Did you know that you can boost your conversions (doubling them!), reduce the number of users who bounce from your homepage (by at least 7%), increase sales and lower your support costs (by half) just by using screencasts?  This was recently discussed in the Business of Software forums.

Boosting sales:

AppBeacon.com are an iTunes competitor, Justin (CEO) wanted a frontpage video as users were telling him that they weren’t ‘getting it’.  He wanted more users to stay and get involved choosing iPhone apps on his site.  We created a screencast, it is on his frontpage, after introducing it he said:

“My bounce rate has decreased about 7 percent per day. Since having the screencast up, the site’s sign up rate has doubled.” – Justin (CEO AppBeacon.com)

Note that Justin has a clever bit of javascript for first-time visitors that pops a friendly ‘cloud’ onto the screen asking if you’d like a demo, this really drives up the number of video-views he gives to first-time visitors.  More detail.

LiveDrive.com offer a hosted FTP service with integrated Windows drag n’drop support.  The CEO (Andrew Michael) had created his own long screencast and noted that his signed-up trial-user rate went up dramatically leading to more sales (the figures were all private).

He asked us to create 5 videos (4 screencasts + 1 mobile video) which told a better story more quickly, they’re on his homepage and Demos page.  You can also see his original longer demo at the base of the Demos page.

Stories For Support:

AcumenPI run Coursework.Info, the largest coursework student site in the UK.  They were losing over a day a month to support requests on the single topic of ‘how do I cancel my paying subscription?’ from less-web-savvy users.

We created a 5 minute walk-through screencast, after introducing it their support load dropped dramatically.  I don’t have figures, they were kept private, I do have a quote:

“The video has been a big help. Our users really appreciate us going the extra mile, and it has greatly reduced the amount of time we need to spend holding their hands. Job Done. Thanks!” – Chris Newson (MD)

You can see the video on our Examples page, it is 7th down, the support page in their site is only available if you’re a paying subscriber.

HowSociable.com is a free brand-metrics measuring web-app run as a demo app for Inuda.com.  I created an introduction screencast as the first ‘real’ production for ProCasts (mid 2008), CEO Jon says:

“Adding a ProCasts screencast to our front page increased activated email conversions by 25% and reduced support requests by half” – Jonathan Markwell – CEO

AdblockPlus is often the most-downloaded extension for the Firefox web-browser.  Wladimir (author) was having to answer questions from new users about support and configuration.  As a bit of open-source support (and free advertising!) we created the homepage video for them.

“I added this video to the front page of adblockplus.org and I hope that far fewer people will be confused now about what Adblock Plus is and how you “make it work”.” – Wladimir

If you click through to YouTube you’ll see that it has had 24,000 views (approx. 600 per day) in just over 5 weeks with 55 five-out-of-five ratings and a string of very supportive comments.

Summary:

We’ve seen increases in sign-ups (100% increase), sales (anecdotal but realistic), reduced bounce-rates (7% reduction) and support-load reduction (50% reduction) simply from the introduction of well-made screencasts.

If you’d like guaranteed results quickly and painlessly then talk to us and we’ll make professional screencasts that fit your needs.  We have years of experience with screencasting and know exactly what does and doesn’t work.

The Screencasts boost conversions, lower your bounce-rate, increase sales and lower your support burden by ProCasts' Blog about Professional Screencast Production, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England License.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.