Impactful personalization is a lofty goal for every loyalty marketer, and this includes online video as well.
Content personalization is an integral component of an engaging customer experience. As technical barriers are disappearing, video personalization lets you build stronger relationships with your audience—including interactive elements that deliver two-way communication and data insights not possible with video alone.
Loyalty360 will host a webinar on Tuesday, March 6, a 1:00 p.m. EST titled, “Building Customer Loyalty with Personalized Video,” presented by HapYak.
Loyalty360 talked to Lisa Clark, VP of Marketing for HapYak, to get a sneak peek of the upcoming webinar.
Can you talk about the challenge of personalization and how video content can be an impactful customer experience?
Clark: Personalization is clearly the direction everyone is heading—and it’s going to accelerate as consumers increasingly expect, and demand, more personally relevant online experiences. It’s no surprise that among the about 200 video professionals that we surveyed recently, 70 percent said they are doing some degree of personalization—with 28 percent currently personalizing all their content and videos.
There’s lots of different ways to personalize video, and a lot of variety in the ways that organizations are approaching it. They may be producing data-driven video experiences that recommend content based on your interests, choose your adventure-style experiences that provide navigation paths to the content that matters most, or personalized video within emails. Another technique that we absolutely love is personalization and targeting of the thumbnail images used on those videos.
Can you offer an example of video and personalization working together?
Clark: E-commerce solutions do this exceptionally well, which is why interactive video is exploding in that sector and our business is seeing steady growth there. Shopping carts have so much technology, and we’ve all experienced it personally. Solutions seem to know who we are; they know what we’re doing and what interests us. And they suggest things that are actually helpful, generating 30-40 percent higher conversion on average.
What are the misconceptions about online video and its potential impact?
Clark: That you can get meaningful KPIs on video’s performance in a campaign from an online video player. Most video platforms deliver rudimentary marketing metrics, like the number of plays or the time when the viewer stopped watching. Marketers need far more data than that—data on where site visitors click, data on what they like, and data that helps move visitors into the funnel and toward conversion. Without this, it’s impossible to tie the video strategy and investments to any specific business outcome.
What is being done well with online video from a brand perspective and where do the challenges lie?
Clark: Video is being turned on its head with more “Web-like” experiences. Through interactivity either embedded or overlaid on the video, marketers, sellers, and educators can offer customers at all stages of the lifecycle more relevant, personalized, and actionable content paths for learning, communication, buying, and support. We’re seeing some great work across the spectrum of use cases. And with today’s interactive video platforms, just about anyone with basic web skills can create them.
Brands are also benefiting from what we call “activated users”—those who have previously interacted with video content—and the behavioral data about them gained from interactive video. Our research shows that activated users consume more video and are more likely to click on calls-to-action of subsequent sessions. Since interactive video lets you present new elements to a user at different times in the video, our most sophisticated clients are using timing and placement data in addition to audience segment to better understand conversion and outcomes. This kind of sophisticated data is one of the reasons interactive video platforms are taking off.
What do you foresee in the future regarding the use of online video by loyalty marketers?
Clark: There’s never been a better time to get started or get savvy on making video play a more powerful role in the customer lifecycle dialog. Video is the most effective and impactful way to engage an audience online. And as video technology evolves, it’s become easier than ever to create video-first content.
We see organizations moving rapidly “getting going” with interactive video to “getting good” at its application in loyalty programs with increasing sophistication in feature and data capture. We’ll see more video-centric marketing programs, not just one-off experiments.