When business hits a stall point and people aren’t interested in your product, what do you do? How do you increase sales and expand your business?

Sure, you can spend lots of money on SEO, Facebook ads, PPC campaigns and other forms of advertisement to get the word out about your product and grab your prospect’s attention.

But the problem is not just about finding prospects… it’s rather about converting those prospects into customers.

Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, says that to sell your product, you have to “earn the awareness, respect, & trust of those who might buy”. Sure, building relationship with your prospects can take a long time… but explainer videos can help you achieve all that in 60-90 seconds.

Considered as the twenty first century sales machine, explainer videos use graphics and storytelling to grab prospect’s attention, educate them about the product, excite them with tailored graphics, and set a mood for purchase.

Here are some stories about smart entrepreneurs who won big by investing on explainer videos to educate, excite and convert their prospects and drive sales. Let’s hear them out.

A Growing List of Explainer Video Case Studies:

1. Dropbox: Explainer Video Raised 10 Million Additional Customers & $48,000,000 Extra Revenue 

During their startup 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.

Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox, had earlier used a demo video to validate the idea of Dropbox and establish its market need. This is what Drew 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 but a proper one at that. 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.

This 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 to boost their customer base from 0 to 100 million users.

Update: Dropbox now has a newer, better explainer video.

2. 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.          

3. 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 landings pages and performed a A/B test:

1. Landing page with text and image
2. Landing page with a live action testimonial video from Facebook
3. 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 upped the conversion by 20%. Bingo!

4. RankWatch: Explainer Video Increased 27% Conversion 

The conversion problem with RankWatch was the one faced by SaaS products in general i.e. despite being a great web app, it was having a hard time communicating its value in words. And, therefore was losing prospects.

RankWatch saw a need for a visual explanation to increase understanding of the product and convert visitors.

So began the production of RankWatch’s explainer video, and it brought in 27% hike in free trial users and improved sales.

5. CaseComplete: Explainer Video Increased 23% Conversion 

Another explainer video success story is that of CaseComplete, a requirements management tool.

Visitors to the site had neither the time nor the patience to understand the software features (a side effect of the 8 second human attention span as well as the general it’s-too-complex-for-me attitude towards software).

Ergo CaseComplete was losing customers.

Having heard of Dropbox and Rypple’s explainer video sales success, CaseComplete tried out an animated explainer video, expecting at least 5% conversion.

The result exceeded their expectation. The explainer video conjured a 23% hike in conversion rate.

6. Dollar Shave Club: 12000 New Orders Within 2 Days Of Releasing The Video Onto YouTube

It cost $4500 to produce and stars Dollar Shave Club’s founder Michael Dubin himself. The video script was also written by him too. Lucia Aniello directed the spot, and then they released the video on YouTube.

With punchlines like “our blades are f**king great” and “your handsome-as* grandfather had one blade- and polio”, you would think that Dollar Shave Club’s explainer video is too bold. It is bold but the reason they could get away with all those sweet profanity is because they know that their audience would like it.

Dollar Shave Club had done some homework and understood that their consumers are mostly men in their 20s or 30s. So their explainer video successfully makes use of language and humor appealing to that target audience. And, it was indeed a success, what with over 20 million views.

The video propelled Dollar Shave Club to overnight stardom, and got them 12,000 new orders in just 2 days of the video launch.

7. 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 $800k deal 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.

8. Autocad WS: 10 million downloads & Media Exposure

Let’s hear it straight from the founder.

“Here’s one example where we worked hard to make our app more interesting. We created ‘Andy the Engineer’ as our mascot, and the 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.” Likewise, there’s also the story of Stuart Hall, the founder of Appbot, who quickly developed an App Preview for his “7 Minute Workout” fitness app (available for free download now). The result: Apple Australia, the country where he lived, had the video featured in the App Store, which boosted the app’s visibility and helped influence the app downloads.

So there you have. The stories of how explainer videos helped these companies and entrepreneurs achieve success and sales. 

By: Deepasha Kakkar