepare these alerts for your BFCM sale:

• Create a list of your best-selling products that you expect to sell out

• Make videos for each of these products or find UGC from social channels

• Turn them into shoppable videos with a buy-now link and embed them in automated emails

With Videowise, you can do all of this effortlessly. Our adaptive video player also lets you create immersive experiences for mobile users. That helped RIFRUF gain $50k in added revenue from shoppable videos. 

The responsive video widget boosted engagement among website visitors and added 500 hours of added time on-site. Naturally, this led to more sales and higher conversion rates.

5. Create a seamlessly interactive video experience

One of the proven CRO video strategies for eCommerce brands is making the buying experience interactive from start to finish. Whether you’re welcoming first-time visitors to your online store or getting a lot of repeat customers, you can boost your conversion rate by adding interactive videos at different touchpoints.

Interactive and shoppable videos invite visitors to actively participate in the content by clicking and choosing different options. They create a more immersive and memorable experience for them. 

Here’s a simple breakdown of how you can embed this interactive content across different touchpoints on your eCommerce store:

• Welcome visitors with a pop-up showing an interactive video quiz with a discount offer

• Add banners anywhere on the screen with an interactive video message from your founder

• Include how-to videos and customer review videos on product pages with the option for instant checkout

• Make interactive videos to answer FAQs and offer customer support

• Create shoppable videos giving email subscribers an exclusive preview of your products

• Run interactive video ads to retarget customers across different channels

Remember: interactive content can bring you hyper-engaged shoppers and shoppable videos can drive sales with a quick checkout process. 

6. Fine-tune your video strategy throughout the season

Let's face it: you can do everything to prepare for your BFCM success, but some things can still fall through the cracks. That's why testing and iterating have to be essential parts of your video marketing process. 

Stay on top of the effectiveness of your interactive videos with these key elements:

• Analytics: Videowise’s real-time analytics dashboard gives you granular data to optimize your videos for conversions. Track key metrics for every video and marketing channel to find gaps and opportunities to enhance sales. 

• A/B testing: Run split testing for different aspects of your interactive video campaign to choose the best-performing version. Get a pulse of your shoppers and share content that will resonate the most. 

Here’s an overview of the data points you can track with Videowise:

Operationalize this data and leverage these insights to improve your videos and increase sales. Based on several metrics, you can modify your video strategy from viewer engagement to top-performing pages.

Get ready for a wildly successful BFCM season with interactive video

The Black Friday – Cyber Monday sale can turn your entire year upside down, but only if you’re prepared for it well in advance. In this quick guide, we’ve shared the best practices for captivating your shoppers with interactive videos. 

Plan, create, and test your shoppable video campaigns to achieve remarkable success during the retail holidays. Try a powerful tool like Videowise to hit the ground running quickly.