I was walking in Chinatown a few weeks ago when a DVD caught my eye. It was a pirated copy of George Clooney’s Academy Award nominee “Good Night and Good Luck”, a movie about the McCarthy-Era Communist Witch-Hunt in the US.
Here’s the original version of the DVD cover you see being sold in the US.
It looks nice, serious and slick. Perfect for a movie of it’s type you’d say.
But apparently the Chinese pirates don’t think so.
Realizing that many peope buy movies with visual-appeal (read: sex and violence) rather than dialogue they decided to ‘spice’ up the cover. Here’s what these enterprising pirates came up with.
Wow – a politically charged, black and white drama – converted into a hot and happening movie with a wet-t-shirt scene. Nice!This strategy clearly moves more DVDs in Asia than the original cover. Even Internet Marketers can learn from this lesson.
When you’re selling anything online – whether it’s an ebook or a software you developed – make sure to create a good looking virtual cover for the product.
We tested this with an online meditation course we were selling online. Our meditation course was purely digital. It was described well in our site copy and supported by glowing testimonials.
Since the product was digital there was no way to photograph it. It was a series of online meditation instructions that came with an MP3 audio file.
As an experiment, we wanted to see how much a fancy 3-D virtual cover would do for this product. We browsed the internet to identify several products that claimed to offer the best virtual cover designs. Finally we settled on one.
It took us 1 hour to pick our product and then 2 hours to play around with Photoshop and design a mock cover.
Our cover was not amazing – but it was decent. We then spent the final hour loading our Photoshop creation into the virtual cover software product and produced a 3-D version of our course.
The virtual cover looked like this:
A week after adding the virtual cover to the site, we tallied the results.
Amazingly – our simple virtual cover led to an 18% increase in signups!
Since a high number of signups convert to sales, we estimated that this one simple change boosted our annual revenue by as much as $30,000. Not bad for 4 hours worth of work!
Even if the product is not shipped at all but downloaded, a good virtual cover can significantly boost sales. If it doesn’t look good, it aint gonna sell.
Discuss This Article