By Kevin Gumienny
Why video, indeed. The training team at BigCommerce needed to train their users. The more people who knew how to use their software, the more people would use their software.
Who are their customers? Mostly small businesses, people who do ecommerce in their spare time. They don’t have the time or money to set through formal training. So training needed to be available anytime, and just in time.
They built a BigCommerce University, a website where anyone could go to learn how the software worked. No need to track who has taken which course, or who the students were. So no need for a learning management system.
And they decided to use video as the delivery mechanism. The videos are three minutes max, there are twenty videos in each section, and four sections. BigCommerce also included a rich description of what each video was about, so the learner would know what to expect, and would be able to choose the correct video to get what they needed. The rich description also allowed Google to optimize the videos in its search results, as Google doesn’t look inside video.
Did it work? BigCommerce University has had around 45,000 unique views since mid-February and an engagement rate of 82%. The trial-to-paid conversion rate went to 15% from 10%. As Alex pointed out, if the conversion rate went up 50%, that’s a pretty good sign that the team did something right.
BigCommerce used their video library to reach out to their customers. They also found it useful for internal training. We’ll post more about that at the eLearning Council Blog at https://www.elearningcouncil.com/.