With the rise of digital media communications such as video advertising and remote access viewing, another element that has been showing promise for small and large businesses alike is the use of speaking avatars, or virtual spokes models.
SitePal is one of the websites taking advantage of the benefits of speaking avatars for business and education. Their features allow for detailed personalization such as the ability to upload your own photo in which to create the website avatar, as well as over two-hundred and fifty customizable pre-made examples to choose from or build upon.
Users can use their own voices or take advantage of the built-in version. The good news is that voice synthesis, or artificially produced human voices, have greatly improved since the early days of the internet. Instead of the droning monotone of old, voices now include fairly realistic inflections and the highs and lows of natural speech.
This fun and powerful tool has become more common and beneficial as seen on many of the sites that now use SitePal.
Global ranking for Sitepal is at #34,425. While around one-third of the site’s visitors are from the U.S., it is also very popular in Mexico.
LiveFaceOnWeb also offers an element of employing digital salespersons but with a bit of a more realistic slant than the average creatively constructed speaking avatars. LiveFaceOnWeb stands behind their belief that people relate better to real people, so that providing human models for their digital avatars can help to enrich the interactivity of any website.
LiveFaceOnWeb allows users to choose from a selection of live models to represent their services, products or other online opportunities. Creating the finished product gives the individual purchasing the service the ability to customize video length, shot parameters and the type of presentation.
Users will then create a script and submit it, and within a few days they will have a completed advertisement made with, and by, live professionals in their industries. They also offer packages with complete services for those who have little to no experience.
Whether due to these web sites’ ages or because users prefer the animated avatars to the human versions, may still be undetermined but global rankings show LiveFaceOnWeb at #58,595. The sites viewers are predominantly males between the ages of forty-five to sixty-five and older with some college education.
The Bottom Line
So how can this form of advertising offer any benefits to your business or services website?
- Results show that placing an avatar or live human communication element on your website’s landing page can greatly reduce bounce rates.
- Beyond the aesthetic and the ability to keep readers on your page longer, avatars can also supply a marketing nudge by delivering short, precise sales pitches to the visitor while they are simultaneously browsing the text aspect of your site.
- Digital advertising in this format has also shown to be effective in announcing discounts, specials and bonuses on your products or services that can lead visitors deeper into browsing your product or service line, as well as closer to becoming a new customer.
- Custom avatars can also be used to help site visitors navigate your site. This can help users who may be interested in your products and services, but are not net savvy enough to navigate other sites that may be more confusing.
- Personalized Avatars can also be configured to collect contact information from prospective customers before they exit your website. Attaching interactive contact forms help to make this an easy and flexible format for data collection.
- Call-to-action buttons or prompts can be reinforced by a speaking avatar that makes the visitor aware them.
A study conducted by Dr. Ralph Wilson, the CEO of WebMarketingToday, analyzed the influence of the speaking avatar against how long visitors spent on his website. The results showed that the speaking character had enormous impact. The average time spent on his site increased by an average of 33% with a 17% increase in page views for each visitor.
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