I'm curious if videos really do scare people away. If you take a look at dropbox and cloudflare they do a really good job at using a video to demonstrate their product. Now taking into consideration the size of dropbox's and cloudflare's users, I'm more inclined to the idea that "videos work".
It's not that videos scare people away, but they need to be augmented. Would Dropbox convert better if they had descriptive text on their home page, or at least made the features link more visible than the one in the footer? We'll never know unless Dropbox tests it and publishes the results.
When I think of software sold to businesses, I'm reminded of the place I used to work where the president had the IT department disable the speakers on all new PC's. He didn't want employees sitting around watching videos or listening to music on company time. It may be hard to fathom for some people, but there are offices where playing videos (even demos) is frowned upon - especially in a cube farm.
If you want to make conversions, think of all the barriers between you and the sale, and start knocking them down one by one. Making your products key features readable and crawl-able for search engines is an easy one.
As someone from the affiliate space where EVERYTHING gets splittested I can tell you that videos generally own all other forms of website content when trying to get the user to do something (download, signup, buy).
>Would Dropbox convert better if they had descriptive text on their home page, or at least made the features link more visible than the one in the footer? We'll never know unless Dropbox tests it and publishes the results.
They don't scare me. I just don't bother watching them if I don't know what will be explained in them beforehand. I am a quick reader, but I cannot accelerate your video.
If video is your only explanation, I'll never come back.
