You’ve just opened your email to find yet another generic marketing message. Yawn, right?
But wait – this one’s different. It’s a video, and it’s addressing you by name. The speaker knows your recent purchases and suggests products you’ve been eyeing. Suddenly, you’re intrigued. What you’re seeing is personalized video marketing at work.
It is so hard for a business to stand out today because, simply put, the landscape is competitive and brutal if you don’t employ the best marketing strategies. When we covered video marketing statistics before, it stood out that 91% of consumers find videos helpful for making purchase decisions. Plus, 91% of businesses now use a stronger video marketing strategy.
But not just any video will do. Personalized videos do so much better than generic videos.
In this article, we will tell you why you need a personalized video marketing strategy, how it works, some examples to learn from, and how to use Zight’s webcam and screen recorder app to implement your strategy.
Let’s get into it.
What is Personalized Video?
Video personalization involves two key things: collecting customer data and using it in a video to address your viewers.
So, if we put it simply, personalized video is an innovative marketing strategy that combines the power of video content with individual customer data to create uniquely tailored experiences. It’s a conversational marketing approach that goes beyond traditional one-size-fits-all online video marketing by adapting content to each viewer.
You can personalize videos at various points in the customer journey to enhance engagement and conversion. Here are a few optimal times to use personalized video marketing campaigns:
- Onboarding: Welcome new customers with a video that introduces them to your services or products
- Milestone celebrations: Acknowledge customer loyalty on anniversaries or after reaching certain milestones with your brand
- Product launches: Send personalized videos to introduce new products tailored to the interests of specific customer segments
- Special offers and promotions: Target individual customers with offers that match their previous purchasing behaviors
- Thank you messages: After a purchase, send a personalized video thanking the customer, possibly including details related to their specific order
- Follow-ups and updates: Keep customers informed about their orders or updates to services they use with personalized video messages
How Does Personalized Video Marketing Work?
You’re probably wondering how to actually create personalized videos for sales. Here’s the breakdown:
Start by gathering insights from your CRM, email interactions, website behavior, and social media engagement. Next, segment your audience based on this data. Maybe you’re grouping by industry, company size, or stage in the buying journey. Each segment gets its own tailored approach.
When creating your personalized video, include these essential elements:
- A personalized introduction addressing the viewer by name or company. Start with a warm greeting that immediately captures attention. For example, “Hi Sarah, I noticed your team at TechCorp has been exploring cloud security solutions…”
- Content that speaks directly to their pain points or interests. Reference specific challenges they’re facing or goals they’re pursuing. For example, “I understand your priority is to enhance data protection while maintaining operational efficiency…”
- A showcase of relevant products or services. Demonstrate how your offering solves their unique problems. “Our CloudGuard platform has helped similar firms reduce security breaches by 70% while cutting IT overhead…”
- A tailored call-to-action that aligns with their buyer’s journey. Guide them to the next step based on their current stage. For early-stage prospects, you might say, “I’d love to schedule a quick demo to show you how CloudGuard addresses your security concerns.”
- A brief but impactful success story. Share a case study of a similar client who benefited from your solution. “Just last quarter, FinanceHub implemented our system and saw a 50% decrease in security incidents…”
Benefits of Personalized Video
Do you need to personalize a video for your customer? Whether for sales, customer support, or anything else, here are the benefits of using personalized video communication:
1. Better Customer Engagement
Personalized videos offer a tailored approach that naturally draws viewers in as they see information specifically pertinent to them. For example, a video addressing the customer by name and referencing their recent purchases or browsing history immediately feels more compelling than generic marketing.
As a result, you can enjoy higher view rates, longer watch times, and increased interaction with the content, such as clicks on embedded calls-to-action.
2. Improved Retention
When personalized, information becomes more contextually relevant and easier for the brain to process and store. Customers are more likely to remember details directly related to their experiences or needs. Think of a personalized product demonstration video – if it showcases features that solve a customer’s problem, it will be far more memorable than a general overview.
Such improved retention will always lead to better brand recall, more informed purchasing decisions, and an increased likelihood of customer referrals.
3. Enhanced Customer Experience
A personalized video message demonstrates that a company values its customers as individuals, not just as anonymous consumers. So, when you address them by name and talk about their preferences, past interactions, or known challenges, your videos create a sense of understanding and empathy.
It is also one way to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty – we’ve also seen before how a lack of good communication and engagement threatens customer satisfaction.
4. Higher Conversion Rates
With a personalized video campaign, you will showcase the most relevant products, highlight the most appealing features, or present the most convincing arguments based on the customer’s profile. It is an effective customer experience strategy that lets you help customers make a decision faster and, thus, improve your conversion rates.
You can also consider incorporating personalized videos in email marketing campaigns to increase open and click-through rates. Emails with personalized video content are more likely to be opened and interacted with, as they stand out in crowded inboxes and offer a direct and engaging way to communicate with recipients!
5. Scalable One-to-One Communication
When you use personalized videos, you can create individualized content for thousands or even millions of customers simultaneously – also called personalization at scale.
This way, you can bring the benefits of personal communication – such as relevance, engagement, and emotional connection – to mass marketing efforts. Your company can maintain a personal touch, even as it grows, to bridge the gap between efficient large-scale outreach and the significance of one-on-one interactions.
10 Examples of Personalized Video Marketing
Here are ten examples of personalized videos for marketing you can create today:
1. Personalized Welcome Videos
These are tailored introductory content designed to greet and orient new customers or users to a product, service, or organization. The videos typically address the viewer by name and provide customized information based on their specific role, needs, or interests.
In the personalized video above, the viewer is addressed by name (Elly), with a pleasant greeting, before they are taken through working with Acme. A video like this aims to create a positive first impression, reduce information overload, and guide users through the initial steps or key features most relevant to them.
Personalizing the onboarding experience will undoubtedly improve user engagement, understanding, and adoption rates.
2. Personalized Product Promotion Marketing Videos
Personalized product promotion videos tailor content to reflect your customer’s interests, behaviors, or even demographic details. These videos use customer data to present products in a uniquely relevant way to boost the likelihood of a purchase.
Take Cadbury’s marketing approach as an example:
They crafted a promotional video for Dairy Milk using personal data to suggest the perfect flavor for the customer. Set against a backdrop of soothing, melodic tunes, the video integrates these personal elements to create an experience that feels both personal and engaging.
3. Year-In-Review Videos
Year-in-review videos are an effective tool to engage your customers by showcasing their interactions and achievements with your product or service over the past year. These personalized summaries pull from individual user data to create a narrative that highlights their activity and fosters a deeper connection with your brand.
Taking inspiration from Nike’s campaign, “Your Year with Nike+,” Nike generated around 100,000 unique animated videos using data from their fitness app, which included metrics like weather conditions, activity logs, and locations. This personalized content celebrated each user’s fitness achievements throughout the year to inspire them to continue their journey.
4. Thank You Videos
Thank you videos in marketing show appreciation to your customers, enhance loyalty, and encourage continued engagement with your brand. These videos are crafted to express gratitude directly to users for specific actions, such as purchasing, participating in an event, or reaching a membership milestone.
5. Event Invitation Videos
Event invitation videos aim to engage your target audience and increase attendance at your events. They allow for a high level of personalization that can make each invitee feel specially considered to boost the likelihood of their participation.
For example:
In this video, the company utilizes a casual, friendly tone to invite their audience to a strategic partnership announcement event. The host, Tanya Wilson, introduces herself and even mentions a bottle of wine personalized with the viewer’s name to create an engaging invitation. This superb technique captures attention and adds a unique and memorable twist by combining personalization with a real incentive – customized wine bottles.
6. Personalized Onboarding Videos
Not to be confused with welcome videos, personalized onboarding videos introduce customers to the product or service they have recently acquired. The goal is to educate or train new users on the product or service’s features so they can get the most out of their new purchase.
An example of an effective personalized onboarding video is from Bell Mobility, where a new customer, Christopher, is guided through the features of his new Samsung Galaxy S7. The video explains elements like billing, account management through the My Bell app, and other specifics like connection charges and how to manage data usage.
As such, the information is more digestible for Christopher and shows that the company recognizes and values him as an individual.
7. Loyalty Personalized Videos
Loyalty personalized videos are an innovative marketing approach to re-engage and retain customers by reminding them of the benefits and rewards they might miss out on.
In the video above, ExxonMobil utilized a creative and personalized video to remind a customer named Henning about the rewards points they had accumulated but hadn’t used. The video re-engages Henning by depicting how continuing to use their Payback card at ExxonMobil stations could lead to tangible rewards, like getting a much-desired watch, thus motivating further engagement with the brand.
8. Personalized Product Teaser Videos
Personalized product teaser videos generate excitement and engagement around a new product release or event.
An excellent example of this approach is the 2018 teaser campaign for the release of the “Paddington” movie on DVD and Blu-Ray. The campaign involved sending personalized videos via Twitter (now X) to users who expressed interest in receiving a reminder about the movie’s release.
The personalized aspect of the video included the user’s name, which was written in marmalade and then interactively wiped away by Paddington himself. This unique touch captured the essence of Paddington and made each recipient feel directly engaged by the beloved character.
9. Personalized Customer Support Videos
Personalized customer service involves tailoring support and communications to customers’ individual needs and preferences to improve satisfaction and loyalty.
A good example of personalized customer service in action is Spotify Wrapped. This annual campaign provides Spotify users with a personalized summary of their listening habits over the year, including favorite artists, songs, and genres. The service leverages user data to create a fun, engaging, and interactive recap that feels uniquely tailored to each listener.
10. Personalized Videos for Sale
Personalized sales videos reflect the interests and needs of the viewer. For example, a video might showcase a new product or offer that is particularly relevant to the customer’s recent browsing behavior or purchase history. The aim is to create a relevant appeal that feels bespoke rather than generic.
The sales video informs the customer about the product in a way that aligns with their interests and lifestyle but also frames the product’s value proposition in a way that is most likely to resonate with them. For instance, highlighting the iPhone 12’s features alongside personalized plan details and additional benefits creates a compelling case for the viewer to consider the upgrade.
How Zight Can Help Personalize Your Videos
We’ve covered pretty much everything about personalizing videos for your customers. It leads to better engagement, retention, satisfaction, and success. Your company will also be poised for a better bottom line!
The only thing you need to know now is how to get started – especially the video personalization software to use. We couldn’t think of a better one than Zight.
Zight’s webcam recording feature lets you add a personal touch to your sales outreach. You can now get face time with prospects anytime, anywhere. By recording videos with your webcam or adding a webcam overlay to screen recordings, you’ll bring an interpersonal element to convince your viewer.
Here’s how you can record a personalized video on your Mac or Windows with Zight:
- Gather customer data from your CRM and previous interactions – you need the customer’s name and connection to your business. For example, did they reach a milestone you want to celebrate, or do you want to welcome or onboard them?
- Depending on the type of video you want to make, create a list of items you want to mention in the video. You can create a video script for longer videos.
- Open your Zight app or Chrome extension, and navigate to Record. Here, choose to record your webcam -and the screen if you want to onboard – and click start recording.
- Depending on the nature of your video, you can add annotations – arrow, line, highlighter, etc. – as you record.
- Once you convey your message to the customer, Finish recording and upload the video to your Zight dashboard. Take advantage of the video editing features to trim your video and add engaging buttons. Keep your call-to-action clear, and even generate captions and titles using Zight AI.
- Now that the video is polished, you can copy the sharable video link and share the video with recipients through chat, email, Slack, Asana, and so on.
But Zight isn’t just about webcam recording – you can also use it for visual async communication to connect with busy prospects. By sending personalized video pitches, you’ll differentiate yourself from the hundreds of other sales pitches your prospects receive weekly.