Learn how Personalized Videos help in marketing from Josias De La Espada

“The majority of customers prefer personalized communications. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. If your prospects and leads feel that there will be a lot of value in the information that will be provided, statistics are on your side.”

–  Josias De La Espada, CEO, Pirsonal

In today’s cluttered marketing and advertising times, personalised messaging can be an effective way to capture prospects’ attention and interest. 

So there is no reason why Video marketing should not be personalised. But is it enough to just personalise the name or personalization is beyond that?

We talked to Josias regarding the same. Read on to get answers about how and why on the subject.

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1. How can businesses personalize the experience for anonymous visitors/shoppers?

Context matters when it comes to how visitors, leads, and customers interact with a brand. Before I get into the practice of how to personalize your marketing for anonymous users, I’d like to give you some preliminary recommendations.

There are several points to take into account. For example, you must first do your homework and create buyer personas. 

Among other things, this will force you to interview current customers, as well as your sales team or the people in charge of providing pre-sales and after-sales support.

It is very important to know what your customers are like and to also understand what your leads and prospects are like. It is basically like starting at the narrowest point of the funnel, to understand how the people you want to address are, based on their characteristics. 

Therefore, when you already have a track record, I recommend going from the bottom up in the funnel.

From there, you can take into account the context of the source of prospect and lead acquisition. For example, with a SaaS service, a prospect visiting a web page on a Sunday night is not the same as a lead visiting a Wednesday at 10 AM. 

The first of them is likely to favour a cheaper product or service. However, it is equally likely that the one at 10 AM is visiting from a corporate computer and also prefers a more expensive plan.

Another example.

Think of a hotel page (e-commerce). A person who is looking at prices and options for a weekend stay in the same room for two has a totally different context than a person looking for options for 5 people in two rooms. The first is probably a sentimental partner. The latter is a family.

Perhaps in the first option, that of the couple, you will show images and update your copy to reflect “couples really enjoy their stay here, you can also do the same”. You will not mention or show children. She wants to rest! 

However, in the second case, of 5 people, it is likely that it is a family. In addition, in most hotel engines you will find that they ask about the age of the children. This information is gold.

Context is key. Context is king. It tells you a lot, even when the prospect or lead hasn’t given you a lot of information yet.

The source of the prospect and lead will also give you a lot of information. For example, a prospect that prefers a phone call over a chatbot, or a human-powered chat over a chatbot. 

They all have different needs, requirements, and concerns, and this is shown in the way they contact the brand. Because of this, you can personalize the marketing and sales messages based on what other leads and customers like them have preferred in the past.

One last thing about this is that the majority of customers prefer personalized communications. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. If your prospects and leads feel that there will be a lot of value in the information that will be provided, statistics are on your side.

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2. How can you capture this information anonymously?

There are several mechanisms. Among them, the following:

– Forms or similar that does not require providing contact information of any kind. For example, when you start looking for accommodation options on a hotel website.

– IP: IP addresses allow you to know a lot about a person anonymously to some extent. For example, the place where the connection is made (city, country, etc.). This information can also be used to determine the language of the interactions or even if the user must visit another localized version.

– The context of the visit: If the person accesses a page in English, the chatbot should speak in English. If the page is in French, the chat and texts should be in French.

– You can give your users the option to customize their experience, and still keep it anonymous. This will provide a lot of information regarding who they are and empower their experience.

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3. What should a business consider before deciding on making a personalised video? Is there a way to track metrics?

Start with your business goals. There is nothing magical about personalized video marketing. It requires a strategy. What is what you want to achieve? More engagement? New clients? More revenue per existing client? 

Knowing your goals will help define everything you need for your personalized videos, from your segmented audience to the budget or even the tools and the right personalized video software and partner.

For example, if you plan on creating personalized videos for a mass database of leads with really low email opening rates, chances are that you’ll waste your money if you make personalized videos for each one of them. Why? You don’t really know if they’ll open the emails!

Let me explain. Personalized videos are more cost and ROI-effective when you deal with already engaged segmented audiences.

In cases like the mentioned one, it will make more sense to either make the personalized videos based on a specific trigger (like once the lead opens the email or clicks on a button) or to use what, we at Pirsonal call player-based personalization. 

Player-based personalization is when the personalization takes place only in our interactive video player but not in the background video.

Here is another example, if one of your core goals is to allow your target audience to download the personalized videos, then instead of player-based personalization you need to render personalized videos on the cloud as individual files.

Your business goals will also tell you a bit more about when should personalized videos be created.

For example, in some cases, you’ll want the personalized videos to be created based on a trigger (“every time a new lead is added to the CRM). But there will be cases when the videos should be created in advance and then sent by email, SMS, or even WhatsApp.

Here is a checklist with the 10 steps I recommend when creating personalized video marketing strategies.

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4. What are the best practices for using personalized video in email campaigns?

Many of the tips applicable to campaigns and marketing automation workflows with personalized videos are closely linked to the usual email marketing.

Here are some that I consider very important and largely ignored by many organizations.

• For batch campaigns, filter your database first. Avoid sending personalized videos to leads that will never open your emails. For marketing automation workflows, make sure to generate personalized videos at crucial moments in the customer journey, as this increases the viewing and click-through rates.

• Make sure to A/B test your email subject lines, email copy, and email calls-to-action to the dynamic landing page. Most campaigns need to make some improvements in the email opening rates, then in the CTR and only sometimes in the video contact, and then in the in-video personalized call-to-action, in that order.

• For batch personalized videos sent by email, warm up your target audience first. Find ways to interact with them first to increase your engagement chances.

• Create follow-up email messages. Between 3-4 emails work better. Often people just need to be reminded about your message. You should increase conversions by about 10-20%.

• If the personalized videos have a call-to-action, it’s usually better to display the video on a landing page. If the videos’ purpose is to explain something in a more contextualized way, you could consider showing the video in the email itself instead of taking the user to a landing page.

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5. What mistakes Marketers should avoid when it comes to personalised video campaigns?

• Creating a personalized video marketing campaign that makes sense takes time. Usually, what consumes more time is the creation of the campaign assets. On many occasions, organizations make a decision late in the process and manage times that are not realistic with respect to their campaign objectives. Therefore, the execution times are very short, forcing the sacrifice of vital aspects for a successful implementation, like A/B testing.

• It is tempting to just personalize the user’s [First Name] field and say “Voilà! We are ready to go”. Take the time to think about your segmented audience. Buyer personas or similar approaches are usually a key part of success as a first step. This takes us to the following mistake…

• Did you know that you can create personalized messages and still be totally irrelevant to your lead’s needs, context, and concerns? As I mentioned earlier, personalized videos are not magical. They perform better, but still, I recommend creating contextualized messages. 

Use Augmented Buyer Personas when possible, I concept I developed to help some of our clients at Pirsonal: “An augmented buyer persona is the profile of an individual comprised by all the interrelated information gathered about that individual provided by one or many data sources and the individual’s buyer persona, taking into consideration the individual’s particular context to create products, services and, most commonly, marketing messages that fit the individual’s needs, objections, desires, and interests, aligned with the objectives set by the organization”. 

As a summary: Buyer persona (or similar) + real data + context.

• Choosing the wrong distribution channel can cost you everything. Choose what works best for your audience, aligned with your possibilities.

• Not double-checking that all the data and creative assets are OK can cost a lot of money. Double-check everything, from marketing automation triggers to images, landing pages, links, and dynamic text structures.

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About Josias (in his own words)

I am what they call a third-culture kid. I am originally from Panama, but when I was a child my family moved to Costa Rica, then Panama again, then Morocco, and then Spain.

Since I was a child I have had something of an entrepreneurial spirit. I sold trinkets like gum, cookies, and ice cream, to my classmates, neighbours, and family.

As a teenager, I discovered that I could sell digital products and services to my high school classmates. Prior to and during my University days, I tried creating Internet portals that never saw the light of day.

11 years ago, together with two other co-founders, I created my first “legal” startup. It was one of the first collaborative music creation tools in the market. 

Unfortunately, my co-founders and I had different visions and I finally decided to find another company.

Pirsonal is my latest venture, founded back in 2017. Pirsonal is a personalized video marketing software that helps marketers, developers, and agencies from brands like Zumba or BMW improve customer experience, one at a time, automatically with the power of multimedia, personalization, and marketing automation at scale.

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About Vidsaga

Vidsaga is a global marketplace for Organisations to create Videos. Consider it as “Upwork/ Fiverr for videos” with Creative script writing and professional project management.