Case Study
Dropbox
Dropbox: Explainer Video Raised 10 million Additional Customers & $48,000,000 Extra Revenue
During their start-up phase, Dropbox (the popular file hosting service) had invested on “paid search” and were disappointed by the result. They were spending $233-$388 to acquire a new consumer for their $99 product. So, naturally, Dropbox was not happy with AdWords, affiliate program and other advertising efforts they had invested in. Their revenue was suffering. And then they used an explainer animation video
Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox, said about the video’s success:
“It drove hundreds of thousands of people to the website. Our beta waiting list went from 5000 people to 75000 people literally overnight. It totally blew us away.”
Having seen a huge return from the screencast that he had recorded himself, this time too Drew decided to invest on developing a product video. He contacted a professional video production company to create an explainer video that will help his prospective consumers understand the concept of Dropbox and persuade them to purchase. The new explainer video which cost less than $50,000 at that time (the year 2009) was indeed a huge success. The 2-minute explainer video, done in a whiteboard style, drove 10% conversion leading to 10 million extra customers that yielded an ROI of $48,000,000 in extra revenue. Alongside the explainer video, Dropbox used referral campaign and other smart marketing tools to boost their customer base from 0 to 100 million users.
Crazy Egg
Explainer Video Raised 64% Conversion & $21,000 Extra Revenue Per Month
Crazy Egg is a popular heat map tool which helps you “visualize where your visitors click”. By using this web app, you can understand and improve the engagement level of website visitors and plan better landing pages to maximize your business conversion rates. But first Crazy Egg needed to improve its own conversion, and for that purpose, founder Neil Patel invested on an animated explainer video. The animated video is 158 seconds long which is slightly too long for an explainer video, but the result was astoundingly high too. Crazy Egg saw a hike of 67% conversion, and the founder revealed that thanks to the video, they were earning $21,000 more every month.
Rypple
Rypple: Explainer Video Increased 20% Conversion
Rypple, a social performance management tool, wanted more people to sign up for their free trial. They too had heard of explainer video’s conversion powers. But they were Rypple wanted to see how effective an explainer video would really be at maximizing their conversion rate. So, after receiving their explainer video, they arranged three landing pages and performed a A/B test:
- Landing page with text and image
- Landing page with a live action testimonial video from Facebook
- Landing page with the explainer video
The landing page with the explainer video won big. The visual explanation and the story connected well with the target audience, and increased the conversion by 20%. Bingo!
Jellyfish
Jellyfish: Explainer Video Helped Closed A $800,000 Deal In 7 Days
Jellyfish, a freight management firm, used an explainer video to warm up their cold calls. They delivered a successful sales pitch to a client who had never heard of Jellyfish before.
Thanks to the explainer video, Jellyfish was able to close a whopping deal of $800k in just 7 days. Yes, it was a cold calling approach i.e., the client had never heard of Jellyfish.
And, you know how these cold pitches yield just about 1-3% success rates of getting an initial appointment with client.
But, not in this case! Before the salesman at Jellyfish could send the follow-up email to get the conversation from their side going, the client reached out to them for a meeting and the deal was closed. And it was all because the client saw their explainer video, understood what Jellyfish did and found that it was exactly the service they needed.
Autocad WS
Autocad WS: 10 million downloads & Media Exposure
This is what the founder of Autocad WS, John Walker said,
“Here’s one example where we worked hard to make our app more interesting. We created ‘Andy the Engineer’ as our mascot, and the explainer video we created for the app showed an architectural version of Andy with plenty of ‘Andy’ jokes. That video got over 1M views, an amazing number considering we’re talking about a video for a CAD app. It also helped us to get covered by blogs that write about Android apps, the kind of blogs I’ve mentioned before. We saw a huge difference in our success rate when trying to convince bloggers to cover us once we had great imagery and a video.”
Fun Facts
75% of employees would rather watch a video than read an article, document, or email.” FORRESTER
Training and recruiting millennials are easier with videos. 87% of millennials prefer working for video-savvy companies.” Forbes
64% of customers are more likely to buy a product online after watching a explainer video about it.
Video can increase click-through rates in your marketing emails by 200-300%.
50% of online customers look for a video related to a product or service before they visit the store.
Adding a video to your site increases your chance of a front-page Google result by 50 times.
Inclusion of the word “video” in the subject line of an email can increase open rates by 19%.
Embedding video in landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80%