How to Use SmartVideo In Support of Your Customer Intimacy Strategy
Customer intimacy is becoming the primary competitive strategy for many companies looking to optimize their customer acquisition and retention results. This requires companies to deliver a more unique and compelling experience to each customer. Some companies leverage marketing personas to segment their customers. Others leverage purchase history and past behavior to engage each customer in a fully personalized manner. In addition to traditional initiatives, such as personalized web pages and recommendations, brands are considering video for personalized customer engagement.
Regardless of whether a brand chooses a segmentation or personalization strategy, it requires access to structured data about its customers, from purchase history to engagement via its different channels. Once the brand has developed its strategy for personalized customer engagement, it needs to define initiatives for how to deliver this personalized experience. The challenge is that the more personalized the experience, the more the brand needs to communicate based on real-time status and behavior of the individual customer. Personalized engagement via a compelling medium such as video has been viewed as operationally challenging and expensive.
Assuming a brand has a clear strategy for personalized engagement and structured data about customer history and behavior, it can now adopt smart video strategies for personalized engagement. Brands can choose multiple levels of personalization:
- Visual segmentation - The visual background of a video has multiple options to reflect unique customer personas, i.e., an electronics persona has a different visual look and feel of the video compared to a fashionista persona.
- Merchandizing segmentation – The merchandizing message is unique to the segment, i.e., upsell recommendations are different for a soccer mom vs. young professional.
- Personalized Status – For brands with heavy repeat customer engagement, you may want to speak differently to a customer based on most recent brand engagement, i.e., “you’ve earned special rewards” for a frequent shopper vs. a “welcome back” message for someone who hasn’t purchased in past 90-days.
In each case above, the video consists of a storyboard that contemplates segmentation and/or personalization data about each potential viewer. The storyboard has a series of scenes that can be included or excluded depending on the most current status of the viewer who clicks to watch the video. Each scene needs to understand how it would be customized for each potential viewer if it is included in the final video. The final video should feel as if it was created from scratch for the specific viewer who clicked to watch the video. This approach allows brands to deliver highly engaging experiences that relate to the personalization strategy chosen by that brand.
Customer intimacy is a compelling strategy for brands to differentiate from their competition. Regardless of whether you choose to engage customers based on segmentation or deep personalization, a video that is smart can be help deliver a compelling message with a personalized experience.
If you are you using data to embark on segmentation or personalization initiatives, are you considering how video can support your strategy?