Customer engagement is one of the main reasons why marketers make videos. Video interactivity helps companies increase video engagement to satisfy and retain customers.
Did you know increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%? This is reported by research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company.
How can you use video interactivity to drive customer engagement no matter your industry, B2B or B2C?
In this article, you’ll learn how to boost customer engagement with video interactivity. You will also discover what types of interactions are available for your audience and which ones work best in different situations.
What Is Video Interactivity?
Interactive videos help you engage with viewers. Video interactivity also drives them toward an action like signing up for email newsletters, renewing a SaaS subscription, downloading apps, or watching a webinar.
It’s important that these actions don’t feel forced on users. If they face a bad customer experience, then your video content will be useless.
Why?
Apart from brand reputation, lifetime value is a critical indicator to pay attention to when talking about customer engagement.
Common Video Interactivity Options
There are virtually unlimited ways users can interact with a video. Even back in the flash days, video players already were quite flexible. Nowadays, thanks to the use of HTML5, interactive videos offer a wide range of user interaction options.
Personalized Interactive Video Player: Call to Action (CTA) Example
These are some common video interactivity options to drive viewer engagement:
- Video Call to Action Buttons: These buttons or clickable elements allow viewers to click through content quickly without leaving the video. They’re great when making videos where people want to get straight into the product or service.
Buttons can be found in different parts of the interactive video. For example, at the end of the video prompt customers to a specific offer. Depending on the video player you use, you might have the option to visually display buttons selecting colors and sizes. - Survey and Polls: This type of interaction allows viewers to answer questions by clicking on images, texts, or visual content displayed within the video. It’s useful if you need feedback from your target market. If you run a UX study, the survey could ask anything from “what do you think about our new website design?” to “how often would you recommend us to friends?”
- Popup windows: Similar to what you’ll find on many websites, a video popup window appears over the top of the screen while the viewer watches the rest of the video.
- Dropdown menus: A dropdown menu is similar to a popover but it stays open until the visitor clicks outside of it. The advantage of using a dropdown menu is that you allow users to access more options that there is no need to show all the time on the video.
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Annotations and text overlay: Annotations are textual effects added to a video. Annotations help users understand what’s the video about. If you have a global audience, use localization to make them relevant to the viewer.
- Subtitles or captions: Similar to the annotations, subtitles help users know what’s been spoken or sung in a video. Often, this doesn’t offer much interactivity, but they do increase viewer engagement. If there is a chance your audience will play the videos without any sound (muted), subtitles are a best practice.
- Web forms: Web forms in videos are one of my favorite interactive elements. In-video web forms allow you to display a web form inside of a video. As a customer engagement strategy, they make complete sense because customers are already paying attention to the videos.
When should you add video interactivity?
Or where. In my experience, interactive elements meant to make customers react should be used and displayed depending on the level of customer engagement.
Generally, if you deal with a totally unengaged audience, the sooner the better. For example, at the beginning of the video.
If your target audience ore more like loyal customers or are expecting your video message, you may consider adding them at the end of the video and/or around 30-60% of the video timeline.
Why Video Interactivity Increases Customer Engagement
Interactive Video is becoming an increasingly popular marketing technique because it helps you keep your customer’s attention intact. This translates into higher engagement, especially if we talk about customer engagement based on personalization.
But also because interactive experiences are 100% connected to customer participation.
Let’s take a moment to think about how many people you know will watch a video only if it’s scrolling through the timeline. Probably not many.
There are plenty of people who will become bored with a video before it ends if they are not constantly gathering new input.
This is where interactivity comes in.
Interactive experiences constantly provide new input for the viewer. This is the perfect example of the input-output loop that video interactivity creates.
Think again… 🙂
Normal video content makes people stay on a website 20% longer than compared to an article. Videos also lead to 66% more shares than other types of content.
The more your customers interact with a video, the more likely they are to make a purchase because they are engaged.
Then, video interactivity is a powerful tool for engaging potential customers and encouraging them to buy or else explore the next step in the customer journey.
So, as a summary… What is the best type of media to use to produce this kind of engagement? Interactive video.
How businesses can use interactive video to boost engagement
There are unlimited ways to create interactive video experiences to boost customer engagement. It comes down to your business goals and the capabilities of the interactive video platform or software that serves these goals.
Let me share a few ways you can use interactive video software to help you boost engagement with customers:
- Help customers to understand complex products
- Guide customers to use your products in the right way
- Teach customers about new products or services with an interactive instructional video
- Gather customer feedback right from the video with in-video forms
- Create new forms of customer engagement (interactive contests, surveys, and more)
- Provide customers with support when they need it
- Create new ways for customers to pay (for example, they start watching the video and need to pay to continue watching it)
- Provide customers with new ways to shop online (with clickable video content)
- To explain technical information and documentation with video playlists.
- To explain an apology and provide the next step to customers
- if you are giving an address, go ahead and prompt the viewer to click on a map right from the video
- To help sales development reps (SDRs) engage with prospects at scale to book more calls
- Use interactive videos with personalization to decrease churn.
Increasing Customer Retention With Personalized Experiences
Delivering personalized experiences to customers is key to increase customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction leads to retention. The smart move for many brands out there is to invest in retention rather than focusing all their efforts on the acquisition of new customers.
As data-driven marketing advances, the use of big data to create granular segments and messages also impacts the way organizations do video marketing.
Let’s see why.
Many companies spend a lot of time on new customer acquisition, but far less on retaining the customers they have. A 2017 study found that customer retention rates are seven times more valuable than customer acquisition rates.
There are many ways to keep customers coming back for more. One is to create a personalized experience tailored to their needs.
How can personalization apply to video interactivity?
This can be accomplished first with a mindset update. Here is where most marketers, customer experience peers, and content creators find the biggest challenge.
Personalized interactive videos need to add value to the viewer. Otherwise, your conversions will go up the first couple of times. After that, the effectiveness will decrease.
A simple piece of advice: Make sure that the personalized content helps viewers understand a lot better what you have to say and that because of that they convert faster. Also, use segmentation strategies for personalized video marketing to target the right audience.
Once the right mindset is in place, the next general step is choosing the right tool for the job.
There are many interactive video software in the market. When talking about video personalization, tools like Pirsonal Player are focused on one-to-one marketing communications at scale.
Also, you can use artificial intelligence to personalize your interactions with customers with tailored content.
AI can be programmed to learn about customer preferences over time by studying their online browsing behaviors.
This way, the AI can suggest content that might interest that particular customer. Many of the largest retailers are using these insights to tailor product recommendations to individual customers.
Closing thoughts
Constant and timely customer interaction is key to increase satisfaction and retain customers. What the most successful brands have in common is that they focus on delivering immersive experiences that add value to the customer.
Of course, higher customer engagement across your organization doesn¡t come just because of your videos. There are many baby steps to improve engagement with customers long term. With a healthy scenario, video marketing will notably work.
Video interactivity helps you invest in customer engagement in a way today’s audiences understand. This applies to B2B or B2C customer it.
From educational videos to saas onboarding videos or sales prospecting videos, video interactivity gives viewers a digital experience that helps them advance in the customer journey.
