There’s the technical definition of personalized marketing: the collection and analysis of prospect data to implement an enterprise marketing strategy for custom segments
And then there’s the dynamic one: using data to captivate viewers, boost engagement, drive conversions, and improve customer loyalty through personalized video triggered in real-time.
The first explains the process, but the second gets you excited, right? Personalized videos have the same effect on your viewers.
Why is a personalized video strategy such a critical part of your brand’s marketing strategy? Consider this:
- A whopping 91% of video viewers are more likely to buy from a brand that recognizes them by name, knows their purchase history, and/or makes recommendations based on past purchases.
- 75% of late-stage prospects who received a personalized video become closed deals.
- The average retention rate for personalized videos is 35% higher than for non-personalized ones.
Yet the digital experience still falls short of customer expectation, with more than half saying they expect companies to anticipate their needs and make relevant suggestions, according to an Accenture survey.
So how can you meet this demand?
How Video Personalization Works
Building marketing campaigns for a specific set of target accounts takes customer attraction, engagement, and conversion to a whole new level. Like website personalization, video personalization uses data sources and triggers to serve up highly relevant content to your audience. Digital and automation tools help scale this personalized content, keeping the brand-customer relationship feeling fresh and human.
Consider the approach used by major brands like Netflix and Amazon. From email to website, they relate to individual audience members by tailoring experiences to personal preferences and needs. Your company can do the same.
There are two main types of video personalization, 1-to-many and 1-to-1.
What is 1-to-many Video Personalization?
Many companies have used personalized videos in their outbound email marketing campaigns to speak directly to their targeted prospects at scale. Marketing automation tools are used to identify target audience members and create segmented marketing lists. The resulting emails often include event invitations, holiday greetings, and notification of new products and services, but they’re tailored to a customer’s expressed interests and needs.
These 1-to-many video communications are an efficient and scalable way to build personal relationships with customers. They’ll save you time while making customers feel cared for. But they differ from 1-to-1 video personalizations in a crucial way: they reflect the company’s activities and efforts, not the unique activities and interests of the prospect or customer.
What is 1-to-1 Video Personalization?
When you want to act in real-time to deliver customized, multi-channel experiences, 1-to-1 personalization is the optimal video solution. It uses all available first and third-party behavioral data (MAP, CRM, OVP) to appeal to customers on an individual basis.
After you collect and combine information such as browsing history and site behaviors, geolocation, shopping preferences, and other demographic and psychological data, use the power of automation to deliver the most personally relevant and dynamic content experience.
The result for viewers? Customers feel they are being listened to and are more likely to behave in a way that aligns with your video campaign goals.
The payoff for your brand? Expect to see improved customer retention, recurring sales, and referrals.
5 Types of Video Personalization You Can Use for Your Business
While one-to-many video personalization can be highly effective—what user doesn’t love seeing their name? Today, we want to talk about the types of 1-to-1 communications you can create using your marketing automation platform (MAP).
1. Create a Rapport and Drive a Response by Identifying Your Viewer
Adding personalization such as the recipient’s name to video communications creates an instant connection, but this can be done on-the-fly, without having to be part of a larger campaign.
Quick, personal messages are ideal for all stages of the customer’s journey. Whether you use them for cold calling, client onboarding, sending personalized thank-you messages, or forwarding important documents, they’re a fresh way to deliver relevant and useful information to your viewers. Interactive templates allow you to customize 1-to-1 personalized videos quickly and easily.
2. Provide a Superior Content Experience through Branching
Branching and choose-your-own-adventure videos are one of the most popular types of personalized video experiences. These videos let your customers self-select the most relevant path, while allowing you to collect and store real-time data, that can be used for future video creative and optimization.
These data-rich experiences create valuable opportunities for your brand to boost engagement on follow-up campaigns.
3. Measure Interest and Increase Leads through Custom Calls-to-Action
By integrating your marketing automation platform with your video analytics, you can easily create personalized CTAs displayed to a unique individual at just the right time. Leave the guesswork behind and automate the process. In fact, personalized video CTAs perform over 200% better than basic CTAs!
4. Create an Instant Feedback Loop by Polling Viewers
Want to get more specific information from your audience segments? Of course you do! Unfortunately, traditional analytics aren’t enough. You can’t decipher why and how users behave the way they do. For example, did the viewer watch the video again because they loved the content? or because they didn’t understand it the first time?
What if you could just ask? Polls and quizzes break the ice and get viewer feedback. Integrate your interactive video with your MAP so you can serve different questions based upon job title, industry, and any other previously collected form data.
5. Increase Conversions and Upsells with Shoppable Video
Today’s retail thought leaders are using shoppable ecommerce videos to differentiate themselves from the competition while successfully engaging digitally savvy audiences.Shoppable videos let you take advantage of the moment when viewers cross the line from casual interest to invested need.
Interactive ecommerce videos can inspire a whole new approach to how you present your products and services. Imagine this: with interactivity you can use things like shopping cart abandonment and previous purchase data to create more relevant content suggestions in-video.
Successful marketers don’t just identify communication trends, they cultivate them. Furthermore, today’s sophisticated video marketers aren’t content with conjectures or hunches – they want to know what’s working and what’s not. Video interactivity and personalization provides the deeper data and analytics necessary to engage in personalized campaigns and improve overall marketing results.
Using highly personalized information, brands can drive higher video engagement that can then be connected to positive business outcomes. But, keep testing! As with all campaigns, personalized video should be monitored and optimized on a continual basis.
Luckily technology is catching up to help give viewers what they expect and marketers what they demand. It’s easier than ever to create personalized video at scale, generating the unforgettable personal connections vital to business growth.
This post was originally published on client site, HapYak, as A Practical Guide to Personalized Video Strategy (+5 Interactivity Types for Your Brand’s Videos) in October 2018.
