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Could adding a virtual tour to your website improve user experience, and help deliver more conversions or help to reduce the number of poor quality leads you receive?
Virtual tours are a fantastic way of allowing someone to take a look around without actually physically looking around.
They work 24 hours a day, so when someone can’t sleep and they’re browsing, they can take a look at wedding venues, or discover the layout of a theme park so they can save time by knowing where everything is before they get there.
In the same way that people have adapted to video calls, people often prefer to see something virtually (at least initially) as it saves time. Time trying to match calendar availability for all parties.
Quite simply, it works when it’s convenient to the person who wants to view, and requires nothing from the host. Meaning that they waste less time with the tyre kickers or those who can be qualified out with a virtual visit.
Virtual tours can now be found practically everywhere. If you have a physical location, office or an experience, then there’s likely someone who has delivered a virtual 3D experience for this.
A virtual tour can take away the awkward small talk, and for introverts, the fear of walking into a car showroom.
The advantage of this is that the showroom can be anywhere, not necessarily a fixed location, as with many other virtual tours.
Hyundai provide a virtual showroom, and even let you use the tour to inspect the inside of the car. Something that you never really get a proper feel for from photos.
For many home buyers, a virtual tour is the holy grail. You buy a property after visiting once or twice and you spend hundreds of thousands of pounds.
A house is almost always a gamble with unexpected surprises when you move in. But with a virtual tour you can inspect everything, and spend a lot more time looking around and picturing yourself living there. All without the owner looking over your shoulder.
You can save physical viewings for answering all those questions you forget to ask when seeing a place for the first time.
Throughout the pandemic the leisure industry was heavily impacted. Venues had to close their doors which meant that in person visits were a no go. Virtual tours gave businesses a way of staying open for viewings, to help them secure future bookings.
Our client Country House Weddings, use virtual tours to allow event and wedding planners to explore their venues. You can see the Leez Priory virtual tour here.
Whistlepunks are an axe throwing experience company, and they provide virtual tours of their venues so that potential visitors can take a look around before booking.
One of the major things here is that Whilstlepunks invest heavily in the physical experience at their venues, when compared to many of their competitors. The tour validates this investment as it shows their experience is not just a shabby old workshop with a few axes from B&Q.
Helping people research care homes is another great use case for a virtual tour. The best care home might not be close. People move away from their loved ones, and when the time comes to consider a home, the best options might not be on your doorstep.
A virtual tour can provide a great introduction to exploring whether the quality and standards meet the level of your expectations, before taking yourself and your loved one to view the home in person.
Our client Athena use virtual tours for their homes, and you can view one of their homes here.
Hotels provide another great use case, where you can allow users to explore the rooms and facilities you provide, and really get a feel for the place before booking and travelling.
The physical shopping experience can start digitally. Like walking around a coffee shop to see if there are power points available, or to discover the best place to sit for a spot of people watching.
Restaurants sell on experience and atmosphere, not just their food. So allowing someone to walk around the venue and explore the size and layout provides a great way for potential customers to iron out any concerns before making a booking. Single photos can be deceptive, whereas a tour can give a fuller picture and how spaces related to each other.
Other retail opportunities could be clothes stores or even for those shopping for a kitchen.
Here’s Wickes with a tour of their kitchen show rooms. Providing someone with a feel for what they like and might want to look at before walking in, alongside an option to book a free design appointment, where someone can go in with a more solid idea of what they would like.
Whether you’re selling office facilities like WeWork, office design like AIS, or you want to share a tour of your office with a customer or potential team member, a virtual tour is a great way to do this.
We have an office in London, and we used their virtual tour before agreeing the terms. We explored the meeting rooms and also the space in and around the offices.
See our London Liverpool Street Station Office >
It’s become an expectation, particularly in certain industries, to provide a virtual tour. People want to explore and have a snoop around at their own leisure.
I personally spend time on Google Earth, walking the streets when I want to find something in a particular area. People will do this too, when it comes to exploring the inside of a property, a car, or an office space.
It depends how you look at it.
For properties for example, someone can look at everything in their own time and as such, may see things that they might not see on a quick glance around. If there was something negative you were trying to hide, the virtual tour might allow people to see this. It’s certainly offering a better experience for the user.
Visitor attractions might feel that they give too much away, and people might not actually come to see them. But they can actually help people plan their trips better and have a better experience on the day, as opposed to a flustered one.
There are many companies out there that now that provide virtual tour services. They do require someone to come and physically shoot your property, so finding someone fairly local might be key.
Many of the tour providers tend to use Matterport as the software that enables the tours, but there are 360 degree cameras and other software available, which can be easily embedded into your website.
Virtual tours generally don’t require any heavy development from your web agency. They’re usually embedded just as you’d add a Youtube video or a regular iframe. There may be some minor additional work from a performance perspective.
This week’s key takeaway, is simply to ask the question “would a virtual tour improve the overall digital experience on my website and increase conversions?” Whether that’s increased bookings or conversions for enquiries, or perhaps a decrease in time spent dealing with time wasters or leads that are a bad fit.
That’s a wrap for Swipe & Deploy #51. Join me next week when I’ll share another insight or piece of inspiration from around the web.
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