Personalized Videos Examples

Personalization is the rock on which good marketing and sales strategies are based. Personalized videos have become more than just a marketing and sales trend but the tool brands from different industries use to deeply engage with their prospects, leads, and customers. My goal today is to share and explain personalized videos examples that will inspire, educate and empower your customer experience strategy and conversions.

To understand the personalized videos examples I’ve chosen for you, first, we need to understand a few concepts that will inspire you and help you create your own strategy, not only for dynamic videos but for any type of personalized marketing initiative.

Segmentation

If personalization is the rock, segmentation is the lighthouse of any great marketing personalization strategy and one of the main reasons why personalized video marketing works so well. It connects all the dots when delivering the right customer experience, with the right message at the right time, towards the right individual. It takes into consideration the customer journey, your customers’ expectations, concerns, desires and any previous interaction with your organization. There is even more: Any potential interactions thanks to the help of AI or by simply analyzing your buyer personas in light of the information you access to in real-time.

Segmentation is the first step in determining who your personalized videos should target. Segmentation helps you know which groups exist so you can later focus on those when creating a personalized video pilot and then scaling the initiative once you have accomplished your business goals. You can segment your audience in real-time, based on specific filters, usually applied in marketing automation workflows, or you can also apply this segmentation when creating personalized videos on a batch or bulk. In both cases, you should have previously studied your target audience and define who they are.

One of the first steps when segmenting your audience is to create subsets or subgroups with common characteristics. Think about the following concepts:

1. Demographics: Demographic segmentation is one of the most commonly used forms of segmentation. Analyze who they are based on criteria such as age, income, number of family members, race, gender, occupation, education, and nationality.
2. Skills and knowledge: The things your prospects, users, and customers know and how they apply this knowledge.
3. Things your target audience like about your products
4. Behavioral activities: Analyse the behaviors and decision-making processes. For example, think about their lifestyle, how, when and why they buy and more.
5. Psychographics: This takes into account how your target audience thinks and divides markets according to lifestyle, personality traits, values, opinions, and interests of consumers.
6. How your target audience uses your product: Do they use your product like you initially expected? When do they use it? With other people?
7. How they buy your products: Similar to the behavioral activities, looking at their processes, how much they spend, when they buy, from what device, if they buy based on a special promotion, and more.

Today I’ll share with you some simple and sophisticated personalized videos examples along with some tips to create custom videos for each and every types of clients taking into consideration where they are at in the customer journey. As you’ll see, personalized videos work even better when they work in harmony with other types of dynamic content. This is, personalized images, personalized landing pages, personalized calls-to-action and more.

Personalized Video Segmentation: Three Important Aspects

This Investopedia article proposes that the segmentation of your clients generally features these three aspects:

1. Homogeneous. Here, you club together with your clients based on their common needs and create a set of personalized videos that address those needs. But these personalized videos go a crucial step beyond that. They also include enough personalization to resonate with each member of that common group. And instead of painstakingly crafting these dynamic videos, you can automate the process by feeding the Pirsonal platform with client data. For example, your custom videos could address each client by name, carry their picture, mention the company name or talk about previous purchases they made from you.
2. Distinctive. Each client within the common needs group is also a unique entity. These differentiators could be anything from their age, their designation and department or tenure to the car they drive, the baseball team they root for, their persona and their interests. A B2B marketer can intelligently tap into such data to automatically create personalized videos that account for the individual differences among their clients. Of course, care needs to be taken that the personalized videos do not come across as intrusive.
3. Reaction. This one pertains to how your clients react to the custom videos. Some reactions will be predictable and common across the entire group, while other reactions might differ from client to client. Your marketing strategy could be to design the interactive elements, especially the call to action, to optimize these reactions and perhaps even turn them into potential leads for the sales team. The Pirsonal platform makes it easy to add interactivity to your personalized videos and tracks the reaction from each of your clients. Take a look at the Pirsonal Player to learn more about this.

What matters is creating the personalized experience your prospects and customer need in order to make them react. Sometimes you won’t even use personalized videos but you’ll engage with your target audience with contextualized plain emails or even a short SMS. Why? Because the priority is not creating the personalized videos because you have access to a platform that can create them automatically, but creating and delivering the message each and every person needs in order to convert.

A Segmentation Example: A Personalized Email With A Personalized Video

Sometimes you’ll use all your arsenal. Take a look at the personalized email example below. It combines a variety of personalized content to grab Kevin’s attention in a unique way using the augmented buyer persona approach.

Now, take a look at the same email through the personalization eyes…

Creating a personalized email like this can be demanding since you really need to be in your customer’s brain, but in the end, we are not here for average conversions, aren’t we? Did you know that email segmentation delivers 73% higher revenue per recipient than non-segmented campaigns?

Key Segmentation Questions To Create Great Personalized Emails With Personalized Videos

An easy way to segment your target audience for your next personalized email campaign with personalized videos is to simply answer these questions:

• What data can you actually use? Think outside the box. Don’t focus on a Name (only). Let’s say your organization is a hotel with a focus on guest experience. If you are planning on using personalized video in travel and hospitality marketing to increase the revenue per guest, everything counts: number of nights, number of people in the reservation, number of adults, number of kids, location of the hotel, dates (are there any activities?), has this guest used a coupon? 
• Do they share any demographic similarities?
• Have you noticed any behavioral patterns?
• What communication channel does each individual prefer? For example, in this customer journey case study you’ll see how this financial services brand shares the personalized videos with their customer either by email or by SMS based on the selected communication preferences. You’ll also learn how they increase the after-sales engagement by 20% when using personalized videos.

If you want to learn more about how to create personalized emails to increase your marketing conversions, here is a video tutorial I recorded based on the images shared above:

This is what we call “evoke a reaction”.

Personalized Marketing and Individualized Marketing

A whitepaper by IDC called “Can Machines be Creative? How Technology is Transforming Marketing Personalization and Relevance” (PDF) brings some light to the subject. They interviewed 459 marketing executives and found out that 34% of them were applying personalized marketing techniques to a moderate extent. About 32% of them said that they were personalizing their marketing communications to a greater extent. However, only 10% had completely personalized their digital communications.

Based on my experience, one of the main reasons for this is because personalized marketing requires time and expertise. Using technology can also make your life easier, but it is not a requirement in some cases.

To understand why personalized videos are so successful, we need to take a closer look at human behavior. One of the most obvious choices a consumer has is to, basically, pay attention to whatever a brand is talking about at any given moment. Here is when things like email opening ratio, video engagement ratio or net promoter score are crucial and why analytics and customer experience tools have risen in the last couple of years.

But are personalized marketing and individualized marketing the same concepts?

Not really.

To keep it simple, marketing personalization is about leveraging the data we have available about someone — you name it, a customer, a prospect, a lead or your next-door neighbor — to connect with that person through custom messages and/or offerings. Nowadays, talking about marketing personalization also involves technology and “translated” data. By “translated” I mean information that is not just textual but contextual, transformed into something your segmented audiences will understand.

Individualized marketing takes a different approach. Marketing individualization takes place when the individual you want to target, your brand and you as a marketer are aligned. When talking about individualization, everything has to do with a deeper contextualized marketing.

Both, personalized and individualized marketing, can be data-driven, but individualization is more related to your target’s context. You can either use Artificial Intelligence or apply old-school brainstorming exercises to find emotional triggers that will make each and every individual react. What matters is that you are able to talk to each individual in a way that makes sense to each one of them, automatically.

From a market perspective, you’ll find that the majority of marketers don’t really differentiate between personalized or individualized marketing, which has forced technology companies to generalize the term “personalized marketing”.

Personalized Video Marketing Automation Workflow

Creating the best personalized videos will require a lot of thinking and a few iterations. In fact, I usually recommend at least three iterations within a 6-month period of time, where you are taking a closer look at the personalized video analytics and standard email marketing performance to then know what to change.

A recommended step is creating a personalized video workflow that will help you understand what dynamic information should be used, what calls to action need to be presented and the path that is needed to create each personalized video and email, all this based on your buyer personas.

The following video will also help you understand how the personalized videos examples I’ll talk about later in this article work. Please take a few minutes to watch this video, as it shows the different dynamic scenes and customized data to automatically create the custom videos:

If you want to take a closer look at the document shown in the video, make sure to download it free from here.

Personalized Videos Examples

Now let’s cover specific personalized videos examples from different industries and use cases. These are real-life personalized videos, automatically created either as part of a marketing automation process or batch operation. Most of these videos followed the baby-steps to creating a successful personalized video project, from a pilot to a fully scaled campaign. Some of these videos havening rendered in our cloud, creating a custom version for each individual based on the marketing trigger and dynamic data received, others have been created using player-based personalization, allowing faster real-time rendering since the personalization takes place in the browser as a layer.

These personalized videos examples helped our recognition as one of the top 10 martech startups in 2018. These are real rendered videos. This means that if any of these brands needed to engage with 6,000 individuals with personalized videos, the Pirsonal platform then created 6,000 video files.

A Succesful Customer Journey With Personalized Videos In the Financial Services Industry

Context

Customer loyalty is still a top priority for brands (41%). Think about the customer lifetime value. Now imagine an auto brand leasing their vehicles. We can do even better. Imagine BMW Financial Services. One of their top priorities is to keep a customer for the longest period of time. In the end, they sell a financial product, so a loyal client is not really “buying a car”, is “buying a house”… Or two.

But buyers change all the time, and this is something to take into consideration when strategizing. For example, in the car industry the repurchase frequency changes based on key factors like the age of the customer (older people keep their cars for longer) or income (higher income translates into earlier repurchase or re-lease).

This is why gathering customer data is extremely important, and using that data smartly is even more urgent. This is how brands become and remain relevant. By contextualizing their offering, messaging and channels to the individual buyer.

Download this customer journey with personalized video marketing case study to know more about a similar use case applied by a European bank, which in this case increased after-sales engagement by 20% using personalized video marketing.

Challenge

In the personalized video example above, BMW Financial Services engages with new customers that have signed a leasing contract. Until now, clients would receive an email or SMS with the contract information in a PDF, which was proven to not be efficient in terms of engagement since it was hard to understand.

Dynamic information

These are the main media objects that are automatically personalized:

Personalized voice-over: Each personalized video uses the customer’s name and different types of audio customizations to engage with the viewer. In this case, the voice-over is studio-recorded, using a professional actor aligned with the brand’s tone.

Personalized scenes: As you can see in the personalized video example from above, the car model is personalized to each client in the first scene. For this, our partner agency (OBC) created a great intro scene where the viewer sees the car he has signed for, increasing the levels of engagement from the first impression. This brand uses different scene structures, adapting the message depending on the communication channel (email or SMS).

Personalized texts: The customized video uses dynamic texts, like the number of miles that each client can consume per year, as well as the monthly payments, options at the end of the contract and the number of fees that the viewer needs to pay.

Personalized images: The dynamic video also uses tailored images in the background, which are combined with alpha-channel videos for a more integrated visual effect.

Personalized call-to-action: In the production personalized videos, this brand uses the Pirsonal Player, that allows adding personalized calls-to-action to the video, with custom links and personalized messages.

What triggers these personalized videos

To create this personalized video as part of an automated process, the marketing team for this financial services brand uploads a CSV to our partner agency’s intranet, which at the same time is connected to Pirsonal’s API. When the document is uploaded, the Pirsonal platform automatically creates a video for each client. When the video is created, they use our integration with marketing automation tool ActiveCampaign to send an email to the contacts or our integration with Clicksend to instantly send an SMS, based on the user’s preferences.

This brand uses the Pirsonal Player, which displays the videos that are automatically rendered across devices. It also uses a custom landing page created by our partner agency, powered by Wordpress and by our Wordpress Plugin to make it easy to use our player within these landing pages and custom, anonymized URLs.

The following image shows this process, which consists of three stages:

1. CSV is uploaded.
2. Personalized videos are automatically created.
3. Each client receives a personalized email including a custom URL pointing at a video landing page.

Type of marketing segmentation:

This personalized video example uses a distinctive segmentation where each client within the common needs group is also a unique entity. For example, this is accomplished by using the car model as part of the video intro, which instantly engages with the viewer.

Accelerating Sales and Converting More Leads with Personalized Videos

Context

Flight Centre Travel Group accelerates its sales process by using personalized video marketing powered by Pirsonal. Every time a lead requests information, the brand automatically renders a personalized video, a personalized landing page and a custom in- video call-to-action based on the information provided by the lead such as name, the reason to travel or destination, which makes these videos and emails totally relevant to each individual.

Customers expect to see personalized touch-points as the outcome of a fluent conversation. A real conversation takes into consideration the context, where both sides do their best to understand what is relevant to the other and how this affects them. Used wisely, this makes personalized video marketing an engagement machine.