The ElliptiGO is the world’s first outdoor elliptical road bike. The bicycle combines the best of running, cycling and the indoor elliptical trainer to deliver a high-performance, low-impact exercise experience.
Bryan Pate, Co-Founder of ElliptiGO Inc., and a vzaar customer for some nine months now, told us that for such a must-see product, video is essential and that the “bottom line is that for our product the video is the absolute best way to communicate what we’ve created because the instant someone sees it in action they understand it. It’s almost impossible to convey our product through text or even pictures.”
We let Bryan take up the story.
So how have you embraced video?
We primarily use video on the site. It purposefully dominates the homepage and screams play me! In addition we send out newsletters each month and many of the recipients come to the website to specifically watch the video. Whilst video-in-email remains an uncharted and unreliable marketing tactic, we do use the video on our iPhones and Blackberrys to facilitate explaining the bike in personal interactions. It’s like have a product demo in your pocket!
Tell us about the numbers
Attributing success to one video is always hard when you first bring your website to market, but at ElliptiGO we’re not only delighted with the 133% increase in visits (doubling previous traffic) but significantly the 30% increase in average time spent on the site. We attribute much of these improvements to an initial redesign of our site and prominent placement of our homepage video.
A further website redesign in November of this year resulted in an additional 18% increase in visits and a 50% increase in average time on site which underlines the work we have put into optimizing the positioning of the video and its call to action messaging. We added a call to action “Watch the 8S in action” and customers are doing just that we’re pleased to say.
We signed up to the vzaar Platinum package that gives us an unbranded video player and permission to stream 125GB per month. That means we can comfortably stream over 1,000 views a month and leave room for those nice unexpected bumps in traffic you get as a result of direct marketing!
Why vzaar?
We did a lot of research on different media players. We found that vzaar provided the best suite of options for the cost. We were particularly interested in having an unbranded player that we could size to the exact dimensions we were looking for. vzaar provided that for us and we’re happy so far.
Lights, Camera, Action!
We worked with a videographer who is also a professional tri-athlete to shoot our videos. Nothing like having an expert in the field to help shape how we show the product’s benefits. You only have to watch the video to see it has been money well spent. In addition, she’s very reasonable - about $1,500 for a full day of shooting plus video production for two videos. Furthermore, this is just the start as the business has done two shoots with her now so we’re getting better at accomplishing what we want and getting the right shots and shooting at the right time of day.
What next for video?
We strongly believe that web-based video is far and away the best method of demonstrating our product. So much so that we are planning to expand the use of video on our website including in the customer service and support sections that we’re developing.
Video plays track well with our overall traffic, so when there’s a spike in traffic, there’s a spike in plays. Furthermore we believe that everyone who has put down a deposit or invested in the company has watched the video, and that without the video we’d have no investors or customers from outside our headquarters region of San Diego, California. Video has allowed us to expand our geographies significantly. 2010 therefore promises to be an even more interesting year ahead as online video becomes more and more familiar and accessible.
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