Our Latest Thinking
Earlier this month, we hosted our second annual SmartVideo Summit, a day rich in best practices and effective ideas, to support our customers for success. I spoke about… guacamole. If you think about it, SmartVideo is similar to a recipe for guacamole. Avocado is a key component of guacamole while there are four core ingredients that go into each successful SmartVideo program:
Allow me to explain…
At SundaySky, we want our customers to think about reaching the largest potential SmartVideo audience, as we can deliver the maximum amount of value through delivery of the greatest amount of volume. That said we don’t want our customers simply throwing more viewers into the top of the funnel. You need to consider who you’re communicating with, how often, and through which channels.
While email is certainly the most popular delivery channel, it doesn’t represent the only channel that you should leverage to deliver SmartVideo. Consider alternative delivery channels to increase your view volume, such as:
Consider other triggers to increase your viewer volume, including:
Data drives the content shown within each SmartVideo as well as the personalization elements. We know that personalization leads to higher levels of engagement that ultimately influence customer behavior and drive customers to take action. Here are a few metrics that our customers have shared with us supporting the fact that data provides a more personalized and informative experience, resulting in a more engaged viewer:
I know that all of this sounds great, but you probably want to know, “How do we turn this into real, measurable value?” This brings me to our next core ingredient…
There are four sub-ingredients that comprise the measurement element of our recipe (I’d call this the salt, cilantro, and lime of my guacamole recipe!):
Everyone likes to benefit from best practices, including the Avocado Farmers in Australia. Our current best practices are informed by the results that we’re seeing with live SmartVideo programs across all of our customers. With over 200 million video views to date, we have quite a bit of data to support each best practice! These best practices are built into our lifecycle marketing platform that our customers can leverage for use in their SmartVideo programs, for a complete, end-to-end viewer experience.
Best practices have a significant impact on the success of SmartVideo programs, but don’t just take my word for it. Look at the results for one of our customers who adopted nearly all of our best practices:
Mix it all together and… voila!
SmartVideo is no different from my guacamole recipe. SmartVideo is comprised of a set of core ingredients – if all of those ingredients aren’t present, then the dish just isn’t the dish. After you’ve whipped it up initially, then you’ll want to fine tune the recipe by testing out new ingredients and flavors, and adding more of one element or less of another so that over time your recipe matures and improves.
And here is my full presentation on SlideShare if you want to learn more, and see additional SmartVideo best practice examples: Recipe for SmartVideo Program Success from SundaySky