In the high-end consumer electronics market, you sell experiences, not stuff. That’s why the industry’s leading dealers and integrators continue to invest in experience centers. The vast majority of your prospective customers, however, your website will be their first encounter with your brand and the products you carry.
It’s time to invest in making your web experience as jaw-dropping as an in-person experience center. Websites influence the vast majority of purchases, whether or not the final sale takes place online. The more expensive the product or service is, the more likely consumers are to visit multiple websites while researching their decision. An immersive, engaging website can give a custom electronics dealer a massive advantage—pardon my French here, but most websites are très boring.
As the retail e-commerce world has already discovered, 3D product models and interactive virtual experiences are one of the most effective ways to transform your website into a compelling experience. These tactics are even more powerful in the CI industry, where experience is everything. Here’s how 3D gives you a head start on a digital customer journey.
Instant Search Ranking Boost
Though consumers often go directly to Amazon or another marketplace for smaller items, most people research their major purchases using a search engine. That means Search Engine Optimization (SEO) matters – your website needs to tick all the little boxes that can help get you ranked on the first page of results. Fun fact: 3D is great for SEO.
Investing in 3D for your website gets you an automatic boost: Google actively crawls the web for 3D models and prioritizes those pages higher in its search rankings. The SEO benefits don’t stop there, though. Offering a 3D experience on your homepage encourages visitors to click through, exploring your site further instead of navigating away. This lowers your “bounce rate,” which is also good for your rankings.
Time On Your Side
3D product models – particularly in the context of a rich, interactive virtual experience – can dramatically increase “session duration,” the amount of time a potential customer spends on your site. The more time a customer spends interacting with digital materials, the more opportunity you have to enlighten them about your products and services. A virtual environment, like an interactive 3D showroom or model home, can help guide the experience while giving the customer the freedom to explore.
Consumers have been shown to spend up to five times longer “playing” with an interactive virtual experience than they would reading a static page about a similar product or service. That time investment correlates strongly with dollars. Across vertical markets, longer session durations are associated with higher purchase intent. Interactive 3D has been shown to have an especially dramatic effect on sales conversion. Case studies from Shopify have found that customers are dramatically more likely to purchase an item after interacting with it in 3D.
Spend Smarter
3D product models are a smart marketing investment, not just because they help your site rank higher and draw customers in, but because they are less expensive than traditional marketing assets. Product photo galleries don’t just look old-fashioned compared to an interactive 3D model; they also cost a lot more to produce and update. Think about it: A high-quality model allows you to “photograph” a product from any angle or in any environment without the cost of resetting a shoot. You can create magazine-ready lifestyle images without renting and styling a space. When you update your product offerings, you can incorporate the new products into the existing virtual environment. Virtual assets deliver ROI year after year.
A full-scale virtual environment can also deliver massive value and savings outside your website: these lightweight immersive experiences allow you to bring interactive demos to client consultation meetings, tradeshow booths, sales meetings, product trainings, and more at a minuscule fraction of the cost of shipping and setting up physical demos. They’re more exciting, reliable, and dependable than any Pelican case worth of gear.
Most CI companies haven’t substantively changed how their websites work in 20 years. 3D models and virtual environments can give you a slicker site than any of your competitors, positioning you as a 21st-century player while they’re stuck in the 20th century. These experiences increase the chances of a sale – and most importantly, they help your potential customers understand your solutions better. A great sales experience starts on your website: when people open your site, make sure they see the future, not the past.
About the Author
Dave Chace is the Founder and CEO of Cogent360, a highly specialized design firm that creates dynamic and immersive digital experiences to help companies showcase their products, educate their target audience, and drive sales enablement.
About Cogent360
Cogent360 integrates a variety of advanced media including ultra-realistic VR and 3D modeling, motion graphics, animation, and more, and merges these with proven instructional design principles to create powerful digital experiences that captivate your audience and get your point across—ultimately speeding the sales cycle, elevating performance, eliminating pain points, and providing a huge competitive advantage for their clients.
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