What Makes a Video-Powered Experience Strategy Successful?

Often when we meet with a new customer, we hear things like, “This is great! Let’s include an individualized video in every email we send.” Or “I showed an individualized video to my CMO and we want to use it in other departments now, too.” It’s not surprising – individualized video engagement is cool and exciting, and brands want to use more of it. While we love to hear that, we also want to ensure the grounds are set for successful performance. Sometimes it’s a case of less is more to maintain focus.

When launching a video-powered experience strategy, our team is entirely focused on delivering success for our customers. It’s in our DNA. We spend considerable time getting in-depth with our customer’s team to define the desired business goals, individualized video use cases and program setup to ensure we’re positioned to best deliver success.

These are the main factors – out of many more – that we consider when designing a successful video-powered experience strategy:
Define the Use Case. The highest performing use cases provide relevant and individualized education, explanations or recommended next actions. They combine at least three out of the below five criteria:

1. Video – The combination of sight, sound and motion in a video will improve or clarify the intended message compared to other communication options.
2. Variability – High degree of variation between records ensures that individualization matters. In other words, making the video “individualized” will deliver incremental value compared to a generic video.
3. Data – The availability of sound, structured customer data to “feed” the videos is the cornerstone of enabling individualization.
4. Volume – A large eligible population with the means to reach a high percentage of people via different delivery mediums (email, online account, IVR, SMS, etc.) enables economies of scale against the initial fixed cost.
5. Actions – Desire, ability and an in-place strategy to cause or prevent important customer actions, which drive the defined KPIs.

Prepare for execution. Once we identify great use cases we focus on delivering the most successful program possible. Based on more than 100 launched programs, we’ve determined the most successful ones share three characteristics:

1. Execution Champion – Delivering highly effective 1-to-1 stories via a video created in real time from data is, well, sophisticated. Our best programs are led on the customer side by a sharp, strategic and empowered leader we call an execution champion.
2. Creative Champion – Our customers view individualized video as a platform. Our best programs are enabled by a visionary creative champion who helps us effectively leverage design, content and concepts across the customer journey.
3. High Success Score – We ‘score’ each program across several criteria to understand how effectively we’re addressing each of the use case definitions above. Our most successful programs are those with the highest scores across criteria.

When we get it right with individualized video, our customers sometimes find the results hard to believe. It isn’t uncommon to outperform goals by 500 percent or more, but achieving such results takes a focused and deliberate approach. We’re ready if you are!

Are you ready to see what individualized video will do for your business? Get in touch or watch some example videos in our Video-Powered Experiences gallery.