Personalized video helps banks deliver differentiated customer experiences that increase customer loyalty and grow share of wallet. After working with leading banks and other customer-centric brands across industries to develop personalized video engagement programs, we’ve found these three tips are key to SmartVideo success.
- Timing is everything.
To ensure you’re providing helpful information to customers when it will be most actionable for them, make the video delivery trigger relevant to other critical milestones in the customer lifecycle. For example, if you’re sending a welcome message triggered by a new credit card sign-up, you want to align the video delivery timing closely to when the customer receives the new card in the mail. If the personalized video is sent too soon before or too far after the customer received his card in the mail, you’ll be less likely to influence things like card activations, digital engagement or top-of-wallet spend.Also be sure to analyze current customer behaviors and drop-off points in natural engagement with the brand to identify your “sweet spot” or inflection point at which you can drive the most impact to onboard customers, based on your KPIs. This will vary for every bank and for each personalized video story – it all comes down to knowing your customers and identifying what works best. - Video content and length matters.
After delivering more than 400 million personalized video views, we’ve found the rule of thumb for optimal video length is around 90 seconds. However – and this is an important caveat – if your message is highly personalized and delivered at a point in time that is highly relevant for the customer, we find that viewers will stay engaged much longer.This comes to show that video length is less important than relevancy and personalization, so be sure to use your time wisely and provide viewers with new and valuable information. Viewers get frustrated if the video explains the same benefits they already researched in order to open a new account, read on your website or received in an email.You don’t want to inundate customers with too many messages. Identify the best action that the viewer should take, as recommended based on the viewer’s attributes and behavioral data. Then clearly build the video story and calls to action around that action to help lift conversions. With banking customers, driving one action can go a long way. Consider a viewer who is driven to her online account to add payees. She will be more likely to make recurring payments to these new payees long after having watched the video, resulting in better wallet share over time.
- Optimize delivery
Personalized videos should be triggered based on specific events or time, and can be delivered in both push and pull modes. How the video is delivered depends on the message and where the customer is in the lifecycle. For instance, if you’ve earned the right to engage customers with a message recommending the next best action they should take, videos can reside within the online portal to facilitate an “always-on” environment, which serves the most relevant video to the customer based on a combination of multiple triggers, logic and the customer’s point in the lifecycle. Banks’ online account portals can be complex, yet they are a great place for customers to take a number of actions. Using video as a storytelling medium helps break down the recommended next best action while viewers are already logged in to the portal, thus making it easier for viewers to complete the action (read more about a next-best-action approach here).When it comes to push mediums, such as email, we find that success is highly dependent on customers being motivated to click through to view the video. Testing different subject lines and email copy can improve email open rates. For instance, we’ve found referencing “your personalized video” in the subject line or within the email body lifts both the open rate and click-through rate.
Want to learn more about optimizing your personalized video programs? Get in touch. Our creative and customer success teams are here to help you.
