Don’t Get Stuck in the 1990s: Design a Better Online Video Store (Part 2 of 2)

When you compare the online video purchasing experience to any other type of e-commerce transaction, video stores aren’t doing so well. They make it hard for customers to find personalized content, don’t reward good customers, aren’t able to offer sales or incentives and don’t even make it easy for a customer to buy multiple items. Somewhere along the way, distributors seem to have forgotten the “retail” part of video retail eyeballs.

In Part 1 of our two blog post series, you learned the impact of having to merchandise help from your suppliers to offer sales and discounts, and how to create loyalty campaigns. In this second part, you’ll learn about offering personalized content choices, using a shopping cart, and enabling gifting so your customers can give content to their friends and family.

How to Create Differentiation and Loyalty for Your Online Video Store

1. Offer Personalization

There’s a record of each path a viewer takes on any website. Many retailers do nothing with this information. However, the smarter stores offer personalized suggestions relevant to a customer’s interests. If you know what someone has been browsing, you can suggest other similar content they’d be interested in or send follow-up personalized emails. “Don’t just send out a generic email listing with what’s new; personalize your communications. Try saying, ‘If, you like X, maybe you’d like Y’,” says Sid.

While we’re on the personalization approach, consider making it easier for consumers to save content to a list for future purchasing. “There aren’t features which let me favorite things on most sites, so I can come back to later for my content. With these sites, every time I go there, it’s like starting from scratch,” says Sid. Instead of having the experience be Groundhog Day for your customers, introduce a way for them to keep a favorites list, and then follow up to remind them about this and any other similar content they may be interested in.

2. Enable Shopping Carts

Your favorite e-commerce retailer is doing one thing which video retailers haven’t thought of to help them both focus on the customer and sell more inventory— they have a shopping cart. Customers may put in a pair of pants, then maybe go for socks, underwear, even a second pair of pants. These customers are making incremental purchases, all because there’s a place to initially keep their items while they’re shopping. “There’s no such thing as a shopping cart on a video commerce site,” says Sid. Imagine a customer buys a second or third video, perhaps starring a favorite actor from the first one. That just went directly to your bottom line. That’s one perk, but how about making it even easier for customers to buy more? Additionally, in order to connect to those elusive Generation Z and younger Millennials, you need to better understand their lifestyles and cultural differences.  Think about other product offerings and partnerships, that could increase basket size as well. It’s important to focus on customer engagement even when they are not buying.

3. Allow Gifting

“Traditionally, it was very common for people to get DVDs and CDs for birthdays and holidays,” says Sid. While the media delivery mechanism may have changed, people always love receiving gifts. The numbers prove this. Gifting is big business; the global gifts retailing market will register a revenue of almost USD $77 billion by 2022. (https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/8frhw4/global_gifts?w=5).  

Being able to allow your customer to not only purchase their own media but also easily buy content for their friends and family, is a very powerful opportunity. You’re reaching two consumers instead of one without having to spend any more marketing dollars to do so, which makes this a great way to find new customers. And think about the possibilities of using “virtual wallets,” letting people load money into a loyalty app.

All of these steps work to gain repeat business and keep you top of mind. The world has changed, and there’s never been more noise, volume, competition and disruption in the video entertainment space. Consumers’ expectations have escalated, and those who do not respond to these changes will lag behind. What is the real key to keeping the customers happy so that they continue buying from you? Well, unless you provided actual value to your customers, sooner or later, they are bound to ditch you for another provider.

For video retailers to succeed, it’s crucial to stand out from the competition, differentiate your brand — and adapt to evolving technologies and customer behaviors. By working more closely with your suppliers, integrating one or all of these steps will keep eyeballs on your content and greatly improve your customer’s experience. The result will be that they will think of you as their favorite video destination, and that’s the best possible outcome you can have.

Check our Part 1 of this blog post here.