After helping launch millions of data-driven videos for clients in a range of industries — everything from utilities to travel — we’ve learned a few things that hold true for nearly every campaign.
And today, we’re going to share that with you. Ready? Buckle up. There’s a lot to cover, but don’t worry: It’s going to be fun. (We’ve got lots of videos for you.)
Tips for Using Customer Data in Personalized Videos
First off, data. It powers the videos you create, changing the story for each one so it’s relevant for that individual. But you need to know how to personalize in a way that’s meaningful.
Here’s some advice for how to personalize your video to make it as effective as possible.
Tip #1: Personalize Early
A lot of times, this can mean putting the customer’s first name in the first few seconds of the video. You want to signal to them right away that this video is different from all the other generic brand videos they’ve seen in the past. Early personalization significantly improves engagement.
Tip #2: Personalize Throughout the Customer Journey
People love personalization and love video. We’re human, after all, and having something bespoke, just for you, is pretty special.
We’ve learned that using Personalized Videos to manage customer interactions at key moments in the customer journey, like onboarding or renewals, is a great way to keep customers informed and excited about a product or service.
Tip #3: Use the Data To Drive Real Personalization
While it’s nice to hear your name or see relevant useful information in a video, true personalization is so much more than that.
Every video tells a story, and that story should change depending on the viewer. It isn’t enough to tell the same story to every viewer, simply replacing data points like names, numbers or purchase history. The data should drive the story.
Take gaming as an example. A player with record-breaking achievements has a substantially different story to tell than one who’s struggled to advance through a game. Or think about banking. A viewer with large sums of money in their account probably wants to hear about investment options, while someone with $50 in their checking account may be more interested in overdraft protection.
Dynamic scene selection lets you easily add in scenes relevant to specific customers. Here’s a split-screen showing how these videos begin the same but then branch with different scenes and different video lengths depending on the player.
Let the data drive the narrative and present each viewer with the story that’s relevant to them — it’s the most effective way to use data.
Tip #4: Personalize With Purpose
Over-personalization can be unnecessarily complex and tedious, while name-only personalization leaves a lot of value on the table. Marketers should think about their goals when creating a data-driven video. Then focus on using the data that supports those goals.
For example, if you want a future student to imagine themselves on campus, maybe the personalization you need is simply adding their name to a dorm room, jersey or welcome banner.
Tip #5: Focus on Available Data
Often, some data points are easier to access than others. Starting the personalization journey with available and relevant data ensures fast time to market.
From there, additional data and personalization can be added over time. Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.
Tip #6: Think Lean-Forward
Video is traditionally a lean-back medium, but we’ve found that adding lean-forward elements such as CTAs or interactivity can really drive ROI.
One of our gaming clients drove a 66% uplift in sales by adding a CTA to their video, and our customers in service industries like mortgages or telecommunications have seen drops of up to 73% in call center volumes by leveraging in-video interactivity.
As an example, this customer support video shows how Personalized Video with interactivity can offload customer care to a digital medium.
Tip #7: Choose Real-Time for Seamless CX
This is a tip not everyone knows. Extracting the relevant data for your video in real time ensures that data is always relevant, not stale.
As an added perk, it also saves any unnecessary rendering of videos that nobody will watch. Videos are only created once the viewer clicks “play.”
How Do You Create a Personalized Marketing Video?
Here’s the short answer: If you want to do this at scale, you’ll need a Personalized Video platform like Idomoo.
You can combine data with video on your own or with the help of an agency to create a few data-driven videos if you’re doing a very small campaign. But creating thousands or millions of videos manually? Forget it.
At Idomoo, the process for deploying data to personalize your video essentially involves creating a master template with complex logic to determine who sees what in their final video. So if you’re a new customer versus a longtime customer, for example, you’ll see something different. That dynamic field might be text or an image or a video-in-video. You might even see alternate scenes or have scenes added or removed. It’s all based on who you are as the customer. It’s personal.
Here’s an example that shows a customized quote.
Then the videos are rendered either in batches in advance or in real time. We support both, and our platform allows rendering in up to 100x real time.
This is a pretty big deal when it comes to the customer experience. You don’t want your customer waiting 3 minutes for a 3-minute video to load. Real-time generation means their video is available at the click of a button and always uses the right data, just like it should.
The Right Data for Personalized Video
The specific data varies by use case. An effective Personalized Video explaining mortgage forbearance relies on very different data from a video driving social buzz around a new video game.
However, some commonalities do exist.
You need to have clean data
If you don’t have the right data, you won’t get the right video. But you don’t need reams of data to create a Personalized Video.
Start with what you have. Use their first name. It adds a human touch. Then include what’s relevant for them. That could be their statement balance, loyalty points earned, days until renewal, etc.
And you can share different information based on who they are or their past behavior, such as the plan they’ve purchased or a favorite product or service they use. Start small and scale up from there.
Pro tip: Have an app? That’s a great source of data, and users love getting their year in review.
If you don’t have enough personal data, leverage other data sources
Maybe you don’t have a ton of customer data. That’s not a deal-breaker. You can enrich your video with contextual data or even by asking the viewer for their input.
People can answer questions or share info about their needs and interests that lets them generate a new video based on that information — like a custom quote — and it also helps you understand more about your customer.
It’s also worth mentioning here that when you do work with a Personalized Video provider, you’ll want to make sure they have the necessary security credentials to work with data.
How To Deliver Your Personalized Video
Personalized Videos can be delivered by almost any method: SMS, in-app, email, MMS or even web. There’s virtually no limitation as to where and how viewers can experience their Personalized Videos.
Email is a favorite method for many of our clients, and the data shows it’s still the most preferred channel for all customers, though it’s dropping year over year.
What Marketing Objectives Work Best With Personalized Videos?
There are so many, but we’ve found that the best uses are those that have clear and measurable goals.
Sales
Video is a storytelling medium that affords endless opportunities for contextual cross-selling or upselling. This can be extremely effective, as we’ve seen our clients in different verticals achieve sales uplifts of up to 11x using Personalized Video.
Retention
Brands know their pain points. It could be early churn or mishandled insurance claims or frustrating calls to the call center.
Using Personalized Video as a way to provide an engaging, visual experience can often turn a pain point into a wow moment and drive impressive uplifts in retention such as a 38% reduction in 90-day churn.
Personalized Video is also ideal for early interactions in the brand-customer relationship, such as onboarding. You can clarify program details and set a warm, personal tone that makes that person know they’re not just a number.
Brand Advocacy
You can create Personalized Videos with your top customers or a targeted group of influencers to encourage social sharing. We’ve seen Personalized Video campaigns that include a personalized referral code where the customer’s friends can sign up, and both get a small incentive.
Empowering customers to become creators can turn them into the most effective brand ambassadors. We’ve user-created videos drive 2x the engagement over videos created for them.
Self-Serve Customer Care
The pandemic has hit call centers hard, as anybody that had the misfortune to call one during recent months can attest to. Personalized Video can be used to offload unnecessary calls, keeping customers happy and informed and driving down call center volumes by up to 73%. (This has been especially effective in the insurance and mortgages space.) One example of this is below.
What Makes Personalized Video So Effective?
Personalized Videos do something most marketing communications don’t.
They don’t just share info or offers. They dazzle. They surprise and delight the customer with a 1:1 connection, in a place where they’re not used to seeing it — a video.
Maybe it’s a personalized recap video. We’ve seen customers so excited to get their year-in-review video that they’ll sign up to make sure the brand sends them one next year.
You can get pretty creative with this. The campaign we did with adidas (featuring personalized race footage) and Orangetheory (with a soundtrack set to customers’ workout BPM) are 2 of our favorites.
Or maybe it’s an onboarding video that makes them feel personally welcomed to a new program or service. These are the moments that define customer experience and drive brand loyalty. Generating your video in real time and seeing yourself in the story — it’s pretty magical.
Next Gen Videos can also be interactive.
That’s a game-changer for the video marketing industry. If you know video marketing, you know it has its flaws. Videos are hard to produce. They get dated quickly. They’re not interactive. They’re not contextual for the user. But interactivity, up-to-the-minute relevance and contextualization are all things we’ve come to expect as internet users. Why should video be any different?
Now, it’s not. You can connect your video to live data feeds, whether that’s the weather or your retail inventory, so it continually updates in real time. No extra post-production work needed. That’s a new way to look at the ROI of video marketing because you can have one video that you use again and again. Combine this with personalization, and your video is always relevant and up-to-date.
On the interactivity front, we’re talking more than just CTA clicks to a website — though that’s possible, too. You can create immersive shoppable scenes where the viewer can jump from their video to your online store. They can click in the video to do any number of actions, from prompting an email to leaping ahead to a different scene.
And, something that’s never been done before, they can customize and create their own video, no extra software needed. Right from the player, the customer can change any fields you designate. So let them design their own product, updating colors and adding monograms. Let them upload photos from their recent trip or experience and brag about it to their friends.
The kicker? When they share their UGC video with their friends, they can share a customizable link so their friends can update it, too. This boosts virality and is another way your video can live on beyond its original form.
How Does Setup Work for Personalized Videos?
Video scenes are created just like they would be for any video. Have some video content already created? Great! You can repurpose those scenes as long as they fit with the new story you’re looking to build.
Don’t have an in-house studio or feel like hiring an agency? Our AI video creator can generate scenes for you based on your brand DNA, and those scenes can be personalized, just as we did in the AI video below.
In post-production, once the master video is created, it’s exported to our platform using our Adobe After Effects plugin.
The scenes are set up on our platform in the form of a decision tree, not a linear progression of scenes as happens with legacy video. This lets us generate completely different videos for every single customer. For example, a recent campaign for one of the top insurers in the world had over 50,000 permutations of scenes.
Logic determines who sees what scenes. Here are two examples:
- A new customer gets a welcome scene while an existing customer may skip that scene.
- A customer with a high balance in their checking account may see a scene offering her investment options while a customer with a low balance may be offered overdraft protection.
Now the campaign is ready to go live.
Personalized Video thumbnails are distributed to customers via a range of methods: email, in-app, SMS, etc. From a user’s perspective, it looks like they were sent a video, but they weren’t. It’s a personalized thumbnail.
Once the customer clicks “play,” the magic happens. An API call containing the key data points required for this specific video is sent to our cloud and a Personalized Video for that client is rendered on the spot, in real time.
So for the examples above, the API call would tell our cloud if the customer is new or existing and what their account balance is. Based on that data, our platform selects the correct scenes, populates those scenes with all the relevant data points, and renders the video right there and then.
What can you personalize? Text, images, video-in-video, voiceover, visualizations — pretty much anything you can include in a video.
It might sound pretty technical, but our platform does the heavy lifting. When you use our platform, there’s no coding required. It’s an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that lets you easily create and launch dynamic campaigns.
What Makes Idomoo’s Platform Better Than Others?
It’s a fair question. There are a few reasons we’re the world’s leading Personalized Video provider.
Here are our biggest differentiators.
Ease of Use
This is a huge one. As you can see from the process above, there’s a lot of room for complexity, and in the past this was a major barrier for adoption.
However, we’ve worked diligently to make our platform seamless and intuitive. As a result, our clients can be in market with mass-scale campaigns within days instead of months.
Use our AI video creator, and making the video creative can be lightning fast too. One of our clients, Huuuge Games, recently wrapped their campaign — from idea to finish Personalized Video — in 4 days flat.
Cinematic Quality at Scale
Other solutions have a clear tradeoff between quality and scale.
- If you want high-quality creative at very low volumes, you can work with a creative agency.
- If you want to deploy high volumes of videos and don’t care too much about the quality, you can work with our direct competitors who use overlays, lower resolution and other methods that sacrifice quality and creative flexibility for volume.
We are the only platform that has reinvented video rendering from the ground up and built our own GPU-based video rendering engine that is capable of rendering at up to 100x real time, even at cinematic quality.
This is critical especially for industries that demand quality and operate at scale, such as gaming.
Truly Open Platform
We offer our clients the option to work directly on our Next Generation Video Platform or let us do the work for a white-glvoe approach. Self-serve clients can access all of our platform capabilities in a more agile and cost-effective model.
The Right Way To Personalize Video
Personalized Video isn’t just about adding a name to the screen — it’s about using data to tell stories that truly connect. When the right message reaches the right person in a way that’s engaging and human (i.e., video), honestly, it feels a little bit magical.
Start with the data you have, focus on what matters most to your customers, and let smart technology handle the rest. With the right platform, Personalized Video can scale across your organization, letting every team leverage the power of data-driven video for personal interactions throughout the customer lifecycle.
Inspired yet? Let us show you how it works.
